F#cking Is Good, Actually: An Unexpected Defense of the Sexual Revolution
Currents
The past 15 years have witnessed a bizarre social trend that I would have considered frankly unbelievable as a 1990s raver kid — a full-on youth-led rebellion against the Sexual Revolution and even the idea of healthy sex itself. And it seems to be changing at least some formal institutional norms. I was inspired to write this after watching media personality Ethan Klein, commenting on an online thread that already included multiple criticisms of hook-up culture, opine that well-known men should simply never have sex outside of committed relationships. Quoth Klein: “Famous men should not have random hookups, especially involving alcohol and with fans. Period. Ever.”
Ever ever?
Why not?
Well, “power dynamics”, or some such.
Klein’s take drew 5.2 million views, 33,300 likes, and 450 bookmarks. My own modest reply (“Maybe… just sleep with other adults who say yes”) drew just 54 likes and a fair amount of criticism.
The same “power dynamics” argument is made constantly, across both new media and even within some academic literature, by citizens who dead-seriously argue that you should basically never date anyone of an age different than your own. Another wildly viral online post, by the feminist-y account “Trash Jones” drew over 94,000 likes — albeit across 21,300,000 views — by warning of “30-year-old dudes on the hunt for 22-year-olds.”
The threat of adult men who are attracted to slightly younger adult women is so grave, argued Jones, that dating apps should make the personal data they collect public and “let you see other people’s (preferred) age ranges.” Jones’s was by no means the most extreme version of this position to recently draw global attention. Two days back, the writer known as Christoph made the tongue-in-cheek comment that upper-middle class “age gap discourse” must be approaching “the singularity” after observing another young urban woman draw in millions of eyeballs by asking: “Realistically, WTF does a 19-year-old have in common with a 22-[year-old]?”
Is a single year’s difference in age genuinely considered “creepy” by actual living people? Christoph bemusedly asked. The answer often appears to be yes, at least within the digital world, where objections to sex across age barriers do not infrequently reach bizarre lengths. In a recent informal poll of my own, a non-zero percentage of people defined pedophilia as any attraction to “people younger than you.”
Interracial sex — only legal nationally in the US since 1967 — now draws constant incoming fire, generally from the political left. A widely-read recent article bluntly described much of it as the result of “fetishization.” “Sodomy,” meanwhile, takes it from right and left. Many Louder with Crowder types seem to sincerely want to ban anal and oral sex… while on the left side of politics, another feminist to trend nationally recently declared: “I can't think of a more dehumanizing sexual act than a woman giving a male a blowjob. It shouldn't be a thing.” Sex a bit drunk after a good second date, meanwhile? Can’t do that anymore: an increasing number of colleges and similar institutions are literally defining it as rape.
Pornography has come in for particular vitriol: not merely as a minor vice or the product of a sketchy industry — which I would probably agree with — but as a sort of all-purpose bugaboo explanation for male behavior (fact: men liked oral sex and sometimes rough sex well before PornHub). Citing research at widely varying levels of quality, websites with names like “Fight the New Drug” argue there is “virtually no way” to ensure that any X-rated content is consensual (Oh really?), that most males believe porn is a completely realistic portrayal of sex, that masturbating actually boosts stress when porn is involved, and so forth.
The one time I chose to debate this topic publicly, versus an absolutely lovely woman, the short online thread that resulted was flooded with comments from both feminists and traditionalists, a pair that has become strange bedfellows indeed. Among other things, critics argued that “porn-sick” men lose all sensation in their penises, that men who consume pornography are no longer able to have normal sex, and that modern porn is capable of making citizens gay or even transgender. Statistical proof of most of these claims awaits — and, one might suspect, will wait for a while.
In political science terms, the source of this New Prudery is fairly easy to understand. Today, both “tradcons” (who never favored sexual liberation) and radical feminists — who feel that the Sexual Revolution facilitated female behavior they dislike, such as sex work — are forming like Voltron to attack sexual activities which were frankly non-controversial between perhaps 1970 and 2010. Thankfully, most people don’t seem to agree with them… yet.
My own un-scientific but very large sample polling generally finds adult attitudes toward sex, the noisy fringes aside, to hover around what a 1990s kid would expect. 82% of men — and a very large chunk of women — at least occasionally consume pornography, while almost always agreeing that becoming obsessed with it is a “bad look.” About 85% of both men and women see oral sex, which is encompassed under the definition of “sodomy”, as a normal part of any intimate relationship. The Kinsey Institute also found that 43% of men and 37% of women have had heterosexual anal sex.
However, the noisy fringe does seem to be having some impact when it comes to societal norms, almost always in the direction of greater restriction of sex. To give just one example, more universities, and similar institutions are moving toward “very explicit consent policies” regulating sexual conduct. Under the auspices of a typical policy of this kind, “students need to not only verbally agree to engage in sexual activity initially”, but also to explicitly give a verbal (or written) “yes to one another for each sexual behavior they engage in as part of a sexual interaction.” The goals underlying such rules are laudable, but it’s hard not to be reminded of the Bedroom Stenographer and Travel Stenographer from Chappelle's Show (2003–06) (“Turn any damn room into a court-room!”).
Because of more than a decade of this neurotic, anti-sex panicking, plus the isolating role of technology, rates of sex have declined in the modern era. In fact, although last year witnessed a slight jump, rates of sexual activity among young Americans are approaching all-time lows.
Between 1991 and 2021, as per the US Centers for Disease Control’s Magisterial Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the percentage of high school students — including graduating seniors and students over 18 — who described themselves as sexually active dropped from 40% to 21%. The percentage of these teens and young adults who have ever had sex fell from about 60% to exactly 30%. Across all young people, well beyond the secondary or collegiate campus, one of today’s fastest-growing social movements is composed of so-called incels (and “femcels”): people who almost never have sex and can’t quite seem to figure out how all the slippery tabs fit together.
While some parents might be inclined to look at this data and shudder in relief, on some fundamental level, it is a very ominous development for civilization that people can’t figure out how to fuck. The actual causes of the problem are deep and depressing ones, and frankly don’t seem to have too much to do with “porn” or “gaming” (or “that devil music kids listen to”). Simply put, humans spend far less time together in the era of Bowling Alone and The Social Network than used to be the case: 60% of teens now say they “‘spend time’ with their friends online every day,” but only 24% give the same response when it comes to in-person hanging out.
Graph displays percentage of teens who spend time with their friends online and in-person. Source: Pew Research Center
Massive causal trends like these (It is hard to date or sleep with people you never see) have effects. At present, almost every major Western country has a below-replacement fertility rate, and this has been the case for at least the last decade. This goes deeper than people simply having fewer or no rug-rats. It points to a lack of human connection, which is integral to well-being. “Deaths of despair”, which all research indicates are greatly mitigated by loving relationships, have soared to near-record levels. The year 2021 witnessed a record 48,183 suicides, while fatal drug overdoses broke the previously sacrosanct 100,000-loss barrier during each of the past two years.
Given the toll our disconnection from one another has taken on society, the last thing we need is more restrictions on sex, and on human relationships more broadly. Telling folks they can only date people born within two months and 17 days of their own birthday, and can only have heterosexual sex with them… in two positions. Nah. Society desperately needs to get laid, and a sensible place for adults to start begins with recognizing that the Sexual Revolution was largely a good thing. No sane person truly wants to go back to an era when oral sex was a once-a-year treat and businesswomen couldn’t open checking accounts without a man. With this admitted, we should focus on limiting those actual overreaches of the modern era which cause real and direct harm to women and children — rather than erecting more pointless bureaucratic barriers to human intimacy.
As citizens work through all this, the old slogan of the 1970s feminists actually provides a pretty solid rallying cry: consenting adults should be able to do what they damn well please.
Published Jun 26, 2023
