February 15, 2023

Happy Valentine's Day! Please only fuck whom and if you want to, and be prepared for the best sexual release of your life when we destroy capitalism.

this is long oh my god, it's about the "sexlessness" panic, the conservative sexual panic, mass media, consent, and how capitalism conspires to remove choices and nuance from our narrative fiction

by Zoë Hayden

I am 32 years old and I feel like every Valentine's Day of my adult life has been rife with op-eds about the theoretical or actual decline of sex and romance. This year, it's the guest essay in the New York Times by Magdalene J. Taylor about how it is imperative for our happiness to "have more sex.” There's also this Pew Research survey about single people not necessarily seeking romance, which is (without data support) painting a picture of lonely single people across America who aren't even interested in sex or romance anymore. Ostensibly leftist folks online in the United States seem to be concerned about the fact that "no one is having sex anymore", sexlessness on television, and the strange, puritanical streak among teenagers (even queer/trans ones) on social media.

Of course, there is a very real right-wing panic about sex, sexuality, and gender in the United States right now — and these types of essays are very much related to it, but perhaps not in an obvious way. In fact, the narrow focus of these types of pieces seems to function as a kind of soft propaganda, plausibly adjacent to literal Nazis panicking about birth rates as an excuse to push homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic politics on Americans. In these pieces, sex and dating and even marriage are painted in and of themselves as positives. They claim to be data-driven and compassionate pieces, but they seem blissfully unaware of the actual history of human sexuality in 20th century America, which, especially for LGBTQ Americans and women and people of color, has always had a subplot related to the participants' material conditions. (The same is true of sexuality and reproduction throughout all of human history, if you look at it through that lens.) Queer and trans Americans have been literally criminalized and institutionalized throughout much of the 20th century, and many states are pushing that agenda anew in the 2020s. A gay couple in the USA could only have a federally recognized marriage starting in 2015. An unmarried, childless cisgender woman over a certain age was, until very recently, considered an aberration, regardless of what she wanted out of her own life. I was born in 1990 and as an elder millennial I am very literally among the first generation of people born with a uterus who were not almost universally raised to think this way. It's hard to not read pieces like this as a sort of backlash to that idea. While neither Pew nor Taylor explicitly mention reproduction or heterosexuality, it's certainly between the lines.

The data presented by Pew and the conjectures presented by Taylor present a world where two genders (men and women) are unable to connect with each other. But the exact same data could be re-framed to suggest that adults of all genders (regardless of their assigned sex at birth) are no longer settling for relationships that do not satisfy them, are no longer having sex that they may not want to have out of a feeling of social or societal obligation, and are no longer going on dates as part of an ongoing mission to find a spouse who will legitimize them in society. Normalizing singleness does not necessarily mean normalizing loneliness -- and the correlation between not having a monogamous partner and being lonely is a dangerous one to make. This is especially in queer communities where sex with friends or acquaintances is normalized, or where "found family" holds much more power than the bonds of blood or marriage. It's also true of any adult who might find that because they are no longer obligated by propriety to marry up as soon as possible, they can spend more time doing things that they find fulfilling, like growing in their hobbies, interests, and communities — through which they are probably more likely to meet a compatible long-term partner than on a dating app. I don't doubt the conceit that Americans are more lonely now than they have ever been; I lived through the last 10 years too and they have fucking sucked politically, materially, and culturally. But I have to side-eye any presentation of data that doesn't acknowledge the social changes that are contributing to these conditions, some of which are very positive, and some of which are inextricably linked to the shackles of capitalism.

Under capitalism, we are all supposed to be aspirational and work to advance in our "careers." In a way, the career became an easy replacement for marriage in our amorphous social hierarchy, probably starting around the 1970s, when it started becoming more common for married women to work outside the home in the US. We tend to talk about people who have dead-end jobs with the same pity as we might have talked about an unmarried 40-year-old spinster in the early 20th century. Work can certainly be fulfilling for many people (I even like my day job most of the time myself!). When Taylor talks about the "loneliness epidemic" and presents sex as an easy solution, I think she wants it to come off as sex positive, but it really comes off as dismissive of the material conditions that might cause someone who wants to have sex to not be able to find a fulfilling sexual or romantic partner and thus find further richness and fulfillment in their life as a whole. Working a dead-end job for little pay and shit benefits in a soulless suburb can certainly lead to depression, anxiety, and reading each Tinder bio in a 50 mile radius like it's a pre-apocalyptic artifact discovered by the antiheroine in an Aldous Huxley novel:

A lack of sex can easily translate into less socialization, fewer families and a sicker population: Sex reduces pain, relieves stress, improves sleep, lowers blood pressure and strengthens heart health.

Hey, you know what else reduces pain, relieves stress, improves sleep, lowers blood pressure, and strengthens heart health? Universal public healthcare not tied to employment. (Also there it is, the "fewer families" dog whistle — as if sex is somehow less so if it can’t result in a baby.)

There is no one solution. The loneliness epidemic has been brought about by myriad factors that have been exacerbated over decades. Social media is one culprit; the 20th century’s war of attrition against walkable communities is another. But as loneliness has accelerated, it has become self-perpetuating: Our current societal loneliness — and sexlessness — is a result of social and cultural shifts, while its continuation perpetuates those shifts further.

Again, sexlessness is presented as equal to loneliness, as a net negative and somehow at least partially the fault of people who aren't having sex, regardless of what those people actually might want out of their lives. Never mind the fact that throughout history, there have been plenty of people having sex who are also deeply lonely. Sex doesn’t always correlate with healthy emotional connection and togetherness. Sex is sex.

In Taylor's piece, this is especially glaring when she seemingly bemoans a lack of teen sex. Teen sex education and positivity is an area where kids have been pulled in so many different directions for so long that I don't think adults should be surprised when they approach it with caution, regardless of their upbringing, experience, or background. Especially online. Teens have access to so much more sexual content online than ever before, and as always, some of it is appropriate and some of it is inappropriate. For example: a teen reading a fanfic with sexual themes on AO3 about her favorite anime characters and talking to her friends about it, I would argue, is an appropriate exploration of her sexuality. But interacting with adult content creators on Tumblr directly would not be. This is why many adult content creators on social media label their profiles with "MINORS DNI" for "do not interact." It's the adult's responsibility in online spaces to set good boundaries and ensure their interactions with children are appropriate.

Unfortunately, any teen who has grown up online (like I did; I got my first internet connection when I was six years old) has dealt with adults who do not set good boundaries. This doesn't necessarily lead to an actual pedophilia/To Catch A Predator/grooming scenario, but it can certainly mean unwelcome advances and conversations between minors and adults who should know better. Just as sex is just sex, online is also just online, and can have both good and bad outcomes. It’s notable that while op-ed columnists are often so willing to point to “social media” as something that accelerates loneliness and mental health issues for both adults and kids, 96% of LGBTQ+ youth surveyed by the Trevor Project in 2021 reported that social media had a positive influence on their mental health, while 88% also reported negative impacts1. There’s a lot of bad shit online. But it’s also how a lot of people, especially marginalized ones, can experience community together2.

Kids today are much more likely to have received basic sex education which includes principles of consent (whether online, from their parents, or in school). Adults being surprised that kids apply those principles to actual sex and sexual content online and in media feels, again, like a desperate longing for shit that never existed. Much like the babies being born and marriages being formalized in the bygone times of higher birth rates and “more families”, not all teen sexual experimentation has ever been consensual, informed, or desired. Giving teenagers clear choices means that some people are going to make the choice to abstain, or to participate in a way that can't be easily polled, like reading queer fanfic online or learning about masturbation techniques from Teen Vogue and not telling their parents about it. (Hint: because they're children, and it's private.) This may limit the amount of sexual experiences that teens are having — but it also gives them a better chance of engaging in sexual activity consensually and with a clear head when they do make those choices, and knowing how to recognize red flags from both peers and adults. If a teen is choosing to not engage with sexual content or experiment with sex, it's important to treat that as their choice and honor it, and recognize that it may be coming from a place of not having their boundaries respected online or in person — or from a place of genuine disinterest.

When your boundaries are disrespected, it can take time to rebuild trust. This isn't just true of individuals, but of society in general. These teens are also growing up in an American society that has eschewed casual, self-aware sexual content in popular media in recent years, which is why teens are more likely to find appropriate sexual themes for their age group on an AO3 fanfic than they are in the actual text of their favorite TV show. But it would be a mistake to blame that on some kind of inherent sexlessness in society. The real culprit seems obviously to be risk management under capitalism. That's what TV and film studios are thinking about when they fund the creation of content — not how to best entertain you or enrich your emotional lives, but how to make money and manage their risk. Because of the right-wing gender/sexuality panic, and because the vast majority of popular media in the US is created and distributed by just a handful of mega-studios (ex. Disney, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery), there is a flattening effect on what values are communicated through media. The reasoning behind the sexlessness of, say, Marvel movies has more to do with this flattening than the idea that people aren't actually fucking in real life.

The depiction of onscreen sex and sexuality always showcases a sort of politics (as does the depiction of any human relationship). Hollywood films famously adopted the Hays Code in 1934 as a way to restrict what could be shown onscreen, with definite political content in those restrictions — such as ensuring that the police and Christian clergy were only portrayed in a positive light, forbidding onscreen romantic/sexual relationships between Black and white individuals, and eliminating the possibility of homosexuality altogether. It’s hard to overstate how much the Hays Code affected popular culture and how it was explicitly about oppression — this Twitter thread, by Katharine Coldiron, explains it very well.

These rules were followed strictly for some time, and eventually fell out of favor with lax enforcement. After a downturn during the height of the Hays Code, exploitation films were getting a fresh lease on life in the 50s and 60s (soon to give way to the grindhouse trend) and there was little incentive to support upholding the Hays Code when money could be made from lurid, sensational content that viewers were hungry for, possibly because they had been forbidden and underground for so long. In 1968 the Hays Code gave way to the MPAA motion picture rating system, which dictates what content is appropriate for different age groups, and is supposedly more liberal — you can make a movie with anything you want in it, as long as it's rated appropriately.

But the flattening of mainstream entertainment content under capitalism has reproduced a sort of new Hays Code in the 21st century, and a huge part of that involves sanitizing sexual and gender politics. The effect is a little more subtle than what happened with the shift from pre-Code Hollywood movies, because it has the illusion of being organic and is not enforced by any actual independent agency which reports on its activities or practices publicly. But Disney Standards & Practices, for example, operates with many of the same goals in mind — as memorably immortalized by Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch:

While Gravity Falls is hardly a show where you want to see people horny and fucking (since it is a cartoon for children), it's not hard to see the similarities. The anodyne suggestion of teens playing Spin the Bottle at a party in Gravity Falls is too spicy the same way as Gwenyth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. having any amount of sexual chemistry at all in the Iron Man movies would have been too spicy (both are Disney properties). Instead of placing us in a story that is lived in and suggests rich inner, private, and indeed sexual lives, Disney wants you to take everything at face value. What's the dynamic like between an ultrarich inventor and superhero who ends up falling in love with and marrying his personal assistant? How did they navigate the transition? What makes them laugh when they're in private? What's an average night in like for these two? Disney doesn't really care — it's all hollow innuendo done solely to service the canonical storyline that Tony and Pepper end up together. Canon is king, and the small moments shared between the two that don't service the storyline are not included, because the "heart" of their partnership is not as important as the one-liners and memeability — which must, above all, be appropriate for children and not offend people in power. That relationship doesn't play out on screen as something with authenticity and shared history and shared emotion because the content isn't as important as the fact that it "exists."

Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are, of course, perhaps the couple least likely to offend wealthy conservatives in positions of power ("war profiteer bangs, then marries, his hot assistant" is a stereotypical alpha male fantasy almost to the point of parody), which goes to show how little Disney cares about creating rich, layered onscreen relationships in mainstream films. (Much more about this has already been eloquently said in this piece by RS Benedict at Blood Knife, about how the idealization of athletic human bodies has oddly desexualized them and made them objects of aspiration and shame, rather than pleasure.)

A complex romantic relationship does not even necessarily include sex, but it of course often does. By not depicting sex or horniness at all, all that is left is an implication, which perhaps intentionally obscures the choices that people make about sex in their lives. This elimination of textual choices about sex and sexuality and gender results in a lack of nuance and depth in depicting sexual relationships in mass media, and is perhaps one reason why teenagers in the 2020s are feeling particularly skeptical around sex and consent. We’ve mainstreamed the idea of the sexual consent conversation while actively sanitizing what that consent conversation might look like in reality. People hear about it in a good sex ed class, health class, op-ed, or advice column (“How do I tell my partner I’m not ready to try penetration?”) but we often find ourselves without contemporary, mainstream artistic representation of what that might look like, specifically in media that may not be entirely about sex or romance. Making candid, honest jokes about sex in ways that are revealing about characters’ motivations can be a tough line to walk on network TV, but there are more direct and nuanced conversations happening about sexual politics on 1995 episodes of Seinfeld than there are on, say, That 90’s Show which debuted on Netflix in 2023 — and the Seinfeld scriptwriters weren’t even allowed to say what they were talking about if they referenced oral sex or masturbation. But it aired on NBC in primetime for nearly a decade. It’s hard to imagine a sitcom where the characters often talk about sex in ways that are not moralizing or sensational (or just bad jokes) in 2023 — harder still to imagine a show where characters’ insecurities, fetishes, and neuroses are discussed so openly.

Prestige television on streaming services and cable networks have the opportunity to do things where the characters really fuck, not to mention commit graphic violence and perhaps discuss topics that you might see ignored on network TV, but they often choose not to when it comes to sex, for whatever reason3. Disney+ somewhat surprisingly aired a gritty, “adult” take on antifascist radicalization in Andor, and caused some chatter when they showed the namesake protagonist as having casually shared a bed with an alien (presumed to be a woman). There’s no dialogue between them; she is simply shown sleeping as Cassian gets out of bed. And yet they made the choice in showing it. To me, as a viewer, I didn’t mind filling in a lot of the blanks in Andor, but some folks seemed really hung up on that one fleeting scene. It felt like a compromise, like the creators had a conversation where someone felt the question shouldn’t be left unanswered as to whether Cassian Andor fucks, and this was the quietest, gentlest answer they could come up with to get it onscreen with Disney. These tantalizing glimpses in the Disneyfied Star Wars universe — like the brief, hardened bolt of sexual tension between Din Djarin and the village woman who tries to remove his helmet in season 1 of The Mandalorian — represent different things for different people. With Andor, Disney gets to have a critical darling which deals with serious political themes and layered human connections without having to show a tit or even people making out. To some it can be their own free real estate for sexual fantasy or fanfic.

But it’s also free real estate for people to fill in their own information about the sexual politics of the fictional universe. Andor didn’t need sex to be a good show — but what options are available to creators telling stories that are part of vast, corporate-owned IP? Most executives will air on the side of caution by mandating that it be as subtextual as possible. By only alluding to sex through sanitized means, a piece of media abdicates responsibility for that part of the story — and that contextual void leaves an open conversation in our culture about what the hell sex actually is or should be. Rushing to fill the void are op-eds like Taylor’s, which are, for my money, more depressing than the void itself, because they trade in a sort of fearmongering that is rooted not just in blatant acephobia, but in a history of queer community that is seldom told because a lot of people haven’t lived to tell it, and, again, in a conservative sexual panic that is very actively seeking to dehumanize and delegitimize trans people (and by proxy anyone, including cis women, who might want to have bodily autonomy) in the same opinion pages of the New York Times. It doesn’t surprise me to see sex positivity being used to package this sort of erasure, but it doesn’t really make it any less tiresome.

There is also the illusion that this perceived sexual malaise comes without responsible parties — that we’re just sliding ever-so-much-further into sexlessness and depression because of “society”, that this happened in a vacuum. But in many very real ways, capitalism and fascist social conservatism are conspiring to remove our choices, at a time when our cultural experiences, social habits, and consumerist consumption have never been more finely individualized. This is the “culture war” that everyone is talking about, but it is actually a material war about our future, which is being fought in the streets, in school board meetings, in legislatures, in seemingly mundane budget meetings, and, to a lesser degree, in our narrative media. Art feeds our souls, though, the same way that sex can for those who want it — and the mission of taking back our human society from corporate greed will be at least partially fulfilled in how we re-frame and learn again to celebrate sexual politics, romance, and passion in our pop culture. The pendulum is going to swing back. Get ready. It’s going to be crass, and it’s going to be camp, and it’s going to be great. And we’re going to take corporate IP for all they’ve got4.

TL;DR: I don't think that our current pop cultural "sexlessness" or cultural loneliness is indicative of any inherent lack of sexual interest among the American People. Blame capitalism for making us unable to prioritize pleasure in increasingly draconian ways. Blame your job for making you so tired that you don't even want to do anything pleasurable at the end of the day. Blame corporate IP for flattening and sanitizing our narrative media. Moreover, you should see it as an act of political resistance to know who you are and what you like, and to engage in whatever you do find pleasurable and which does not harm others as often as is possible and reasonable5. (Remember kids, everything in moderation.) Support independent content creators. Talk to your friends about sex and how you feel about sex that you're having or not having. Do what feels beautiful, authentic, and passionate in your own life, and point it out, enthusiastically, when you see it reflected back at you in fiction and in media. It's a very specific kind of togetherness perhaps only possible because of social media and the hellscape we find ourselves in — but it's what we have at the moment, and what's going to shape and inform what we create next.

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1

The Trevor Project’s published 2022 survey data did not provide an update on this question.

2

I met my wife on Twitter dot com and have made most of my close friendships in adulthood through online interactions; this is the bias of my personal experience, but I also know it’s not unique.

3

As an aside, when I do see a piece of media that is very forward in how it is largely about fucking, not to mention queerness and Blackness, like AMC’s Interview with the Vampire adaptation, I find it curious that it’s largely absent from awards talk and serious critical TV writing and the endless Twitter threads about how no one is fucking in TV or movies anymore, and I have to wonder if that’s because it is so much about queerness and Blackness as much as it’s about fucking and politics. Not to mention that it’s a genre fiction camp masterpiece and I genuinely believe that the true cowardice of American society is exposed by its aversion to camp.

4

I’ve got this disease in my brain that makes me think that Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence is actually a concept album about James Flint in Black Sails.

5

It doesn’t have to be sex, but sex is good if you want to have it. Finding a person to have it with isn’t rocket science but it can become somewhat protracted, depending on your standards and desired levels of emotional availability.