Even Our Sex Scandals Are Sexless

Desire Digest 007: Elon Musk and natalism's IVF problem, notes on boudoir shoots and whether Hollywood still serves as a cultural barometer

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

It’s been a minute since I’ve done a digest format, but I fear everything I want to talk about is now weeks old. That, and post inauguration, there’s a sense of stagnation. Is there even a good meme to analyze right now? Is there anything funny circulating? No, just the same tedious headlines about tariffs. There are those blown out and edited photos of JD Vance looking like a jolly court jester currently being traded and collected like baseball cards, so at least that’s something.

dansavage

A post shared by @dansavage

My essay The Tech Oligarchy is Stealing Your Sexuality landed me a guest appearance on Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast, wherein we discussed the American Gooning Conspiracy and moreover addressed a caller’s question on how to address their desire for daily sex early in the dating process. My segment is featured in the Magnum edition of the episode for his paid subscribers, but you can access the episode and get one free month of the podcast by using code MAGDALENE at this link: https://savage.love/subscribe/.

On Elon, Natalism and IVF

On Valentine’s Day, 26-year-old conservative X figure Ashley St. Clair announced that she had given birth to a baby boy five months prior. The father is allegedly Elon Musk, and he’s apparently absent. That the richest man in the world, unmarried, would be fathering children with beautiful young women isn’t much of a surprise. All of history is periodically marked by the scandal of powerful men accidentally impregnating someone. But that isn’t really what happened here. Musk didn’t just have sex with this woman and proceed with the natural process through which a baby is made. Instead, he made the intentional decision of impregnating this woman through IVF. There’s not even any sex left in our sex scandals.

[Update 3/7/25: Apparently, it has since been claimed that this baby WAS in fact conceived naturally, so I am likely wrong here!]

Wouldn’t it be almost kind of cool if Musk had truly just knocked this girl up? If we knew he was capable of normal sexual function and giving in to a moment of unprotected intimacy? He would, at very least, seem human.

This is the problem that, from my view, characterizes the contemporary natalism movement: there is no sex to it. Many of the biggest voices of natalism — Musk, that couple Simone and Malcolm Collins — are all having children through IVF. All but one of Musk’s thirteen children have been created through IVF.

I don’t have any issue with IVF where it’s required or otherwise makes parenthood more accessible. Babies are good! But that the natalist movement is so reliant on it as a preference evades the overall problem of why people are not becoming parents. Couples today aren’t skipping having children just because they are incapable of conceiving. They are skipping having children because they are not fucking: literally, spiritually, economically, socially.

The reasons why otherwise stable, happy couples are choosing to not have children are the same reasons why people are spending more time alone, why they’re ordering all their meals from DoorDash, why their screen time mirrors their waking hours, why they report having fewer friends. They’re anxious and addled as it is, and feel as though they can’t justify bringing new life into this world to experience the same horrors they do. They also can’t really afford it, anyway.

It is all part of this same disillusioned, atomized puzzle. Posing IVF as any part of the solution to the natalism problem entirely circumvents the issue. It doesn’t get at these core problems of sexlessness or nihilism. And particularly in the case of Musk or the Collins family, both of whom are explicitly using IVF to select for certain traits, the procedure makes childbirth appear to be an even more abstract and daunting task. What good is it, the average person on the fence about having kids might ask, to have normal, randomized children who will have to live in competition with these genetically optimized ones? It all becomes yet another item on the cons list for the thousands — millions? — of people who could otherwise become great parents but are choosing not to for reasons somewhat beyond their control.

Later this month is the Natal Conference in Austin, which states itself as having “no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren. If you are concerned about collapsing fertility, the economic challenges of having children, the increasing difficulty of dating for men and women, we want to hear from you.” I’d love to go and check it out for myself, though I’m not sure that’s in the cards for me this year. The speaker list leans conservative and religious, so I’m curious how sex will be addressed. Hopefully, some of their talks will be available online and I’ll be able to report back to you on them here.

On Boudoir Shoots

Yesterday, adult product site Lovehoney hosted a PR event promoting Womanizer’s latest launch. I go to a decent amount of PR events — what else is being a writer in New York City for? This one was unique, though: rather than the usual launch party, they invited writers and editors to join them at the Moxy Chelsea for private boudoir shoots by photographer Anastasia Garcia, professional hair and makeup included.

Boudoir shoots (i.e., sexy photoshoots usually featuring bedrooms and lingerie) are a surprisingly mainstream facet of culture and sexuality. There’s not a ton of data here, but some stats suggest that over 40 percent of wedding photographers now offer boudoir sessions and one in three brides have considered it. Maybe it seems to embody a contemporary narcissism or a growing desire to see our sexuality through a digitally mediated lens, but I don’t actually think that’s all that accurate. Women have been doing boudoir shoots for decades, long before the Internet. Your own mother might have even done one.

The shoot itself functions as a sort of ritual, one that requires a decent amount of planning and forethought. Nevermind finding a photographer and a setting you feel comfortable in, what are you going to wear? It forces you to think of your body and its erotic elements through a new perspective, one in which both temporarily become “other.” But by accessing this otherness, that foreign element momentarily dissipates. Safely boxed in the package of a boudoir shoot, we’ve gained new knowledge of ourselves and how we’re viewed while maintaining the mystery of eroticism.

All this is to say, I enjoyed my boudoir session. No, you can’t see the photos.

Does the Anora Win Mean Anything?

I am so sorry, but I still haven’t seen Anora. Or Babygirl. Or really any movie that appeared in theaters this year besides Nosferatu and Longlegs. I don’t know what my problem is!

Nevertheless, I’ve obviously seen all the discourse Anora generated, which continues on after the film’s five Oscar wins this weekend. A lot of sex workers did not like the movie. A lot of anti-sex work radical feminists did not like the movie. People who really care about intimacy coordinators did not like the movie.

Between the success of Anora and last year’s Poor Things, it would appear that the film industry really doesn’t have much of a sex problem, at all, They’re continuing to talk about it, plenty. Good! But maybe a better question than whether Hollywood is dealing with sex is whether any of that matters, at all. Oscar viewership is up slightly, but it’s still less than half of what it was at its peak.

I’m not sure that film is all that strong of an indicator of our collective views on sex any more. But, it is certainly still a barometer of something. I saw one person online suggest that Anora and Poor Things are a “sign” that we’re becoming more conservative and misogynistic since these films are sure to please porn addicts, a theory that vaguely connects to the American Gooning Conspiracy one. Honey, the porn addicts aren’t going to the theaters. They’re not renting Yorgos Lanthimos. They’re streaming porn on their phones.

But still I’ve been mulling over this framing, this urge I’ve seen repeated to view art as some sort of spell that makes our culture shift one way or another, that these are all “signs” only a select few have been given the insight to read. It explains why people are so afraid of engaging with topics and media they find difficult or disagreeable: they believe doing so carries transformative power. Maybe it does.