Sex For Sex's Sake

Something is still missing from the sexlessness discourse, especially surrounding Gen Z.

source

There’s a pressure in talking about sex to make it about something else. I do it myself in my own work — when I write about sex, I often highlight that my broader emphasis is on loneliness and human connection. Sex, in that context, is just one vector toward a certain end. That’s not untrue. The problem of sexlessness isn’t really about intercourse. It’s about a lack of energy, a lack of communing, a listlessness and vacuity that pervades our day-to-day. It’s not about sex, except for the way that everything is about sex.

This avoidant framing, one that shirks sex at the core of the matter, is central to Jia Tolentino’s recent New Yorker essay “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” Here, Tolentino dissects two books: Louise Perry’s 2022 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Carter Sherman’s The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, released in June.

I was invited to speak on a panel for the latter book at McNally Jackson last week alongside Sherman, writer Samantha Cole and sex educator Justine Ang Fonte. There, we had a lively discussion about Gen Z sexlessness, with the conversation exploring fear around the #MeToo movement, porn and porn censorship, and the political divide between young men and women. Sherman’s book is an exceptional survey of Gen Z sexlessness and sexual attitudes, though she and I ultimately might differ on our position of whether this sexlessness is really a problem at all. Tolentino’s review highlights this framing, too, though I think Tolentino’s somewhat misinterprets Sherman’s own stance on the matter.

“I am not personally inclined to wring my hands about what young people are doing with their genitals,” writes Tolentino in her essay. “There’s some locker-room shaming in the Zoomer sex panic, and some suspiciously coded pro-natalism, and also a displaced longing… Still, it seems fine that Gen Z is having less sex, and fine also that, when they do have it, they are doing so in more arcane arrangements.”

There’s a common blasé attitude that Tolentino shares here with so many others in the conversation around sexlessness. Who cares? What does it matter? I’m not personally all that inclined to wring my hands about what young people are “doing with their genitals,” either. I’d never be so reductive. No, I’m a bit more inclined to wring my hands over whether any of us — young adults or elderly — are having sex. I’m inclined to wring my hands over whether it’s fulfilling, whether it’s as much as we would have had in decades prior, whether we’re living with any sort of drive or lust toward the future or pleasure or a moment of vivacity. But at the end of it all, I am still here to wring my hands over sex.

Of course, Tolentino does offer some acknowledgement that something deeper may lay within this whole conversation. It’s fine that young people aren’t having sex, “as long, of course, as this is what Gen Z actually wants,” she says. “But what do they want? Or, put another way, why do we fuck in the first place? Part of the Gen Z sex recession is a relationship recession: Sherman writes that partnered people have more sex than single people, and young people are more likely to be single than those who have come before them. The real problem at the heart of this matter is less about sex and more about loneliness.”

Like most social crises, manufactured or otherwise, we’re inclined to frame it all around the youths. It’s an established obsession, one traced by Mark Greif in his 2006 essay “Afternoon of the Sex Children.” This essay is cited by both Sherman and Tolentino. Here, Greif identifies the fascination as emerging from postwar America, a swirl of century-old fantasies crashing against a new language of “freedom,” Nabokov’s Lolita, Lewis Carroll’s Alice meets Britney Spears, MTV and campus sex magazines. Greif does make the crucial distinction that we are talking largely about legal adults, people somewhere between 18 and their early 20s, but it is so often their short distance to childhood that draws attention. At the time of his writing, though, young people were still having sex, at least within the cultural imagination. He points to spring break and Girls Gone Wild as evidence, using analogies that today’s youth would probably find foreign:

“If I do something rotten on a blind date, I never need to see the only witness again,” he writes. “A child does something rotten, and his date is sitting next to him in homeroom. The adult world sends down its sexual norms, which cannot blossom in a closed institution (though alarmists say they originate there), but which the children tuck away to fulfill just as soon as they can. Children are the beneficiaries of a culture that declares in all its television, jokes, talk, and advertising that if sex isn’t the most significant thing in existence, it is the one element never missing from any activity that is fun. They are watchers, silent, with open eyes, and they grow in the blue light. So much for the decadent reality of childhood.”

There are no longer anonymous blind dates. The culture has declared sex not only insignificant but not fun, instead something threatening and dangerous to be best observed from the distance of an iPhone screen. At least his comment about the blue light remains true.

Both Tolentino and Greif suggest that the sexlessness conversation is one founded in jealousy of youth. “Envy of one’s sexual successors is now a recurrent feature of our portion of modernity,” writes Greif. In reality, the era of looking upon the teens and early twenty-somethings of the moment with any real desire to be them now has passed. Nobody wishes they had spent their childhood on an iPad. Nobody wishes their early understandings of sex were shaped by whichever PornHub thumbnail they happened to click on first. Nobody wishes their dating prospects were dictated by the algorithms of an app. You’ll repeatedly hear people refer to those who have avoided these fates as having “caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam.” We don’t view youth today as an envious experience. We view it with the same anxiety as the fall of Saigon.

---

---

The part of Greif’s essay that both Tolentino and Sherman focus upon most is his delineation of liberation versus liberalization:

“Liberation implies freedom to do what you have already been doing or have meant to do. It unbars what is native to you, free in cost and freely your possession, and removes the iron weight of social interdiction. Even in the great phase of full human liberation which extended from the 1960s to the present day, however, what has passed as liberation has often been liberalization. (Marcuse used this distinction.) Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free.

One of the critical aspects of culture that Greif believed highlighted our culture of sexual liberalization rather than sexual liberation was that people were no longer free not to have sex, to be asexual or to ignore sexuality without consequence. The overwhelming dominance of sexuality as a commodified good, he thought, did not allow for this abstaining. In the twenty years since, though, I’d argue that sexual dormancy has become compulsory in new forms. We are free to be asexual if that is what we want, but we now have a culture that encourages sexlessness whether we want it or not.

Once again, sex is vacant. Both Perry and Sherman recall a time in the recent path that sex was a given, perhaps too much so. There was Girls Gone Wild and fear-mongering essays in the style of this one here about hookup culture and the pressures young women were facing to have casual sex. It probably is good for us all that this time has come and gone. But this constant circling around the past, the insistence that some things are better now than they were before and that isolation and apathy are acceptable trades for that reality, brings us back to our fundamental avoidance of the core of the matter. We are still making sex someone else’s issue.

---

As we were accepting questions in the end, one person asked, “Isn’t it all sort of a good thing that Gen Z is having less sex? Isn’t sex an inherently traumatic and dangerous act, and it’s better that people are avoiding that?”

At the time, I’d felt I’d spoken enough. I could have jumped out of my seat to answer. I probably could have just responded with a simple “no.” I preferred not to dominate the mic. Still, this remark has stuck with me the most out of the entire conversation. “Inherently traumatic.” That’s a telling choice of words. It’s a choice that positions itself as one of authority and one of victimization at the same time — a type of authority of its own.

Is sex inherently traumatic and dangerous? Of course not. But also… of course it is. So is any other foundational part of the human experience. Love, friendship and family all come with the potential, maybe even the guarantee, of some sense of loss and devastation. Nobody gets through life unscathed. Nobody should want to.

So much of the discourse around sexlessness is centered in a certain type of risk. Gen Z isn’t having sex because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and increased fear of the repercussions of an unwanted pregnancy, for example. But even with historic setbacks such as this, efforts to mitigate some of the potential for trauma and danger in sex have nevertheless been the winning strengths of sexual liberation, sex positivity and sex education. More people are able to have sex with reduced risk of pregnancy or STIs. More people are able to have sex with reduced risk of social shame. Even so, some “risk” remains: the risk of having a bad time, the risk of something going wrong, the risk of embarrassing oneself.

My guess, however, is that contemporary sexlessness — the kind that pervades us regardless of generation — has far more to do with the risks of the latter. Why has sexual liberation failed to deal with these risks, or perhaps even inflated them? Why have they become an even bigger mental threat?

It would again be so easy to identify this unwillingness to deal with the uncomfortable as part of a broader social trend. It is! We see it in how people are spending more time alone, how they’re not drinking, how they’re shirking the usual goalposts of adulthood. But it is still fundamentally about sex. What Greif and Tolentino do get right is that much of the dialogue around other generation’s sexlessness is some sort of subconscious deference. It’s far more convenient to worry about the sex life of some abstract other. But it is not, despite their claims, a matter of jealousy. It is a matter of evasion. It isn’t that Gen Z has a sex problem, it’s that we all do — whether we want to make it about loneliness or politics or whatever else is more digestible than making it about sex itself. Consider my hands wrung.