Wither Eros

Why Is Everyone So Obsessed with Sex?

Titian - Sacred and Profane Love

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it has certain cycles of what we users call “discourse,” which is a very fancy word for what is usually inane declarations on a particular topic. These are so repetitive and regular, and people seem to so quickly forget that they keep having the same arguments again, I joke they are part of the Twitter program, a kind of psy op to keep us arguing about the same stuff over and over again. One of these discourses, I call “books,” and yes, the topic there is whether or not it’s important or necessary to read books. Another is “relationship age gaps,” in which the discussion centers on just when an age difference between romantic partners becomes problematic, creepy, or even downright abusive. Opinions differ markedly: there is not a small constituency that seems to believe the age of consent ought to be bumped up to near age 30 (for young women in particular) and another one that seems to think it ought to be abolished altogether.

Like with most things online, it’s difficult to tell if there is any greater cultural significance to this chattering, or whether or not its just flotsam and jetsam floating across our now overly-interlinked neuronal channels, but one recent “discourse” seems potentially telling to me. The subject this time is sex scenes and nudity in movies. It would appear that a lot of young people are rather uncomfortable with sex scenes and would prefer films do without them, with some even going so far as viewing their sudden and unwelcome appearance on the screen as a violation of consent. To the older generations, this is absurd and even heretical. “We made all this progress against censorship, for artistic free expression, and to loosen up sexual repression, just for these silly prudes to not be able to take it! We’re adults, dammit!” This is all a little funny to me, because it’s a reversal of the usual logic of generational warfare: the youngs, being traditionally for freedom and license, the olds, for restraint and decency.

This part of a bigger set of cultural anxieties around (supposedly) changing sexual norms and practices that has even got the eggheads stewing. A few years ago, The Atlantic had a big piece about what they called the “Sex Recession,” which has sort of become common wisdom among the types of people who believe what they read in The Atlantic magazine. Just yesterday, there was a New York Times op-ed entitled “Have More Sex, Please,” decrying the fact that nobody’s doing it anymore:

Sex isn’t the sole form of fulfilling human interaction and certainly isn’t a salve for loneliness in all forms. Still, it should be seen as a critical part of our social well-being, not an indulgence or an afterthought. This is in large part because the rise in loneliness closely parallels a decline in sex. More than a quarter of Americans hadn’t had sex even once in the past year the last time the General Social Survey asked, in 2021. It was the highest such level of sexlessness in the survey’s history.

This is obviously written in a kind of liberal-therapeutic register, the language type of people we’d expect to be “sex positive” as that horrible modern expression goes, but conservatives are also concerned that people aren’t having sex enough. Even the putative decline in teen sex, something that right-wingers used to associate with the end of Western Civilization, is now something that seems to them a big problem. The New York Times’s own Ross Douthat regularly worries that there isn’t enough (heterosexual) sex happening and wishes movies were sexier. I think he’s a little more worried about the human race not being able to reproduce itself than people being lonely, but still.

Conservatives are also a little split about #MeToo: on the one hand, they think it was the long overdue hangover of the sexual revolution that turned out to be more degrading than liberating, on the other hand, they bemoan the loss of flirtation and the game of romantic pursuit. What’s a fella to do, these days? Liberals believe this is all nonsense at best, and, more probably, cover for predatory behavior. Surely, we could reform the system, and learn to be both respectful and sexy? Then there are other problems related to the political economy of sex: what are we to do about the incels, those pathetic young men who, unable to win over mates, become embittered and even homicidal? Should they be reviled or pitied and helped? It anyone entitled to sex? Surely, not because that would imply an obligation to provide it and therefore a violation of autonomy and choice. Is sex a right? This is the question the philosopher Amia Srinavasan has tackled in a recent book.

Are people burnt out on too many years of sexual license? Is libido collapsing because of over-exposure to pornography? Should we restrict porn? Teach courses in its literacy? Should we return to more Victorian mores? Is it our cellphones? Should we distribute Viagra for free?

What should we make about all of the elite discourse about the proper measure of sex, all these the shifting and reversing worries about if we’re having too much or too little? Well, let’s consult some experts in these matters: a couple of noted French perverts. First, this brings to mind Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, where he writes of how in the modern age, “Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. It was in the nature of a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses.” Dismissing the idea that bourgeois society “repressed” sex but while we now speak about it openly, he wrote, “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” All of these discourses, too, are dedicated to the proper administration of sexuality. When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so hot, now does it? Maybe we can have more sex in movies, but a little less in newspaper columns.

Second, I think of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s famous aphorism, “il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel — there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” (Keep that one in mind this Valentines’ Day.) What could that possibly mean? Surely, that’s not true! A Lacanian psychoanalyst would probably correct me here and be able to go on ad infinitum about why I’m wrong, but my reading is of it is rouhgly that human beings don’t have any sort of natural or harmonious “healthy” sexual existence that can be potentially unlocked by the right partner or the right attitude; rather, sexuality itself is an intrinsically problematic part of our existence: the site of elusive fantasies, fugitive desires, and profound anxieties. I don’t have an answer to any of these problems and neither does anybody else. I tend to think a lot of our problems can be solved, but not this one — This one will be with us until the end of time. At least, I hope so: The idea of sex and romance as a problem to be solved, something to be finally administered in the correct way, is a pretty depressing prospect. As in all things, there’s something to be said for a little mystery. With that in mind, I’m going to conclude with an old fashioned response to all the people agonizing over these matters: Why don’t you stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and mind your own business? Easier said than done.