When people talk about sex in broad sweeps, they are almost always wrong because they work off cultural assumptions they were trained to have about sex or gender. And when medical doctors chime in with their assumptions, it adds even more junk to the mix, because most of us are inclined to think, whooo, medical doctors, they must know what they are talking about. So this Yahoo news story that popped up on my radar yesterday which looked so scientific on the surface was particularly aggravating. The headline said there’s a new study which shows that Millennials are sex duds compared to previous generations. What? They claim Millennials “do the deed” (ugh!) 9 times less than people did in the 1990s. Then they got a supporting quote from a dermatologist. That’s like a reporter asking my opinion on the results of a new acne treatment. WTF?
So I rummaged through Google, and saw similarly uninformed chirping in the NY Times, which notes that “more people are staying single — meaning there is less sex.” That annoyed me because this time they are assuming that married people have more sex than single people on the whole. Is this even true? Does this include LGBT people or were they not even in this study? I’d love to see the proof that married people get more than singles because I see an awful lot of singles with ROBUST sex lives and a whole lot of married ones with sexually dead ones. It leads me to think that people, regardless of marital status, act on their innate needs — not according to legal documents they once signed.
Then I went back to the original abstract of the study, in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, and realized that the study did not define what they considered to be sex. Big mistake right there. What the researchers were investigating is how much people fuck today vs. in the past. And if they had said just that, that there is less fucking today than 50-80 years ago, I would’ve let it go. But they didn’t. They made it sound like all sexual behavior is down in Millennials, even while the evidence is so obviously showing us that Millennials are at least as sexually active as every other generation. Why else would they be watching so much porn and sexting so much?
They should have just come out and admitted they were studying the state of sexual intercourse, not sex itself. Sex isn’t short for “sexual intercourse,” but for sexual behavior, and sexual behavior doesn’t have to include fucking. It doesn’t even have to include genitals or direct touching. All adults know that. It’s not like, in real life, when your monogamous partner gets oral sex from someone else, you dismiss it by saying, “Oh, that’s quite alright, dear, sex is only when you fuck, so please feel free to share your genitals with others in non-fucking ways.” More often, people say, “I want a divorce, you cheating asswipe!”
What’s sex? It’s any pathway to orgasm.
The heteronormative bias here taints this study and all the commentary that has flowed from it. FACT: Sex is more than fucking. That’s not exactly a state secret. Sex is any activity that turns you on and may lead to an orgasm. Partners nice but not required. Masturbation is sex. Watching porn is sex. Lap dances at a strip club are sex. Reading erotica is sex. Sexting is sex. So are yiffing with the furries or wearing a leather collar to lick your top’s boots. It’s all sex because it all follows the brain’s basic message. To wit, “Have a life-enhancing orgasm whenever possible, darling! It’s good for you!” I think the human brain must have a secret Jewish mother in there or something, benevolently coaxing you to feast on happiness.
While all fucking is sex, not all sex is fucking
So while all fucking is sex, not all sex is fucking. If you want a true picture of sex habits in America, you have to include masturbation, blow-jobs/oral, and anal sex at a minimum. In fact, I’d argue that until we include all the LGBT and asexual and poly and swingers’ variations, plus all the kinks, quirks and fetishes that turn people on as well, we’ll never understand human sexuality in its entirety. Human sexuality is far greater than any one of its expressions.
So here are some reasons why fucking may be down statistically, while sex itself is likely happening even more frequently than in the past
GERMS! GERMS, EVERYWHERE.
AIDS should rank as the number one reason why fucking has declined. We teach kids about all the diseases they can catch from sex — but we don’t teach them much about all the ways they can avoid contracting those diseases from sex. I can’t tell you how many times clients have expressed to me a fear of the “germs” they will catch from having hook-ups with people they don’t know. There is no doubt that since the 1990s, HIV awareness has made a lot of people think twice before having the kind of casual hook-ups that were so common back in the 1960s – 1990s.
When I was growing up, it never even occurred to us we could die from having sex with strangers. We all relaxed under BigPharma’s assurances that there were remedies for every bug we got. Penicillin, we thought, was our “get out of jail card,” and there was nothing a trip to the doctor couldn’t cure.
Ah, yes, blissful in our ignorance were we in those days…until HIV changed everything. Now we live in a different health reality. Comparing the blissful ignorance of the 1930s, when HPV, HIV, and Herpes were not even on the radar to 2017, after generations of us helplessly watched millions of gay men succumb to AIDS, is ridiculous. How can you not acknowledge the impact of HIV and AIDS on people today? Yet none of the doctors mentioned that. Instead they made it a blame game, pointing fingers at Millennials and faulting them for being too picky, too lazy, and too obsessed with their devices to get laid.
SEXUAL STRATEGIES AND COPING MECHANISMS
You cannot convince me that people want sex less than our forebears until you can prove the unprovable and show me that people wanted it more in the past. Do we really think that more men went to strip clubs and escorts 80 years ago than today? There’s a LOL. Yeah, I don’t see those 1920s gents videochatting sex-workers or having skype sex so much either, do you? I’m sorry if some people don’t think that’s really sex or don’t want to count it, but, as I said, sexual behavior is sexual behavior, whether or not you approve of it or believe it can only be legitimized by matrimony. The proliferation of sex-oriented services actually suggest there’s more interest in sex than ever before. But, again, that can’t be proven. Among other things, you can’t compare people who didn’t have Internet technology to those who do.
There is no evidence that our brains have changed in the last 90 years, and it is our brains which drive sex. So our underlying sexuality is likely exactly the same as it ever way. If anything, people talk more openly, confess more intense sex secrets, and generally are more present to the role sex plays in life than ever before. They experiment more. They are more open to new variations. They know a hundred times more facts about sex than their grandparents ever did too. They are smarter about sex. They choose safer sex. The sex they have is the most consensual of any previous generations in human history. And, with the power of the Internet and social media, they’ve built relevant strategies and coping mechanisms so they can have sexual fun without the risk of germs. We should be happy for them, not shaming them.
Porn is a good sex strategy. Instead of hanging around in bars looking for Mr. Goodbar, you can google him and go watch him get naked and perform like a stallion. Without condoms, no less! No disease in that imaginary porn-wonderland where everyone can fuck everyone without fear of an ugly infection changing their lives. In fact, when a porn star gets a disease in 3D, it’s news and everyone panics. That ruins the image, the fantasy that there is a magical land where men with preposterously large organs can screw every hole with a 100% guarantee of safety. But heaven forfend if someone gets an STI. That instantly reenforces the cultural narrative that, deep down, sex really is dirty and dangerous. Otherwise there would be no story at all to a sex-worker catching an STI. Because … germs. They happen. All the time, every day, everywhere, even when you take precautions against them. Yet when it happens to a porn star, you can be sure that some anti-sex reporters will pounce on it as proof that porn is dangerous.
Porn is a very reasonable strategy for taking the edge off of natural sexual hunger in a world of germs. Porn is only a risk for people who already have unresolved psychological conflicts around sex.
Speaking of which — a nobody named Kim Kardashian leveraged a sex tape into a career and financial fortune. That was a big American cultural first that says a lot about the rabid interest in and more accepting attitudes towards sex these days. Today’s porn stars get mainstream star treatment and special coverage throughout pop media. Of course Big Media censors sex-educational columns because…well, old people run Big Media. But they sure cash in on porn and sex scandals, and Millennials are clicking as fast as they can.
Sexting is another great sex strategy. Contrary to weird counter-intuitive opinion, sexting isn’t the beginning of moral decline. It’s a coping mechanism in an uncertain and scary world. Wait, it’s more than that! It is a legitimate expression of sex. In my day, you had to scheme and lie to your parents to find a way to sneak in some forbidden canoodling down at the candy store and deliver fucking hand-written notes. No, seriously. If your parents were strict, your lives were under their dictatorship. This generation will never know the agony of leafing through department store catalogues in search of a good underwear ad to jerk off to. They will never know the embarrassment of sneaking around a newsstand, searching for the naughty section so you can get a hasty glimpse of big boobs before an adult caught you and kicked you out.
It’s no mystery to me why people spend so much on their phones sexting. It doesn’t upset me or worry me about the future. What’s there to worry about? Too many orgasms? I think it’s great that people can now communicate about sex, flirt, experiment, and, yes, even learn about other people’s bodies without physical risk. Free home-made porn for you, delivered to the privacy of your handheld. It’s safe, it’s casual, it’s experimental and it doesn’t end up with someone getting an STI or getting pregnant. It also protects people from judgmental relatives who want to police their emotional lives.
And btw the way, I bet none of those researchers reached into the bowels of Craig’s List to ask people with personal ads what their sex lives were like. Because we all know what happens on Craig’s List (the term “feeding frenzy” comes to mind) even though most Millennials keep their CL secrets to themselves….and their sex therapists. 😉
Now, masturbation is the world’s oldest sex strategy and this century has taken it out of the closet and into the streets (literally, in some cases). Masturbation is first and foremost the most common kind of sexual experience humans have.
Women of our grandparents’ generation were brainwashed against masturbation
I would have LOVED to know how this generation rates for masturbation as compared to their great-grandparents’ generation.
Did you know that women of our grandparents’ generation were brainwashed against masturbation? They lived in dread that it was unladylike and pathologically perverse and a whole range of other malicious bullshit intended to suppress and control women’s sexuality. They didn’t have the Internet to let them know that everybody does it and it’s okay. They didn’t have adult toy industries plying them with sex toys to suit every taste. They didn’t have reams of scientific studies proving the benefits of frequent orgasms, either.
Today’s women own their sexuality in ways that their great-grandparents couldn’t even imagine when they were growing up. And I like to think that young men today feel better about themselves than their own fathers and grandads did as youngsters, because former generations were told they’d burn in hell for touching their manparts or that their testicles would shrink if they did it too much. Millennials know better! They are infinitely more relaxed, informed and uninhibited about sex than ever before.
FINALLY, TWO WORDS ABOUT THE PAST — IT SUCKED!
A quick bust of two myths media reporting are perpetuating.
1. Sexual Frequency Doesn’t Correlate to Good sex: Back in the 1930s (and for millennia before that and still in some cultures today), men were allowed to rape women. I know this sounds crazy but it is sadly true. Men got away with rape all the time. It was almost impossible to prove rape for a wide range of reasons, primarily victim-blaming: women who got raped were not treated as victims but as sluts who encouraged the man to rape them by dressing or acting provocatively. It was marginally legal in the US for husbands to rape their wives too. It was considered part of male privilege for a man to be able to have sex with your wife when he wanted it whether or not she did — that kind of attitude still goes on but was far more prevalent in previous generations.
Now, I’m not saying all husbands did that. Kind and decent men always existed. But I am saying that I know my sex history, from the routine sexual exploitation and domestic slavery of women to the practice of marrying off young girls to old men for money. So when you talk about more fucking back in the 1930s, you need to note that those stats include girls as young as 13 who’d been sold off to men they didn’t love and untold thousands of wives who were treated as sex slaves by their husbands. Men were controlled in different ways. They were made to feel like they were only as good as the stiffness of their members and that if they couldn’t get it up consistently, they were failures as men. Meanwhile, man-on-top screwing was the only act they were properly allowed. They had to sublimate ALL their sexual energies into one missionary-position penis/vagina encounter. No masturbation, no porn, no bi-curious, no anal, no nothing except the duty to inseminate.
So maybe a lot of repression and patriarchy artificially raised the rate of fucking during those years. Maybe more people fucked because they felt they had no other options for sexual release. Certainly, many people back then believed fucking was a religious duty and not a shared experience of pleasure. They believed it’s what God wanted them to do to fulfill their marital contract. So between repression forcing men to drive all their sex impulses into a single act, and the guilt and shame they felt at not being manly, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was perhaps more fucking during that period than during freer times which allow people to express variety.
What if today’s amount of fucking is a more normal level for humans because today’s world has forced us to explore more sex strategies and has, most importantly of all, allowed us to explore more variations, more possibilities for giving and receiving pleasure, than just man on top plowing a maiden?
We don’t know. We may never find out. The only thing we can count on is that every generation develops its own strategies for fulfilling the brain’s sexual mandate: get orgasms!
2. Over-Sexual Is a Bogus Concept : One doctor noted that we live in an “oversexualized culture.” As a sexologist, I don’t know what that term means. And neither do the people who use it. I’m guessing what they really mean is “society today makes me deal with sex more in more open ways than my parents had to because they kept all their sexual behaviors a shameful secret, and I was happier when it was all locked away in closets and I didn’t have to think about it.” Or maybe it’s more like, “I’m getting turned on all the time! Staaaaaaap!”
Beyond that, “oversexualized” is meaningless. Who gets to define what “over” means in the first place? People are always sexual because we are living breathing primates with needs. Culture is always sexual because it contains people. I think of Millennials as mentally healthier about sex than their elders. This generation has been freed of a lot of the toxic anti-sex myths that our forebears had. They aren’t burdened by all the lies and myths that plagued previous generations. If they are fucking less, it’s because they’re having other kinds of erotic fun.
