The prudes, scolds, and killjoys will be the last people having sex.
The New Yorker recently published a piece titled: “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” The author, Jia Tolentino, wonders how Zoomers can be having a “sex recession” when “sex has seemingly never been less stigmatized or easier to procure.”
“The electronic devices in our pockets contain not only a vast universe of free porn but also apps on which casual sex can be arranged as efficiently as a burrito delivery from DoorDash,” she writes. “And yet, presented with a Vegas buffet of carnality, young people are losing their appetite.”
A recent Guardian piece about “the rapid rise and horrifying risks of choking during sex” may illuminate this reticence. The normalization of sexual strangulation is a perfect illustration of how and why the promises of the sexual revolution have proven empty.
To begin with the obvious, women don’t want to be strangled — and, absent the influence of porn, very few men would be interested in strangling them for sexual sport. And yet many women have accepted this as part of sex, in large part, because they are fearful of being seen as insufficiently “kinky.” As one of them explained to The Guardian, “Among my friends, there’s this competitiveness about not being boring, not being ‘vanilla.’ I think it’s very prevalent for women my age, and no one wants to kink-shame anyone.” The porn actresses never say no, she added.
Our culture glorifies sexual desire and presents it as the true, authentic self. No one wants to admit to being a bland, boring, authentic self, rather than an exciting, adventurous, sexually sophisticated self.
But “kink” is frequently just another name for sexual dysfunction. To demand strange or violent inputs to attain sexual satisfaction is sexual degeneration, not sophistication. Normalizing dangerous and degrading sexual practices damages relationships and turns many people off sex. Not every young woman is going to lie back and think of non-judgmentalism — no matter how many times she is told she has nothing to be ashamed of, except kink-shaming.
Nonetheless, Tolentino’s New Yorker piece dismisses concerns about sexual strangulation in particular, and the state of our sexual and relational landscape in general. She treats Louise Perry, a secular critic of the sexual revolution, as a foil. She whines that “one of Perry’s favorite moves … is to present reactionary conservatism as simple common sense” and accuses her of offering advice that culminates in a fearful “defensive crouch.” Tolentino suggests Perry has no hope of “chang[ing] anything about our society,”
Of course, we true reactionary conservatives think that Perry does not go far enough. But at least she is on the right track — realizing that the sexual revolution is a dead end and that its regime of sexual liberalism is destructive, even of true social justice.
The state of our sexual culture is not only — as Tolentino seems to think — about college-educated women’s emotional status as they discover themselves relationally and sexually. Rather, the relational and familial instability of sexual liberation has devastated many of those who are less privileged than writers for the New Yorker.
The Best Sex Model and Societal Program
Stable natural families would be, by far, the best anti-poverty, anti-crime, and pro-education program. Thus, Christian sexual morality is integral to social justice because it protects and promotes family formation and flourishing. It is not an idiosyncratic or arbitrary religious decree or practice but, instead, is rooted in human nature and ordered toward our good and the good of those around us. Its truth and beauty are manifest in loving and enduring relationships, grounded on oaths sworn and upheld, rather than the fickle flux of day-to-day desires. This commitment provides a solid foundation for an enduring intimacy between man and wife.
Implausible as it might seem to the sexual revolutionaries, it is social conservatism that leads to more and more satisfying sex. After all, having sex requires someone to have sex with. And because sexual liberation discourages lasting relationships, it has led to Americans having less and less satisfying sex. As the sexual revolution discredits itself, it is married churchgoing Christians who are, on average, having more and more satisfying sex.
Thus, even by its own metrics, the sexual revolution has failed. And yet Tolentino seems exasperated that the issue is even being raised, writing that “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.”
Provided, she stipulates, that this is what they want. But, she suggests, they will only know what they want through experience. After acknowledging that the root of the sex recession is a relationship recession, she urges more sexual experimentation as a solution, which is like telling a heroin addict to cure his problems with fentanyl.
Sexual liberation presumes that we need to uncover who we really are and what we really like, and that these revelations are the key to an authentic, thriving life. Desire is the core of the self, and doing as one wills is the essence of human well-being. And so, Tolentino declares that sex “can be a form of discovery, especially but not only for young people — a zone in which we might, if we’re lucky, learn how to be partners and friends and citizens, how to find ourselves and one another worthy of love and respect simply for being people with desires.”
Her premise, such as it is, seems to be that experience allows us to learn what we like, sexually, relationally, and so forth, and this, in turn, will enable us to live well.
But it is truer to say that experience teaches us what to like. Who we are and what we like are as much shaped as they are uncovered. A large number of young men did not have an innate desire to indulge in sexual strangulation and just needed the stimulus of porn and the opportunities of casual sex to realize it. Rather, they were taught to like it through repeated consumption of increasingly violent porn.
Human flourishing consists less of discovering who we are than of becoming who we ought to be. Instead of being defined by our desires, we learn to control and direct them in accord with a right understanding of who we ought to be and where we are called.
Sexual indulgence is not the key to unlocking who we are. Indeed, it is destructive and deforming, harming us and those around us while damaging the deep, loving human relationships that are only established and maintained through committed exclusivity.
The beauty in marriage, in which the two halves of the human race are united in a lifelong union that begets new persons, exceeds the pleasures of sexual indulgence. As we are seeing, the promises of sexual indulgence are mostly empty anyway. In contrast, Christian marriage illustrates the truth that we are meant for love, and that, when we live for something greater than our own desires, we will often find pleasure included as well.