Hello, and welcome to Group Chat, where culture reporters Rebecca Jennings and Alex Abad-Santos discuss the topics currently blowing up our (and probably your) phones.
Old people have fretted about the sex that young people are (or aren’t) having since time immemorial. But lately it feels like the tension has amped up in wilder and weirder ways. Under Trump 2.0, with a hedonistic vibe in the air and a palpable nihilism, you’d think we would collectively loosen up some of our oldest ideas about sex, but if the past week is any indication, that’s not happening yet.
This week, X (formerly known as Twitter) erupted into discourse about IUDs. Polyamorous people once again became the victim of the internet’s collective bullying, while the same old “Gen Z are puritans who can’t handle sex in movies” conversation reared its head again. Then, a magazine declared that “everyone is horny.”
But … are they? What’s actually going on here? Rebecca Jennings and Alex Abad-Santos attempt to have a discussion about sex on the internet that’s still SFW.
Rebecca Jennings: So it’s become increasingly evident that we can’t, as a society, have a normal conversation about sex anymore. More than that, it feels like sex positivity is … dead?
Earlier this week, a guy posted a photo of his roommate doing a happy little jig because his girlfriend got an IUD, and a lot of people criticized him for “celebrating women’s pain” (because IUD insertion is often very painful), for not getting a vasectomy instead, or for “not loving her.” What did you think of all that?
Alex Abad-Santos: I mean, if you read the sentences you just wrote, I don’t think you have to guess how I feel. There is no winning on the internet. Social media, X especially, is a place where you could post that you love golden retrievers and someone would be like, “Wow I can’t believe you want to inflict harm on Chihuahuas, you ableist.”
Of course posting something personal about birth control and implicitly sex was going to end with the worst conversation possible. Weirdos being reductive about birth control! Internet users with anime profile pics being regressive about women having sex! Strangers weaponizing therapy speak! I love being able to read in times like these!
Rebecca: It makes me feel insane because it’s like, the fight for access to birth control was such a foundational part of second wave feminism, and now it’s 50 years later and self-described feminists are acting as though birth control is a burden or it only benefits men. Like, we fucking fought for this, guys! Sex should be fun and safe and pleasurable and birth control helps with that!
Alex: RJ, that doesn’t take into account the social media rules of consensual sex. Before two consenting adults even think about having sex, they also have to think about whether some internet stranger that they never met approves!
On the other side of this, you know who can’t win? Polyamorous people — they are the victims of the joke — one that transcends generations and political affiliation — that they all look “like that.” (The vagueness of the original video is deliberate, allowing people to fill in the blanks, but some viewers connected their own dots in the comment section, describing the look as “Ren Faire employees,” “Steven Universe kids,” or adults in “cookie monster pajamas.”)
Rebecca: I really feel for our polyamorous brethren. They’ve replaced bisexuals as the internet’s punching bag.
Alex: Seriously though, you’ve written about this. The worst-faith conversations people are having about the IUD guy are not unlike the woman who made chili for her neighbors or the wife that tweeted about enjoying a cup of coffee with her husband — seemingly everyone is addicted to being disingenuous for a few internet points. As you said then, it all points to “how high the stakes seem to be for interpersonal encounters that are objectively nobody’s business, and how so often our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment.” Couple that with the dire state of media literacy, and like, of course no one is going to be able to talk about sex in a fun and normal way!
Rebecca: And then there’s all this discourse about young people hating sex scenes in movies. Not to be all, “What’s up with kids these days,” but literally like, what do you think is up with kids these days?
Alex: This feels like a trap.
Rebecca: Any time I can get you to put on your 40-something man hat and complain about the children, I’m gonna do it.
Alex: Not you outing me. I do think there’s something to millennials growing up with a lot of sexually progressive — for the time — pop culture. The Real World showed us LGBTQ people. Sex and the City gave us Carrie Bradshaw and, more importantly, Samantha Jones. Even sitcoms like Frasier and Seinfeld (with canonically hot Elaine) frequently touched upon the characters having sex. Millennials are also the first generation that grew up on internet porn.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why millennials may be more relaxed about other people having sex and enjoying it. And if Gen Z is all about pointing out millennial cringe and everything we did wrong, then it makes sense that they find millennial sex positivity cringey too?
Like, millennials are guilty of creating that entire “I need Jason Momoa to hit me with their car, reverse, and run me over until I am nothing but sentient meaty pulp” speak to say they found someone attractive. That’s immensely cringe.
Rebecca: That’s an interesting argument that Gen Z’s aversion to sex might just be an aversion to millennials.
Alex: What’s sort of funny though is that the culture that millennials absorbed as children, was all created by older Gen X and boomers, who were reacting to more rigid attitudes from the Greatest Generation and beyond. And then if you apply this idea — that generational attitudes reflected in generational art and culture shape the upcoming generations — to Gen Z, did younger Gen X and millennials drop the ball?
It’s not our fault, is it?
Rebecca: I posited this already on Twitter, but part of me wonders whether it has to do with parasocial relationships. Young people might be empathizing with the actors in sex scenes to a fault — they feel that they know these actors (or perhaps that they are them) and are projecting their own discomfort onto them. But maybe I’m overthinking it.
Alex: I think you’re onto something, although maybe it’s more about the 2020s than generations. I mean, I can think of one big stan account who hates that Timothée Chalamet is dating Kylie Jenner, and another big fandom — full of millennials! — that still doesn’t approve of a pop songstress’s ex-boyfriend. The parasocial aspect is strong there!
On the other side of that, there’s an entire swath of people, Gen Z included, who watched Nosferatu and were fawning over Count Orlok being so obsessed over a girl as a sign that he was a romantic. Never mind the stalking, cucking her husband, and bringing plague and endless death upon her.
Rebecca: First of all, put some respect on Club Chalamet’s name (a.k.a. Timothée Chalamet’s most prominent fan). Second, yes — it seems like everyone wants to yearn for sex, but not actually have it. It’s similar to the way people yearn for IRL social interaction but constantly flake on plans or refuse to leave their house.
Where it all seems to lead is a lot fewer people fucking. A few years ago there was that big piece about the “sex recession.” Do you think that’s actually happening, and if so, what are the causes?
Alex: My general theory or excuse is that the pandemic really broke us socially. Every aspect of our lives that revolves around us interacting with other people has been fundamentally altered. Sex included. Like there’s an entire swath of Gen Z who were stuck at home with their parents when they should’ve been in dorms, at parties, or studying abroad, making awful decisions!
What’s the opposite of a recession? A boom time? Do you think we’ll eventually get to one?
Rebecca: Dazed magazine recently did a piece on how “everyone is horny now,” pointing to pop cultural artifacts like FKA twigs’s trancey new album Eusexua, movies like Babygirl and Challengers, the music of Doechii, Ethel Cain, and Billie Eilish, and even Hawk Tuah. It basically argues that after Me Too and Trump 1.0, culture got a little neutered by the desire to make everything feminist and woke (I’m sloppily paraphrasing, but that’s the gist).
I think there’s something there, largely stemming from the nebulous “vibe shift” of the early 2020s toward hedonism and ostentation — Sean Monahan of K-HOLE recently coined the term “boom boom” to describe the current version of it. People are less interested in litigating who’s allowed to say, do, and desire what and more interested in flaunting how much they have.
But the piece also argues — correctly, I think — that a lot of it feels a little sauceless, a little lacking in filth and perversion. None of it feels dangerous. Maybe we’re already scared enough.
Alex: Or maybe we just don’t post about it, like the IUD guy shouldn’t have. Maybe it’s time to reclaim sex from the internet strangers who don’t get a say.
The post The online sex police are always watching and always so mad appeared first on Vox.
