by Rachel Hills
Tullia’s high school high jinks were ultimately short-lived, and she spent most of her college years in a steady relationship. But she looks back on her experiences as life-affirming and empowering. She perceives her more recent casual encounters the same way. “I love the thrill of a new body,” she says. “You put your most into the experience and let go of your fear.”
But as life-affirming as Tullia’s sexual experiences have been, she is mindful that they also serve another purpose. Learning how to apply makeup and going to clubs while in high school, for instance, wasn’t just a means of enticing boys. It was also a vehicle for becoming more interesting to other girls. “I went to a Catholic girls’ school, so I didn’t wear my skirt short to attract boys. I did it to attract girls—to be accepted into the cool girls, as one of the pretty girls.”
Similarly, playing the role of the sexually liberated young woman as an adult isn’t just a matter of the sex Tullia does or doesn’t have. It’s about how she presents herself, how she interacts with people, the products she consumes, and the lifestyle she pursues. As she describes it: “You’re going to music festivals, you’re regularly getting a bikini wax and pedicure. You’re dining out with your friends and meeting new people. Even if you’ve got a boyfriend, the lifestyle doesn’t change all that much. You’re still out there, still part of the scene.” To be sexually “free” is not just a question of doing as you please but a public display of self: an identity that is contemporary, cultured, and financially secure.
The shift from sexual restraint to liberalism that has taken place in Western culture over the last half century reflects more than just a rejection of the perceived repressions of our forebears, argues British cultural theorist Mark Jancovich. It has also coincided with a transformation of the types of people and occupations that are classified as middle-class, as the “craftsmen and small shopkeepers” who made up the old petite bourgeoisie have been replaced by a new bourgeoisie comprised of people working in sales, marketing, advertising, fashion, and the creative industries.
To be middle-class, Jancovich argues, is to be defined as much by what you are not—economically and culturally—as by what you are. The small-business owners who formed the original middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stood out because they defied the categorizations of their day. They were neither landed aristocrats nor working poor. Instead, they occupied the middle: wealthy enough to own their own businesses and earn money off other people’s labor, but lacking the institutional privilege of the old nobility.
The middle class of this era sought to distinguish themselves in other ways, too: rebelling against the marriages of convenience and sexual hypocrisy they associated with the upper classes, and developing their own set of ethics that valorized moderation, purity, and romantic love instead. As Canadian sociologists Erin Connell and Alan Hunt explain it: “While sexual passion could drag the individual down, romantic love, linked with reverence and devotion, could lift the married couple to the gates of heaven.”
In the same way, the philosophy of freedom and fun favored by the educated middle classes today serves to identify this group as not repressed and not moralizing—and therefore distinguish them from less savvy outsiders.
The other quality that defines the middle class, according to Jancovich, is the desire not to be judged. For the old petite bourgeoisie, this aim was achieved through the creation of a strict moral code of “respectability and restraint,” which, if followed to the letter, left no loopholes through which one could be found wanting.
Today, we seek the same judgment-free state by attempting to demolish the rules by which we might be evaluated altogether. In place of these, Jancovich argues, we have adopted “an ethic of fun, which is defined as ‘modern’ and sophisticated.” But in turning fun into a virtue, we have also made it yet another benchmark on which we can be deemed inadequate.
“You Have to Go Crazy Now, Because You Can’t Later”
For no demographic group is the link between sex, fun, and freedom more powerful than it is for the young and single. We expect young adults to experiment sexually not only because they are physically mature humans with adult desires, but also because of the broader fantasy of youth as a time of unfettered independence, ripe with possibilities that have not yet been diminished by the weight of responsibility or convention.
The assumption that teens and twentysomethings are uncontrollably sexed serves as the mirror of the drab but “respectable” married couple who no longer have any sex at all. As Noah, a twenty-two-year-old trans man living in Seattle, describes it dryly, “You have to go crazy now, because you can’t later. So you’ve gotta fuck everyone while you still can.” He wonders if there might be less pressure for young queer people to “get it out of their systems” in their twenties, because there isn’t the same expectation that their period of freedom will end. “You go somewhere like [Seattle gay bars] Pony or the Wildrose, and you see people my parents’ age and, like, I know that they’re still getting it on. It’s still an accepted part of the community.” He laughs. “Oh god, the sagging Prince Alberts I’ve seen!”
Seattle gay bars aside, the perception is that young people have more sexual opportunity than other groups—and that they ought to be taking advantage of those opportunities while they last. Witness the New York Observer’s shock in 2011 when, at the end of one Manhattan house party, not one of the twentysomething revelers went home with anyone. “Young New Yorkers no longer care about having sex,” the paper announced dramatically. The young adults in question were of the same creative-class ilk that Jancovich describes—“day laborers in film, public relations, media, fashion”—but although they were fashionable, successful, and attractive, sex was not their Friday-night priority.
The Observer argued that desire had been replaced with narcissism, fornicating with Twitter followers. “Sex is antithetical to the way [young people] socialize, disruptive to the larger plan, a gateway to chaos in a digitally ordered world,” theorized journalist Nate Freeman. The hours they worked were too long, their social circles too interwoven to accommodate the fallout of failed intimacy. “It’s harder to go home with someone knowing that you’ll be seeing their avatar the next morning and every morning after that.”
It wasn’t conceivable that the people at the party might not have met anyone they were attracted to on that particular night, or that they might have met someone they liked but weren’t in the right frame of mind to make a move. The fact that no one, at least as far as Freeman knew, got laid meant that there must be something wrong—not only with the young people at the party, but with their entire generation.
For most twentysomethings, not taking a stranger home at the end of a party is more typical than picking someone up. But for young people whose experiences don’t fit the fun, free ideal, there can be a sense that they are missing out on an essential part of their youth. Sarah, twenty-five, hasn’t had sex in four years, and not because she is morally or even personally opposed to it. She says, “It just literally has not happened. Like, I have not been in a situation where sex has even been a possibility.”
Sarah is attractive and outgoing, with long dark hair and slim hips. Two years ago, she packed her bags and moved from her native Melbourne to live and work in Beijing, where she is studying Mandarin. During her university years, Sarah channeled some of her thirst for excitement into her sex life, sleeping with guys she met at house parties and in her local theater scene. She is yet to have a serious boyfriend, but she had her first threesome the same year she lost her virginity. Then, all of a sudden, she stopped hooking up entirely.
Officially, it was a one-night stand gone wrong that caused her to take pause. She had met a guy at a house party, and at the end of the night they went up to his room to have sex. “I wasn’t really planning it, I was just such a go-with-the-flow kind of person back then,” she explains. After it was over, they went back downstairs and he showed her out. It had been nice meeting her, he said. And the
n he shut the door.
Sarah had had one-night stands before—in fact, they were the only type of sex that she’d had. But this felt different from all the times before. “I think with the others, there was at least some pretense that they would call,” she says. And Sarah always wanted them to call. On reflection, she concedes that most of the guys she slept with weren’t great matches for her anyway. “I never stopped to think if we got along. It was just all being young and wanting to love life and have these exciting hookups. And yes,” she admits sheepishly, “wanting them to call.”
After that night, Sarah didn’t just stop hooking up with strangers. She stopped having sex altogether. At first it was intentional, a bid to regain control over her body and emotions. Ten months later, when she emerged from her period of self-enforced celibacy, it became circumstantial. Sarah didn’t want to avoid sex, but the opportunities no longer presented themselves the way they used to. Where once the parties and shows she attended had seemed ripe with sexual potential, now the people who set her loins ablaze were few and far between. Those who did were often unattainable—already in a relationship or just too cool to connect with her on the level that she desired.
Now Sarah channels her thirst for excitement into nonsexual aspects of her life—travel, activism, friends, her blog. But she admits that she sometimes feels like she is missing out. “I have this angst, this feeling that now is the youngest and hottest I’m ever going to be,” she says. “I feel like I should be ‘out there’ more. I mean, sex is fun, and relationships are fun. I get jealous hearing about other people’s interesting love lives, and feeling like I’m missing out on that.”
Like Tullia, Sarah views sex as a marker of being engaged with the world around you. “Everything in media, literature, popular culture points to sex,” she says. “If you’re not married or in a relationship, it’s expected that you’ll be hooking up with people and dating. That’s just what you do. You have a love life and that’s what you talk about with your girlfriends or whatever. You talk about whatever the latest chapter is. And it’s only recently that I’ve thought that maybe it’s okay not to do that. That it’s fine, I don’t have to constantly be on the search for my next boyfriend or hookup.”
If sex is an expression of freedom, it is a freedom that is dependent on the ability to exercise autonomy in other areas: financially, from parental surveillance, and from the demands of a committed relationship. If you are bound by any of these restrictions, your capacity to be sexually liberated—at least in the format that liberation is usually sold to us—diminishes accordingly. “Freedom” becomes a source of risk instead.
I meet Lauren, a gregarious high school senior with a passion for performing, at a surburban strip-mall Starbucks an hour or so south of Los Angeles. Lauren hopes to study musical theater after she graduates. If she does, she will be the first member of her family to go to college. She is passionate about gay rights and is a member of her local Gay-Straight Alliance. She is also a virgin, as are most of the girls she is friends with at school.
Lauren grew up in a Catholic Hispanic family, where most of her older female relatives became mothers before they finished high school. Her parents expected that she would follow the same path. “My goals are not taken very seriously in my family,” she tells me. “All of my aunts on both sides of the family got pregnant when they were teenagers, and everyone thinks that the same thing is going to happen to me. That that’s just the way Latinas are: we stay home, we have kids, we take care of our husbands. But I’m not like that. I want to have a career.”
For Lauren and her friends, sex is an obstacle to future success. When everyone in your family and community expects you to be sexually active, not having sex becomes the transgressive thing to do. It’s also the safer option. “So many women in my friends’ families had to drop out of high school because they got pregnant. They couldn’t continue on to college,” Lauren says. “So there’s a feeling that if we have sex, or even if we think about it too much, those doors will close to us.”
She doesn’t think it should have to be that way. “Being sexually active shouldn’t change anything about you,” she says. “If you were a successful student before you had sex, you should be a successful student after as well. If I got pregnant, I would still find a way to continue my education.” But she also suspects she won’t be having sex anytime soon, and that’s not just a matter of avoiding pregnancy. “There aren’t many guys at my school who I’d really date. It’s hard because everyone knows each other, so I know that if I started getting involved with a guy he would tell his friends, and it would get back to my friends and it would be really complicated. As much as I’d like to change perceptions, it’s still high school.” For now, Lauren’s sexual liberation will have to wait.
From Sexual Liberation to Great Sexpectations
But a sexual culture that trumpets freedom from the rooftops is not the same thing as a sexual culture that is truly free. And in practice, today’s “open-minded” and educated middle classes have not eluded judgment so much as we have changed the terms upon which we are judged.
Where once we were condemned for being too sexual, today we are admonished for not being sexual enough. Where it was considered perverse to engage in any activity more adventurous than the missionary position, today you risk being labeled boring if you don’t. In our attempt to overturn the rules that once governed our sexuality, we have replaced one brand of regulation with another.
Foucault believed that his late-twentieth-century contemporaries were wrong to dismiss their Victorian predecessors as buttoned-up and repressed. The culture they lived in may have been tightly controlled, but it was a control that was imposed not by making sex invisible but by continually invoking it: through heated discussions about the birth rate, the proper age for marriage, how often couples should have sex, and more. Similarly, the omnipresence of sex in media and popular culture today—and the particular types of sexual expression we celebrate and condemn—are not the revolutionary break from an oppressive past they might at first seem. Rather, they are a continuation of a fixation on sexuality that reaches back to the dawn of Western civilization.
And if the words we speak about sex have been used to convey the limits of acceptable and unacceptable behavior for thousands of years, it stands to reason that the multitudes of conversations we engage in about sex now—in the media, in popular culture, and with each other—might serve the same function. In other words, the compulsion to appear “liberated” is a form of regulation of its own.
We won’t achieve sexual freedom simply by replacing an oppressive set of rules with its opposite. It is true that being told that the only “good” sex is that which occurs within marriage and produces children is harmful to many people. But just as our predecessors were stigmatized for failing to achieve the old benchmarks of sexual purity, so too are many people today suffering for their struggle to meet the new standards of sexual “freedom.” Recent studies of sexual attitudes in Finland, for example, show that as public appreciation of the importance of sex has increased, dissatisfaction with individual sex lives has also grown.
None of this is to suggest that things aren’t better now than they were before. We may have grander expectations of what our sex lives should look and feel like, but we also have more information about how our bodies work and the pleasure possibilities available to us. We may be surrounded by images that objectify and sexualize women, but we have also raised a generation of young women who are more comfortable with pursuing the people and pleasures they desire than those who came before them. Young men too are challenging traditional gender roles, showing a greater willingness to confront and acknowledge their vulnerabilities.
But as we have stripped away some of the old taboos around sex and pleasure, we have replaced them with new anxieties around performance, desirability, and what it means to be “normal.” As Leonore Tiefer, a psychologist at New York University, writes in her book Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essay
s, “It used to be that sex was so secret, so hidden, and so private that people felt completely unprepared and anxious that they wouldn’t know what to do and would somehow do it wrong. Now, sex is so not-secret, so not-hidden, and so not-private that people feel anxious that they can’t possibly measure up to what they think is the ‘normal’ standard of sexual life.” Our shift from a sexual culture that privileges respectability and restraint to one that privileges freedom has also been accompanied by an increased emphasis on sex as a path to status, self-expression, and personal fulfillment.
The old sexual regime was repressive because it narrowed people’s options in a manner that was both painful and psychologically unsustainable. If you were gay, you weren’t allowed to be with the person you loved. If you were a woman, sex was fraught with risk and stigma. But it wasn’t just the terms of the regime that needed to be dismantled. It was the very fact that there was a regime at all.
Power isn’t just exercised from above, imposed by government legislation, corporations, or religious dictate. It is also present in the stories we tell about our lives, the ways in which we choose to interact with other people, and the assumptions that we leave unquestioned. Often, power is most present in the forums we don’t immediately recognize as political: in truisms such as “women want love, men want sex,” in the assumption that everyone is heterosexual until otherwise stated, and in the sex advice proffered in glossy magazines.
