by Rachel Hills
To understand how sex became entwined with the self, we need to go back five hundred years, to the dawn of the period historians refer to as modernity. This was an era of enormous social and economic change in what we now call the West, which had a profound impact on the way people perceived themselves in relation to others—and, in turn, a powerful effect on the way we thought about sex.
At the beginning of this period, in the early 1500s, most Europeans lived in small, feudal farming communities, with high mortality and few opportunities for social advancement. Who you were and who you were allowed to be was a matter of class hierarchy, determined at birth and enforced by a community you would know for your entire life. By the mid-1600s, the transition to an industrial society was in full swing, and people were increasingly living in cities, surrounded by strangers. Now one’s identity was not fixed but could be shaped by hard work and sheer force of will—at least in theory.
The transition from an agrarian to an industrial society created the need for a new interdependence and awareness of the self as distinct from other people. In cities, survival meant learning to get along not just with people you knew well but with people you might never see again. This demanded an increased attentiveness to how your actions affected the people around you. The twentieth-century German social scientist Norbert Elias called this “the civilizing process,” writing that “in order to be really courteous by the standards of civilité one is to some extent obliged to observe, to look about oneself and to pay attention to people and their motives.” This awareness of others led to an increased awareness of the self, Elias argued, which in turn led individuals to modify their behavior to be more considerate of and appealing to others.
This period also saw the redrawing of the lines between private and public life. In the old feudal societies, decisions relating to politics and religion were made behind closed doors, away from the eyes and influence of ordinary people. The domestic sphere, by comparison, was largely public. It was not uncommon to share a bed with a stranger of the opposite sex at an inn, for example, or to sleep naked when you did so. But the modern age turned these old divisions on their heads, as politics became a matter of public interest and acts related to the body—from sex to sleep to bathing and using the toilet—became private, and in some cases taboo.
This new sense of mystery surrounding the body infused sex with an unprecedented intimacy. If sexuality was a secret, then knowing the details of another person’s sex life meant understanding them in a way that others did not. Combined with the increased emphasis on individual identity and interpersonal etiquette in this era, sex began to take on a new importance.
These days, sex is as much a topic of public conversation as politics, but it continues to be treated as an act of profound personal significance. There is a sense that sex is uniquely revealing: that if someone has a certain type of sex, they must be a certain corresponding type of person. Or more precisely, that certain types of (good or bad) people engage in particular sexual activities.
Most of us wouldn’t radically change our opinion of our friends if we learned that they were bisexual, or into BDSM, or that they hadn’t had sex in three years. We might be surprised—especially if it didn’t fit with our existing beliefs about who that person was—but any new information about their sex life would be incorporated as one thread of a larger story, alongside their temperament, their taste in music, what makes them laugh, where they grew up, or the way they dress. That is to say, Sofia’s fears that her friends would think less of her if they knew the truth about her relationship are probably misplaced.
But although we might be loath to judge individuals whom we know and love on the basis of their sex lives, we are far more willing to make such evaluations in the abstract. Plenty of people who wouldn’t look down on a friend who told them they had never had sex still think of “virgins” as a category, as uptight, unattractive, or socially inept. The same people who would respond with nonchalance or inquisitive enthusiasm if someone they knew told them they were kinky still think of “kinky people” as strange, intimidating, or oversexed.
Like Norbert Elias’s civilizing process, the link between sex and self usually manifests itself not externally, through an explicit condemnation of undesirable behaviors, but internally, as we carefully monitor what others say and do about their sex lives, and modify our own self-presentation accordingly. Sofia may not be able to create the sex life she would like to have, but she can influence the assumptions that people make about her through the way she dresses and the stories she chooses to share (and not to share) about her relationship. She might not feel sexy on the inside, but it matters a little less so long as she looks the part.
But looking the part only takes us so far. Identity isn’t just built on the basis of what we like, do, and believe, but on our ability to create a cohesive story about who we are. And whether that “story” looks consistent from the outside or not, when it fails to align on the inside, we are left with a sense of discomfort at best, and at worst, a deep sense of shame.
Like Sofia, Greta doesn’t have as much sex as most of her friends—although she does have as much sex as she wants to have. A self-possessed and outgoing twenty-five-year-old fashion blogger, with curly dark hair and a bold, colorful sense of style, Greta has been with the same guy since she was eighteen years old. When they first got together, they went through a “honeymoon period of ripping each other’s clothes off,” but in recent years, they’ve regularly gone weeks—or even months—without having sex. “I have a sluggish sex drive,” she says with a shrug.
Where Sofia feels anxious about her desirability, Greta is confident about the state of her relationship. “We talk a lot. We play. We’re really quite silly together, which I love. We kiss every day. We’re quite physically affectionate with each other, always touching and holding hands and running our hands through each other’s hair,” she explains. The source of Greta’s discomfort is that her sex life doesn’t fit her identity as a progressive and powerful young woman. It’s not just the amount of sex she has; it’s the fact that she has only ever done it with one person. “I had this fear when I was about twenty-one that I was missing out on all these great dicks by staying with one man,” she jokes. She talked it through with her boyfriend for a month or two before she came to the conclusion that “he was the person [she] wanted to be with,” she recalls. “I realized that I don’t need a lot of bad sex with a lot of different people.”
Still, Greta admits she often feels like her sex life doesn’t reflect her politics. “I feel like it should be more radical,” she says. “It always comes as a bit of a shock to people when they find out I only have one notch on my bedpost, and that he and I have been together for such a long time, at such a young age. Paul is pretty much my first boyfriend, and certainly my first serious boyfriend. He’s the only person I’ve had sex with, and he may end up being the only person I ever have sex with.”
A sporadic sex life doesn’t cause Greta the distress it does Sofia, but it is a source of disquiet nonetheless. “It doesn’t mesh with my idea of myself,” she reflects. “Intellectually, I know that there is no normal, and that the only thing you should be worried about when it comes to sex is if it makes you feel uncomfortable or if it’s having a negative impact on your life. But still,” she adds knowingly, “it’s different when it happens to me.”
Consumer Sex: We Get What We Pay For
If the emergence of the self-made individual allowed the Sex Myth to flourish, the rise of consumer culture over the past fifty years has sent it into overdrive. Today, the question of who we are and how we are perceived by others is answered not just through what we do and how we interact with other people, but through the things we consume. And just as the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the food we eat have all become symbols of our values and identity, our relationship to sex has followed suit.
Of all the dreams today’s young Westerners are sold about what our lives could look like, the bi
ggest is that we have limitless opportunities, that we are free to pursue whatever work, relationships, and ways of being we like. And while sex isn’t central to every young person’s perception of what it means to be free, it is a key part of how that freedom is sold to us.
The old adage that “sex sells” is as true today as it ever was, and the exhilarating, “special” qualities of sex are used to market everything from fashion to popular culture to beauty products. But these products don’t just promise sex. They also use sexuality to suggest other emotions and desires. Advertisements for perfume and high-end alcohol feature beautiful models to connote not just sexual desirability but wealth, distinction, and glamour. When pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, or Rihanna dance onstage in skintight costumes, thrusting and grabbing at their groins, they do it not just to titillate their audiences but to intimidate them—and to position themselves as powerful, edgy, and transgressive in the process. Magazine covers plastered with promises to reignite our sex lives aren’t just promising orgasms but also to make us more confident, self-actualized, and even more lovable.
Despite its reputation, consumer culture is neither inherently shallow nor meaningless. To the contrary, it facilitates desire by infusing everything it encounters with meaning. The right pair of shoes doesn’t just protect your feet; it is a passport into the life of someone richer, more attractive, and more fashionable. A well-stocked iTunes library reveals more than just a love for music; it is a mark of taste and cultural savvy. And an active sex life doesn’t only satisfy us erotically; it represents desirability, self-agency, and charisma. If consumer culture trades on the promise that we will find ourselves through the items we purchase, consumer sex promises that we will discover ourselves through sex. Who we sleep with, what we desire, and the acts we engage in are all part of a broader expression of personal taste.
In Guyland, Michael Kimmel quotes Jeff, a fraternity member at the University of Northern Iowa, who tells him that “the girls you hook up with, they’re, like, a way of showing off to other guys. I mean, you tell your friends you hooked up with Melissa, and they’re like, ‘Whoa, dude, you are one stud.’ So, I’m into Melissa because my guy friends think she is so hot, and now they think more of me because of it. It’s a total guy thing.” Jeff may be genuinely attracted to Melissa, but part of her appeal is what his desire for her reveals about his good taste, and about his own desirability and skill with women.
This “consumer” approach to sex isn’t just visible in what we do. It is also present in how we frame our experiences in everyday life. Rebecca, a nineteen-year-old college sophomore, has yet to have sex, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t sexual. “Just because somebody isn’t sexually active doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it,” she says. “I’ve got a libido, and it’s quite heated. I don’t feel the way a virgin is ‘supposed’ to feel. [I don’t feel] chaste and self-censored.”
Rebecca is quiet but opinionated, a close observer of the people around her. Her best friends know she is a virgin, but most people she meets assume that she is not. “I’m not a huge social character, but I am quite independent, and I think people imagine that confidence goes hand in hand with sexual availability. I go out and I drink and I’ve kissed boys, and people think that naturally there would have been an occasion when that would have led to me sleeping with one of them.” But she hasn’t—mostly because she has yet to meet somebody she wants to sleep with. “It doesn’t have to be on a bed of roses or anything, I just want it to be something kind of nice.”
Rebecca also pays attention to the assumptions she sees her classmates making about each other’s sex lives. She tells me about a conversation she overheard recently, in a campus computer lab around exam time. “One of the girls was stressing out about the paper she was working on, and this other girl piped up and told her, ‘You just really need to get laid. Go out and get some sex.’ ”
It was a casual remark, probably intended as a joke, but Rebecca saw something more in it: a desire to communicate a particular type of sexual experience. “To me, a comment like that says that she’s sexually active, and that she assumes that everyone else is, too,” Rebecca explains. “And the thing is, both of those girls could be virgins for all we know. Because they’re not really directly saying, ‘Hey, I’m having sex.’ But their conversation is designed to make people think they are.” The subtext, she says, is that sex is important to them, “and it should be to you, too.”
Consumer sex isn’t about pleasure or a desire to connect with other people. It is inward looking, a matter of proving something to yourself and to others. And contrary to what Jeff says, it’s not just a “guy thing,” either. In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy speaks with Annie, a “beautiful twenty-nine-year-old” who treats sex as “a kind of shopping.” When Levy interviews her, Annie has had sex with thirty-five people, and her mission is to get her number up to one hundred. Many of her experiences, she tells Levy, have been “pretty fucking lame,” but she is “willing to take that,” because she wants to have sex with as many people as possible. “The thing about when you start accumulating sex for its own sake is that the exercise of it is not that sexual,” Annie observes. “Sometimes having this kind of sex, this shopping kind of sex, is based on insecurities for me, am-I-attractive insecurities.”
In their book Sexual Conduct, John Gagnon and William Simon hypothesize that rather than needing to “constrain severely the powerful sexual impulse in order to maintain social stability,” earlier societies might have had to “invent an importance for sexuality.” This, they argued, would not only “assure a high level of reproductive activity,” but would provide a powerful incentive for conformity in other areas of life—and one unlimited by natural resources.
In today’s consumer society, it’s not hard to see how our special preoccupation with sex might be channeled into practices that are very useful from a political or economic perspective. In contemporary Western culture, desirability is strongly tied to what we consume, with women in particular encouraged to purchase products that promise to make them more sexually appealing, such as makeup, skin-care formulas, designer clothes, and cosmetic surgery. Increasingly, there is a market for products that allow men, too, to manipulate their appearance to become more attractive, with the men’s grooming industry valued at $33 billion annually in 2011.
Sexual desirability is also connected to what we produce. Work is more than just a means to purchase products that promise to make us more attractive; it is also a source of attractiveness in its own right, as men and women who are “successful” in the ways that matter to the people around them—be that money, power, or cultural cachet—are considered more attractive sexual partners. Even reproduction itself is an economic good, as governments in France, Germany, Estonia, and Australia have proved with their appeals to young couples to have more children—and create a workforce to pay for their future pensions.
None of this is to imply that if sex were not so important, or so central to our sense of personal value, people wouldn’t still go on diets, purchase beauty products, or turn up to work on Monday morning. But promoting sex as a path to status and self-worth, and suggesting that if we produce and consume in the right ways we will get more access to it, certainly encourages behavior that is economically desirable. In the next chapter, we will begin to look more closely at what those desirable behaviors are and how they are upheld, starting with the need to be “normal.”
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Freaks and Geeks: The Trouble with “Normal”
If the Sex Myth teaches us that sex reveals the essence of who we are, normality is the barometer by which we come to understand how “who we are” is valued by other people. To be “normal” is to be embraced, accepted, one of the gang. To be “abnormal,” on the other hand, is to mark yourself out as different, deviant, and in some way deficient. But in the early twenty-first century, a time when most of us pride ourselves on our open-mindedness, what does it mean to be normal?
Mi
chael identifies as straight but has kissed guys and watched gay porn. His father is a cross-dresser. Now thirty-two, he has been married for four years to a woman with whom he has been in a relationship since he was twenty-five. It is not technically “open,” but they have flirted with the idea of hooking up with other people. Once, on a drunken night not long after they married, his wife and one of her friends teased him with the possibility of a threesome—a promise Michael was only too keen to take them up on. “It ended up with us just talking,” he admits sheepishly. So it is no surprise, then, that I receive a quizzical look when I ask him what’s considered “normal” these days when it comes to sex. “Nothing,” he says. “It all depends on what is normal to you.”
We are sitting in London’s Victoria train station on a rainy Friday afternoon, all grand red brick and polished archways on the outside, a miniature city of chain coffee stores and mass-market retailers bathed in fluorescent light inside. Bright-eyed and well-built, with reddish-brown stubble and a sleeve of tattoos down each arm, Michael is eager to share his experiences, speaking candidly about everything from his insecurities (height, masculinity, perversity) to his “obsession” with breasts. “I am the biggest boob fan you’ll ever meet,” he says with a grin.
Growing up in the working-class outer suburbs of London, Michael didn’t feel like he fit in with other guys, and he didn’t think girls were attracted to him. He had long hair and bad acne, and listened to heavy rock in a community where alternative music wasn’t cool. When Michael was sixteen, a group of guys he knew went through his bags and found a letter he had written to a friend, pondering whether he might be gay. They later took him down to a local park and “beat the shit out of” him. Experiences like these might explain why he is so fervently opposed to the idea that some ways of being sexual might be more acceptable or desirable than others. “Nothing should be seen as alien or should be looked down upon as wrong,” he says forcefully.
