You’d think the widespread availability of porn would make teens more interested in actual sex, but young people themselves often say the opposite. Hiro, 17, lives in Texas with his parents and older siblings. He says he first saw pornography when he was 9 years old, when he figured out how to turn off the child filter on his parents’ computer. Porn led him to try to imagine what girls he knew looked like naked, so, he says, “I had two choices: hang out with girls and constantly think sexually about them, or avoid them entirely.” He chose to avoid them. “I have never been in a relationship in my 17 years on this earth, and the big reason is porn and my association with it. At this point that makes me sad,” he wrote. He concluded, “Pornography, especially on the internet, has desensitized teens into not enjoying or wanting sex and intimacy.”
Some young men find that porn is enough to satisfy their sexual urges. Noah Patterson, 18, told the Washington Post he’d rather watch YouTube, play video games, or work than have sex. He’s a virgin, though he has watched a lot of porn. When asked if he was curious about actual sex, he said, “Not really. I’ve seen so much of it. . . . There isn’t really anything magical about it, right?”
A 2016 Time magazine cover story documented the growing number of young men who say their extensive use of pornography has left them unable to be aroused by actual sex. Noah Church, now 26, says he first saw pictures of nudity online when he was 9. By the time he was 15, he was masturbating to pornographic streaming videos several times a day. When he was a senior in high school, he and his date ended up naked in her bedroom, but he couldn’t get an erection. “There was a disconnect between what I wanted in my mind and how my body reacted,” he said.
In a widely viewed TED talk, 40-something Cindy Gallop described her experiences having sex with men in their twenties. “When I have sex with younger men, I encounter, very directly and personally, the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hard-core pornography in our culture,” she said. “Kids are able to access [porn] at a younger and younger age than ever before. There’s an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hard-core pornography is the way that you have sex.” In response, she originated the website Make Love Not Porn, a collection of helpful tips for men, including “A lot of women aren’t into the idea of anal” and “Some women shave [down there], some women don’t.”
It’s difficult to prove that increased pornography consumption has led to less sex. By definition, men and women who watch porn are more interested in sex in the first place, so they usually have more sex. For most people, porn likely doesn’t decrease sexual activity. But there appears to be a measureable segment of people for whom porn is enough and real sex seems unnescessary. Why risk rejection, sexually transmitted diseases, relationship arguments, or having to meet up with someone when you can watch porn in the privacy of your own bedroom and do things your way?
Porn may be leading to sexual inactivity in another way, by influencing the kind of sex young people are having. College students told Lisa Wade that hookup sex was the norm and the only real route for entering a relationship. Hookups, they said, are ideally “emotionless or meaningless sex,” an idea they might have gotten from pornography. As Wade told Minnesota Public Radio, “Pornography is hot sex and cold emotions. That is the same ideal that students will articulate if you ask them what hookup culture is all about. It’s about having hot sex but being cold emotionally.” She found that a third of students were sexually inactive in their freshman year. “Almost all of them were opting out specifically because they didn’t want to have that kind of sexual encounter,” she said. “They were okay with casual sex, they weren’t opposed to that. But they didn’t like the idea of having cold, emotionless, and possibly cruel sex with one another. They would have been happy to have hot sex and warm emotions. They wanted to at least be in like if not in love. And that is really off script in hookup culture.” Other researchers who study sex have encountered similar attitudes among today’s students. “I have students who say people should be able to have no emotions in sex, and if you can’t, there’s something wrong with you,” says Debby Herbenick of Indiana University.
Catching Feelings
As her number one reason “why relationships in your 20s just don’t work,” Leigh Taveroff writes, “These years are extremely important: you’re meant to be finding out who you are and building a foundation for the rest of your life. You don’t want to get too caught up in someone else’s problems, triumphs and failures, and forget to be experiencing your own. At the end of the day, your 20s are the years where YOU DO YOU. Be selfish, have fun and explore the world.”
Taveroff clearly takes it for granted that self-exploration is the purpose of one’s twenties—a notion that many 25-year-olds as recently as the 1990s might have found odd. By that age, most Boomers and GenX’ers were married, and many had children. That’s not to say that one way is right and the other isn’t, but they are very different viewpoints on the best way to spend the high-energy years of your life. “It’s way too early,” says Ivan, 20, when I ask him if most people in their early twenties are ready for a committed relationship such as living together or getting married. “We are still young and learning about our lives, having fun and enjoying our freedom. Being committed shuts that down very fast. We will often just leave our partner because we are too young to commit.”
In general, relationships conflict with the individualistic notion that “you don’t need someone else to make you happy—you should make yourself happy.” That is the message iGen’ers grew up hearing, the received wisdom whispered in their ears by the cultural milieu. In just the eighteen years between 1990 and 2008, the use of the phrase “Make yourself happy” more than tripled in American books in the Google Books database. The phrase “Don’t need anyone” barely existed in American books before the 1970s and then quadrupled between 1970 and 2008. The relationship-unfriendly phrase “Never compromise” doubled between 1990 and 2008. And what other phrase has increased? “I love me.”
“I question the assumption that love is always worth the risk. There are other ways to live a meaningful life, and in college especially, a romantic relationship can bring us farther from rather than closer to that goal,” wrote Columbia University sophomore Flannery James in the campus newspaper. In iGen’ers’ view, they have lots of things to do on their own first, and relationships could keep them from doing them. Many young iGen’ers also fear losing their identity through relationships or being too influenced by someone else at a critical time. “There’s this idea now that identity is built independent of relationships, not within them,” says the psychologist Leslie Bell. “So only once you’re ‘complete’ as an adult can you be in a relationship.” Twenty-year-old James feels that way. “Another person could easily have a large effect on me right now, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily something that I want,” he says. “I just feel like that period in college from twenty to twenty-five is such a learning experience in and of itself. It’s difficult to try to learn about yourself when you’re with someone else.”
Even if they go well, relationships are stressful, iGen’ers say. “When you’re in a relationship, their problem is your problem, too,” says Mark. “So not only do you have your set of problems, but if they’re having a bad day, they’re kind of taking it out on you. The stress alone is ridiculous.” Dealing with people, iGen’ers seem to say, is exhausting. College hookups, says James, are a way “to find instant gratification” without the trouble of taking on someone else’s baggage. “That way you don’t have to deal with a person as a whole. You just get to enjoy someone in the moment,” he says.
Social media may play a role in the superficial, emotionless ideal of iGen sex. Early on, teens (especially girls) learn that sexy pictures get likes. You’re noticed for how your butt looks in a “sink selfie” (in which a girl sits on a bathroom sink and takes a selfie over her shoulder Kim Kardashian style), not for your sparkling personality or your kindness. Social media
and dating apps also make cheating extremely easy. “Like your boyfriend could have been talking to somebody for months behind your back and you’ll never find out,” 15-year-old Madeline from the Bronx said in American Girls. “Love is just a word, it has no meaning,” she said. “It’s very rare you will ever find someone who really likes you for who you are—for yourself, your originality . . . . Rarely, if ever, do you find someone who really cares.”
There’s another reason iGen’ers are uncertain about relationships: you might get hurt, and you might find yourself dependent on someone else—reasons that intertwine with iGen’s individualism and focus on safety. “I think it’s good for people to be on their own for a while, too. People who are so heavily reliant on relationships for their whole source of emotional security don’t know how to cope when that’s taken away from them,” says Haley, 18, whom we met earlier. “A relationship is impermanent, everything in life is impermanent, so if that’s taken away and then you can’t find another girlfriend or another boyfriend, then what are you going to do? You haven’t learned the skills to cope on your own, be happy on your own, so what are you going to do, are you just going to suffer through it until you can find someone else who will take you?” Haley’s view is the famous couplet “Better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all” turned on its head: to her, it’s better not to have loved, because what if you lose it?
This fear of intimacy, of really showing yourself, is one reason why hookups nearly always occur when both parties are drunk. Two recent books on college hookup culture both concluded that alcohol is considered nearly mandatory before having sex with someone for the first time. The college women Peggy Orenstein interviewed for Girls & Sex said that hooking up sober would be “awkward.” “Being sober makes it seem like you want to be in a relationship,” one college freshman told her. “It’s really uncomfortable.” One study found that the average college hookup involves the woman having had four drinks and the men six. In American Hookup, one college woman told Lisa Wade that the first step in hooking up is to get “shitfaced.” “When [you’re] drunk, you can kind of just do it because it’s fun and then be able to laugh about it and have it not be awkward or not mean anything,” another college woman explained. Wade concluded that alcohol allows students to pretend that sex doesn’t mean anything—after all, you were both drunk.
The fear of relationships has spawned several intriguing slang terms used by iGen’ers and young Millennials, such as “catching feelings.” That’s what they call developing an emotional attachment to someone else—an evocative term with its implication that love is a disease one would rather not have. One website offered “32 Signs You’re Catching Feelings for Your F*ck Buddy” such as “You guys have started cuddling after sex” and “You realize that you actually give a shit about their life and want to know more.” Another website for college students offered advice on “How to Avoid Catching Feelings for Someone” because “college is a time of experimentation, of being young and wild and free and all that crap, the last thing you need is to end up tied down after the first semester.” Tips include “Go into it with the attitude that you’re not going to develop feelings towards this person” and “Don’t tell them your life story.” It ends with “Don’t cuddle. For the love of God, this is a must. Whether it’s while watching a film, or after a steamy session in the bedroom, do not go in for the hugs and snuggles. Getting close to them literally is going to mean getting close to them emotionally, and that’s exactly what you don’t want. Don’t indulge in those cuddle cravings, and if needed make a barrier of pillows between you. Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.”
Maybe I’m just a GenX’er, but this sounds like someone frantically fighting against any kind of actual human connection because he has some idealized idea about being “wild and free.” Humans are hardwired to want emotional connections to other people, yet the very concept of “catching feelings” promotes the idea that this is a shameful thing, akin to being sick. As Lisa Wade found when she interviewed iGen college students, “The worst thing you can get called on a college campus these days isn’t what it used to be, ‘slut,’ and it isn’t even the more hookup-culture-consistent ‘prude.’ It’s ‘desperate.’ Being clingy—acting as if you need someone—is considered pathetic.”
Then there’s “ghosting.” That’s when someone you’ve been talking with, flirting with, or hooking up with suddenly stops texting you back. It’s the most passive way to break up ever invented, worse than the dreaded GenX Post-it note. Ghosting, wrote Columbia University first-year student Madison Ailts, “isn’t your run-of-the-mill rejection. This is rejection that leaves you in a state of utter confusion.” Ailts believes that ghosting is a product of the constant array of choices offered by digital media: “We are hardwired to constantly search for the best thing possible, even if it’s at the expense of someone else. This has resulted in a new social norm: to suddenly pretend like that person doesn’t exist.” It also sounds like a generation without the social skills to know how to break up with someone.
Many Millennials and iGen’ers have ended up someplace in the middle, not merely hooking up but also not settling into a committed relationship. As Kate Hakala wrote on Mic.com, there’s a new status called “dating partner” that’s somewhere between a hookup and a boyfriend. Dating partners have emotionally deep conversations but don’t move in together or meet each other’s parents. Hakala calls it “the signature relationship status of a generation” and explains, “It might all come down to soup. If you have a cold, a fuck buddy isn’t going to bring you soup. And a boyfriend is going to make you homemade soup. A dating partner? They’re totally going to drop off a can of soup. But only if they don’t already have any plans.”
Here’s the irony: most iGen’ers still say they want a relationship, not just a hookup. Two recent surveys found that three out of four college students said they’d like to be in a committed, loving relationship in the next year—but about the same number believed that their classmates only wanted hookups. So the average iGen college student thinks he is the only one who wants a relationship, when most of his fellow students actually do, too. As Wade says, “There’s this disconnect between brave narratives about what they think they should want and should be doing and what, in a way, they do want.” As a 19-year-old put it in American Girls, “Everyone wants love. And no one wants to admit it.”
I’ll Get Married . . . Someday
Will iGen eventually catch up in the relationship department? Maybe. iGen’ers are just as likely to say they want to get married—77% of 12th graders said so in 2015, exactly the same as Boomers in 1976. There’s also been little change in the percentage who say they would prefer to have a mate for life or who definitely want to have children.
iGen’ers’ attitudes toward marriage are a little less positive than previous generations’ views, but not for the reasons you might expect. iGen’ers are more likely than their Millennial predecessors to question marriage because there are so few good ones and are less likely to say their lives will be happier if they marry. However, that’s not because they think having just one partner is too restrictive; fewer iGen’ers believe this than Boomers or even Millennials did. By far the largest shift: iGen is more likely to believe that it’s a good idea to live together first before you get married (see Figure 8.4). So iGen sees marriage as less mandatory and questions the institution more, but it’s not due to some longing for a perpetually promiscuous life.
Figure 8.4. 12th graders’ attitudes toward marriage. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
The bigger question is: What are iGen’ers’ priorities—do they think marriage and family life are important? Given iGen’ers’ move away from in-person social interaction, it’s worth considering what they think of marriage and family, the primary social interactions of adult life. In 1976, Boomer high school seniors rated “having a good marriage and family life” higher than any other life goal. By 2011, however, marriage and f
amily had slipped to fourth (behind finding steady work, being successful at work, and “giving my children better opportunities than I had”—the last likely focused on economic issues). Marriage and family remained at fourth in 2015. Overall, significantly fewer iGen 12th graders felt that “marriage and family life” were important compared to Millenials, and fewer college students believed that “raising a family” was important (see Figure 8.5).
Figure 8.5. Importance of marriage and family among 12th graders and entering college students (corrected for relative centrality). Monitoring the Future and American Freshman Survey, 1976–2016.
When the Boomers, GenX’ers, and Millennials were in college, students rated raising a family either highest or second highest; during the Millennial years of 2002 to 2007, raising a family was rated highest each year. By 2008, though, “being very well off financially” had muscled its way to first place. By 2015, raising a family had slipped to third on the priority list (behind “being very well off financially” and “helping others in difficulty”), the first time that had occurred since it was included on the list of life goals in 1969. It stayed in third place in 2016. Marriage and children are just not as high on iGen’s priority list.
iGen’ers’ uncertainty about their economic prospects may play a role in their rejiggering of priorities. “I think the biggest problem in having children is [wondering whether] I’ll be able to provide a secure and comfortable lifestyle for them,” wrote Miles, 22. “I don’t want to have a child when I’m not sure if I’m going to have a job tomorrow.”
iGen’ers may also see marriage as less important due to their own childhood experiences. Thirty-six percent of iGen babies were born to unmarried mothers, up from 25% during the Millennial birth years. Perhaps as a result, more did not live with their father or even a stepfather (see Appendix H). These statistics contradict the common view that iGen was more carefully nurtured by fathers (“Having a dad at home or even around was more common,” claims GenZ @ Work). Actually, it’s the opposite: fewer fathers even lived in the same household as their kids.
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