Sex is one of those odd things about which, to understand truly what’s going on, you have to recognize that we’re always negotiating three or four different, sometimes competing, perspectives.
First, there’s what’s in the media: television and movies and what journalists say is happening. This is what I like to call the “narrative layer” — it’s the stuff that defines generations, it’s what colors our memories, regardless of whether it maps to our own experiences. We imagine that the 1998 of Sex and the City was every cosmopolitan woman’s experience of 1998 — and so on.
Second, and only relevant within the past 15 years, there’s what people are saying online. This has as much remove as what the press describes. While we do live in an era of oversharing, self-reports are notoriously unreliable. It’s hard to trace the contours of what you’re seeing when you’re seeing through social media. You read even five posts in your timeline or newsfeed of a single genre, and it’s easy to imagine that there’s a trend where there might not be one.
For example, I would imagine that bodybuilders, or any grown men for that matter, are not, generally, seeking out human breast milk for extra nutrition (or at least not enough to prompt a global boom in the market), and rather the commercialization is geared toward mothers or caretakers of infants, but feminist writer Julie Bindel’s Twitter timeline apparently tells a different story. On the other hand: What if she’s right? This is the sticky thing about taking in reality partly via the internet — you never know what’s real.
Third, there are the edge cases: These are the living embodiments of confirmation bias, people whose sex lives mirror the internet, however rare and statistically unrepresentative they may be, clustered in big cities and often members of the media class. The sparse friends, and friends of friends, who are as bad as every conservative/liberal’s worst nightmare. These are the “girl bosses” with “body counts” over 70, the “incels” who inspire disgust in even their Starbucks barista, the 40-somethings who waited too long to have children and now are “nonconsensually child-free,” and the 19-year-olds who gave it all up to become “tradwives.”
Finally, there’s what most people are doing in the physical world. Here’s where the conflict emerges. The first and second perspectives may have a symbiotic relationship, one inspiring the other, but when you examine statistics, an entirely new narrative emerges. The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures show adult American women ages 25-49 with a lifetime number of sexual partners of 4.3 — so much for the epidemic of women being “ran through.” In the case of sex, this is how we end up with a sex recession in the age of OnlyFans and dating apps. How people conceive of sex doesn’t necessarily legibly inform their actions.
It’s this muddled climate that makes salient commentary about 21st-century sex challenging. When we see articles about provocative new sex acts sweeping college campuses, we’re right to ask: Which campuses? Which students? And the same goes for the reverse: When you see people like myself saying we’re on the precipice of a “coming wave of sex negativity,” you’d be right to ask: Aren’t we there already?
Well, it all depends on what dimension you’re analyzing the argument on. It’s this subtle distinction that makes Washington Post columnist Christine Emba’s new book Rethinking Sex successful. It’s a primer for how we conceptualized sex in the 2010s and a list of suggestions about what about that may have failed us. It’s not a sociological study or a road map of radical solutions. It’s a survey of the landscape of conversations. Emba doesn’t set out to redefine the conversation about sex. The mission of the book is in the title: It’s a gentle suggestion to rethink how we conceive of it. It cracks, rather than kicks, the door open. What people do is all over the map, but one thing we can be certain of is how we talk about it and the role that plays.
Rethinking Sex is by no means forceful. There are very few times when she comes out and suggests that a way of thinking or behavior is wrong. At most, she offers recommendations or hints at what she believes the correct path forward is, intimations that one thing or the other may be deleterious.
But as a person who’s written extensively about the conversation around sex, it’s hard for me to blame her for taking this subtler approach. In an essay of mine Emba quotes in the book, “What is the value of restraint?,” I make a very similar argument to one Emba makes throughout the Rethinking Sex. Namely, perhaps it was a mistake to assume that sex is only as meaningful as you want it to be. Rape is hurtful not only because of the obvious physical violation but because there is something intrinsically different about sex. Perhaps not everyone is emotionally equipped to have as many sexual partners as there are people willing to sleep with them. Perhaps there is a point at which we should practice restraint and be more intentional, if only for our own good. Perhaps there is no such thing as casual sex.
My essay is meandering and flaccid, overall. It wasn’t written as an advice column or with a large audience in mind. And yet it’s the piece that put me on the map as some kind of neo-Puritan.
All this to say that questioning the premises of sex positivity, even if sex positivity doesn’t necessarily reflect people’s actions, is enough to seriously rattle cages. If a gentle 2,000-word blog post, an overglorified diary entry with wisdom not all that different from what you might hear from your boomer mother, was enough for me to lose friends and become resident neoprude ideologist, I can’t imagine what a more aggressively written book would do for Emba, a star of mainstream opinion journalism (and, that very rare thing, one worth reading).
And as it stands, the reception has painted her similarly to how I was painted that fateful year ago: a radical, a prude, a Puritan. How dare she? How dare she … what? Say that sex might have meaning? That free love is not really loving, and that “love” may never really come free, especially for women? That sex and love are related? That there might be a proper order of operations between the two? That’s the least someone could do when they suggest we “rethink” sex.
But still, I believe Emba’s book marks a significant shift in that media narrative layer — in the conversation. She won’t be the last to publish a book of this nature. Eventually, and I suspect soon, someone will kick that door wide open.
Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcast After the Orgy. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter @default_friend.
