The Sex Myth

by Rachel Hills

  But just because Skins employed a grittier brand of hedonism than other teenage dramas doesn’t mean that it revealed an unspoken truth of young adult life. To the contrary, shows like Skins tell us exactly what we want to hear: that young people today are more shameless, wanton, and darkly glamorous than any generation before them. They don’t challenge our preconceptions of sex so much as they affirm them, while wrapping up our voyeurism with a bow of rebellion. In other words, shows like Skins feed directly into the first layer of the Sex Myth: that our culture has never been more sexually debauched, and that this debauchery is alternately the source of our downfall and our freedom.

  Millennials Gone Wild

  Older people have wrung their hands over young people’s bad behavior since Plato complained about youth disrespecting their parents and rioting in the streets in the fourth century BC. And as signs of aging go, that first moment of horror at what the next generation might be doing with their genitals ranks up there with sprouting your first gray hair or hanging up your dancing shoes in favor of a night in with Netflix. But at some point in the mid-’00s, anxieties about teens, twentysomethings, and sex began to hit a fever pitch.

  Part of it was a product of popular culture. The first half of the ’00s saw the rise of Girls Gone Wild, which enticed young women to take off their tops and perform on camera in exchange for GGW-branded hats and T-shirts. It saw Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (and later Hilary Duff, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus) go from artificially chaste Disney stars to artificially sexy pop starlets in the blink of a music video. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian parlayed homemade sex tapes into international media empires encompassing jewelry, nightclubs, music, multiple reality TV shows, and more. Playboy went from a soft-core porn magazine to an aspirational pop culture brand, and Victoria’s Secret went from a staid underwear retailer to a family-friendly peep show starring some of the world’s most beautiful women.

  Where the 1980s had been dominated by antiporn crusaders such as radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the cultural pendulum had swung in a more libertarian direction. The “sex wars,” which had pitted feminists against one another on the integrity of everything from sex work to BDSM to having sex with men, had been won, and the winning position was that sexual imagery didn’t have to be degrading or objectifying. To the contrary: eroticism could be a source of power.

  And increasingly, for younger women especially, sexuality had become a key arena in which power was exercised, whether it was books such as The Ethical Slut or The Happy Hook-Up, which promoted the invigorating possibilities of casual sex, or dynamic, successful women such as singer Beyoncé, Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard, and would-be lawyers taking off their clothes for soft-core men’s magazines like Maxim and FHM.

  Enter Ariel Levy, whose 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, flipped the prevailing story about sex and popular culture on its head. Levy’s concern wasn’t about the proliferation of sex but its representation, and the way that sex and female empowerment had become entwined in a manner that was both ubiquitous and compulsory. “What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality,” she wrote. But the success of Female Chauvinist Pigs also provided a platform for a number of unarticulated anxieties that had been brewing just beneath the surface of public debate, and the news media and commentariat enthusiastically latched on to the idea that young people today—and young women in particular—were more sexually precocious than any generation that had come before them.

  On NPR, sex educator Deborah Roffman worried that casual sex was robbing twentysomethings of their capacity to form intimate relationships, while Christian sociologist Mark Regnerus argued in Slate that hooking up tipped the scales of sexual power too far in men’s favor, labeling it a matter of “sexual economics.” In Britain’s Daily Mail, filmmaker Olivia Lichtenstein reported breathlessly on the “deeply disturbing . . . generation SEX.” In my home country of Australia, the newspapers told stories of ten-year-olds smeared with too much lipstick and twentysomethings dropping their pants to shake their buttocks “like G-stringed baboons in oestrus.” As one article said, salivating, “They’re here, they’re mostly bare, and they don’t care who’s looking.”

  This wasn’t the first time there had been widespread alarm about the sexual habits of the young and single. In his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald told tales of Victorian mothers startled by “how casually their daughters were accustomed to being kissed.” When the oral contraceptive pill made its debut in the early 1960s, US News & World Report worried that it would “lead to sexual anarchy.” A 1964 cover story for Time despaired the dawn of “champagne parties for teenagers, padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds, and going ‘steady’ at ever younger ages.” The magazine recalled the Orgone Box, a closet-shaped device popularized by Austrian psychoanalyst and sex liberationist Wilhelm Reich in the 1940s, which claimed to unleash the sexual energy of the person inside it. “Now,” the anonymous editorial lamented, “it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box.”

  But although teenagers and twentysomethings were the subject of much of this moralizing, the real anxiety wasn’t about young people—not really. They were just a lightning rod for a broader set of concerns about a sexual culture that was changing then and is still doing so now, in ways both real and imagined.

  And a lot has changed. Over the past half century, the way we form our families has diversified from the cookie-cutter nuclear model that wallpapered popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s to encompass same-sex couples, single parents, blended families, and more. We are marrying later and in smaller numbers—in 2013, 28 percent of American adults had never married, up from just 15 percent in 1960. In the space of fifty years, sex has gone from being permitted only within marriage to being accepted within a monogamous relationship to being embraced—in some circles, at least—outside the framework of any ongoing relationship at all. And with the rise of new online and mobile dating technologies such as Tinder and OkCupid, if you’re looking for no-strings-attached sex, it is easier to find now than ever before.

  More than an anxiety about young people in particular, the hysteria over teen and twentysomething sex that emerged in the ’00s was rooted in a fear that, in an attempt to create a sexually liberated society, we had accidentally unleashed more freedom than we could handle. As Australian newspaper the Age warned in 2009: “[m]any teenagers and young adults have turned the free-sex mantra of the 1970s into a lifestyle, and older generations simply don’t have a clue.”

  When I first began to notice these articles in my early twenties, I was skeptical of how accurate they were. For my own twenty-second birthday party, I had asked my friends to dress up as hotel heiresses Paris and Nicky Hilton, famous for their fortune and their skimpy clothes, for a night at a downtown Sydney club. It seemed fun, theatrical, and mildly humorous, an act of performance and satire. We applied the same tongue-in-cheek humor a few months later when the Tina Fey–penned Mean Girls was released in cinemas, heading out to a college party in sky-high heels and thigh-skimming skirts. To a casual observer on the street, we probably looked like the very image of “raunch culture,” but in our minds, we were making fun of the stereotype.

  The hypersexualized Girls Gone Wild story that was dominating the media didn’t fit with anything I’d seen or experienced. I had spent most of the first half of my twenties convinced that everyone was getting laid more than I was, but not once had I imagined it manifesting as a row of naked buttocks convulsing like “baboons in oestrus.” It was less in-your-face than that. It was in the sigh one friend let out a few days after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend. “How do you do it?” she asked me, driving her fork into the college cafeteria table in an effort to diffuse her sexual frustration. It was in the grin on another friend’s face as he pointed to the car seat on which he’d had his first one-night stand. Most of what we knew about each oth
er’s sex lives was communicated through inference. You told people about the three weekends during which you did hook up, not the forty-nine during which you didn’t.

  Like most college students, most of my friends had had sex at some point, whether it was with a high school sweetheart, a one-night stand, or a first love they had met on campus. Some of them had had casual sex, or had hooked up in relationships that petered out before either party had a chance to define them. But the sex my friends were having didn’t look like the scandalous descriptions in the newspapers or the aspirational hedonism in the magazines we read.

  It wasn’t just our experiences that diverged from the media stereotypes. The Online College Social Life Survey found that 72 percent of college students engage in some kind of hookup at least once by their senior year, but it also found that most of them don’t do it all that often, with 40 percent of those surveyed hooking up with three or fewer people over the course of their college career. Nor did “hooking up” necessarily translate to the type of sexual activity that most people who write about its dangers might imagine. Only one-third of students had engaged in intercourse during their most recent hookup. Even more telling, one in five students hadn’t hooked up at all.

  These statistics were echoed in stories I heard from young people across the English-speaking world. “A lot of people say that college is so full of sex,” reported Shannon, a pretty freshman with long limbs and strawberry-blond hair. “And it is a pretty party-hard environment in terms of drinking. It can be full-on. But sex? Not so much.”

  A nineteen-year-old communications student at an East Coast liberal arts university, Shannon is smart, articulate, and sexually confident. She first had sex three years ago, with her high school boyfriend. “For me, sex was a really big deal,” she recalls as we sit cross-legged on the floor of her dorm room. “I was really adamant that we had to wait at least six months before we did it.” When Shannon and her boyfriend did have sex, she didn’t feel pressured at all. “We’d been fooling around for an hour or so already and I was so turned on, there was absolutely no pain at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.” After that, they had sex any chance they could, in ways that were generous and playful. “It set me up to expect men to take care of my needs,” she explains.

  Shannon and her boyfriend were very serious about each other—they dated for almost three years and had talked about getting married—but split up at the end of high school, when Shannon “just felt that [she] needed to be single.” In the nine months since their breakup, Shannon has slept with six men—one a vacation romance in South America, some guys she knows from school, and a couple more she met in bars and clubs. “I have definitely slept with more people now than I ever thought I would,” she says. Shannon’s positive experiences with her ex have proved helpful when it comes to negotiating casual hookups. “I am very much aware of what I should expect from guys, in terms of how I am treated,” she asserts. “I can tell if a guy has had a girlfriend before. If they’ve only really [had sex] casually, then they don’t have a clue what to do apart from the basics. So I can tell if they’ve had a girl give them some instruction.”

  She tells me about a friend she hooked up with a month or two ago, who asked her to go down on him but refused to kiss her after. “I told him he was never getting in my bed again,” she recalls with anger. “That was the only time I felt bad about a sexual choice I had made, and I hated that he had made me feel like that.” They’re still friends, and “he thinks it’s going to happen again, but it’s not,” she says. “Most of the guys I’ve been with have been really lovely, though,” she clarifies. “I’ve been lucky that way.”

  But Shannon is an exception among the people she knows. Most of her friends in high school were virgins, and a lot of the girls she knows at college are, too. “I am probably the most sexually active of all my friends,” she says.

  Shannon tells me about a drinking game she played with some of the girls in her dorm recently—“Never Have I Ever,” in which each person declares something they have “never” done, and anyone who has done the act in question has to take a drink. “One of the girls said she had never taken anyone home,” she recalls, “and I said I had.” Even though it had happened a few times, she told them she’d only done it once to soften the blow. “And they were still shocked!” she exclaims. “I thought to myself, if a reporter was here, in this big group of fifteen girls, and only one of us had in two months taken one person home, they wouldn’t believe it.”

  Footloose and Fancy Free: Sex without Limits

  Even the most flimsy media portrayals don’t grow out of thin air, and the myth of our hypersexual culture is no different. Ethan, a twenty-four-year-old aspiring screenwriter living in East LA, is caustic and contrarian. He reads Vanity Fair and the Economist, and likes to think of himself as a young Ernest Hemingway or Christopher Hitchens—provocative, hard drinking, and hard living. Tall and slender, with blue eyes and a smattering of dark brown stubble on his chin, Ethan is confident in his intellect but less so in his physical appearance. “I know that I am not what most people think of as handsome, chiseled, or toned,” he says self-deprecatingly, taking a sip of his cheap beer. “I scrub up okay in a suit, but I’m not someone who will walk into a room and make heads turn.”

  Ethan is equally critical of the images of female “sexiness” that pervade popular culture. “It’s completely different from what most women look like,” he says. On the question of casual sex, he is ambivalent. Until recently, he used to worry that he was inexperienced compared with other men his age. He didn’t have sex until college, and he spent most of those years in a long-term relationship. But since graduating and moving to LA, he has encountered the opposite problem; instead of feeling embarrassed by the sex he is not having, he has begun to feel an unexpected shame about all the sex he is having.

  When Ethan arrived in LA last year, he had been with two women. In the past fourteen months, he has slept with five more: an old acquaintance from high school, a close friend, his housemate, and a couple of girls he met around town. “For a long while, I thought I was doing something really self-destructive by having sex with people I didn’t have feelings for,” he says. He doesn’t think so anymore. “I think it was more just a slow admission to myself that I like to have sex. And I don’t need to be in a relationship to enjoy it, so long as both parties are aware that those are the terms.”

  Ethan may have come to terms with casual sex now, but he is still cynical about the role he believes popular culture plays in promoting an illusion of sexual excess. We might respond to Katy Perry’s whipped-cream bikinis and Robin Thicke’s music-video boasts of sexual prowess with amusement or derision, but in an attention economy, any form of recognition is a form of validation—intended or not. And it has an impact, says Ethan. “Even when it is presented in a condemning light, the fact that we broadcast it doesn’t validate it exactly, but it certainly says that it’s interesting. That it’s something you should want to know about.”

  In the fifty years since the sexual revolution, there have been concrete changes in what we know about sex and the scope of the behaviors we engage in. But the most significant transformations in the way that we engage with sexuality have taken place inside our heads. They are less about what we do than they are about the way we think about sex—about the types of behavior we celebrate and those we condemn. We have moved from a culture that demanded we keep sexuality hidden from view to one that demands we speak it out loud in the name of liberation.

  The sexual revolution of the 1960s wasn’t just a product of medical innovations such as penicillin and the Pill; it was a public rejection of the old rules that had governed sex and relationships. That sex should only happen within marriage. That its primary aim should be reproduction. That it was a necessary evil rather than a source of pleasure and joy. And if reining sex in was oppressive, it followed that reversing the rules would set sex free—and set the people free in the process.

  Sex wasn’t jus
t personal but political, and the ramifications of what you did with your body had the potential to transform society. As author Linda Grant recalls in her book Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution: “At the time, to fuck was in and of itself a form of liberation. It was hip to be promiscuous and square not to be, it was a defying of convention. . . . The implications went far beyond whether or not you were getting laid or if you were enjoying the sex you were having.”

  Grant’s words still ring true today. Sex may no longer be viewed as an explicit act of transgression—at least, not if you’re heterosexual—but for many of us, sexuality is still intimately entwined with questions of freedom and resistance.

  Partly, this is because the ways in which we are sexual are still limited by culture and politics—especially for those of us who are women, gay or lesbian, or transgender, or whose sexual expression falls outside the continuum of what is considered to be “normal” or desirable. But there is another reason we are able to hold two seemingly contradictory positions—the feeling of being unprecedentedly free and that of being unfairly oppressed—at the same time. And that’s because there is something kind of sexy about the idea that our sexuality is being repressed.

  If sexuality is being inhibited by some external force, then having sex—or even talking about it—feels like an act of defiance, which in turn makes sex more exciting and more pleasurable. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in his book The History of Sexuality, “What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss.”

  Tullia, twenty-six, is soft-spoken and philosophical; her sharply cut bob and elegant posture reflect her job in the fashion industry. She admires the unstudied sensuality of women such as actress Scarlett Johansson and Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr, and seeks to emulate their blend of confidence and femininity in her own life. For Tullia, sex is a profoundly intimate, almost meditative experience, during which the rest of the world falls away. It is also a source of excitement, a taste of rebellion and living on the edge. She tells me how, while in Catholic high school, she would sneak out of the house to go clubbing with friends, armed with black eyeliner and a fake ID in her purse. “I was very curious to experience life. I wanted to party. I wanted to meet guys,” she recalls. “Basically, I wanted to do everything that my parents and teachers thought I shouldn’t be doing.”