by Rachel Hills
Nor is power purely oppressive, designed only to censor and to silence. It is also a generative force that carves out new rules and possibilities at the same time as it demolishes old ones. At their most effective, the forces that shape our behavior draw us in so that we don’t just passively accept the parameters they set out for us, but so that we participate in their creation.
All this is to say that sex doesn’t need to be actively suppressed in order to be controlled. Just because the current sexual ideal promotes fun, freedom, and pleasure doesn’t mean that it isn’t still an ideal upon which we are expected to model our behavior. And it does not mean that our sexuality isn’t still being influenced by social and cultural forces.
If we are to be truly sexually free, we need to do more than just celebrate sex. We must understand why sex has been sold to us as the key not only to our freedom but to who we are and how we engage with the world. We need to look more deeply into how sex is regulated today, starting with the source of that regulation itself: the Sex Myth.
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Sex: An Act Unlike Any Other
At the heart of the Sex Myth lies the idea that sex is unlike any other facet of human life: that it is more powerful, more transcendent, and an expression of a more authentic truth than any other activity we engage in. In contemporary Western culture, sex is more than a matter of reproduction, or even recreation. It is the arena in which the self is formed and the ground on which we are presumed to build our most profound intimacies. You might have strong relationships with your family, your friends, or the people you work with, but it is the person with whom you have sex who is considered to be your “significant other.”
We are taught that sex is the ultimate source of pleasure—that it is, as Woody Allen once put it, “the most fun you can have without laughing.” But we are also taught to fear sex as a source of corruption and moral decay—especially if you have the wrong kind of sex or do it with too many people.
What ties all these beliefs together is the idea that in sex we will find our truth: not just of who we are as individuals, but of how we are faring as a society. British sociologist Ken Plummer argues that sex “has become the Big Story,” the part of our existence that we are compelled to confess and dissect more than any other. And it is this link between sex and self that sits at the root of how sex is regulated in our culture, more than any individual rule or whim of cultural fashion.
I meet Sofia, a glamorous young executive, at a bar in Beverly Hills. A vivacious twenty-six-year-old with a curvy figure and a great job, Sofia looks like the image of the modern, liberated woman. Her black leather skirt is cut to midthigh, and her makeup is immaculately applied. She is groomed to draw stares, and she succeeds. But there is an undercurrent of insecurity beneath her polished self-assurance.
Sofia is someone who puts a lot of stock in her sexuality. It is important to her that men find her attractive, and she has strong ideas about what a good relationship should look like. “You need to have passion, otherwise the relationship will die and you will drift apart,” she tells me. For Sofia, sex is a reflection of how the rest of the world perceives her, an unbiased barometer of her attractiveness and her social desirability. But for all of her ideals about what a successful relationship should look like, those standards are not reflected in her own romantic life.
Sofia has been dating the same man for six years, the first two of which they didn’t have sex at all—and not for a lack of trying on Sofia’s part. Their make-out sessions rarely got past second base, limited to quick, platonic pecks on the mouth. “I felt like I wasn’t attractive,” she recalls. “[Not having sex] made me feel like I was worthless.” These days, Sofia and her boyfriend do have sex, but it happens less frequently than she would like, and it lacks the rip-your-clothes-off passion she believes it ought to have. “You go to clubs and see people grinding on the dance floor, and hooking up in bathrooms at parties,” she says. “Sometimes I wish I had that, too.”
Sofia doesn’t usually talk about her sex life this directly, and it shows. She speaks softly, glancing around furtively to check that no one is listening. She apologizes for herself often—when she swears, when she spills some of her soft drink on our table, and when she occasionally trips over her words. When she tries to describe how she feels about her relationship, she vacillates, contradicting herself within a single sentence: “It could be better, but I’m happy with it,” or, “It’s mediocre, but it’s better than it used to be.”
Sofia fears that if people knew she had to beg for two years to persuade her boyfriend to have sex with her—or that he needed “persuading” at all—they wouldn’t think she was so desirable anymore. She worries that if they knew her sex life wasn’t up to scratch, they would think that meant there was something wrong with her as well. Or worse still, that they might think there was something wrong with her boyfriend.
Part of Sofia’s dissatisfaction is situational, a product of a relationship that isn’t meeting her physical or emotional needs. She feels torn between her longing for what she perceives as a “normal” relationship—that is to say, one that includes lots of intense, exciting sex—and her desire for safety and stability. “Sometimes I wish that I could be single and just go out and party and take guys home and fuck them and then dump them,” she says. “But if I did that, I wouldn’t have my boyfriend anymore.” But Sofia’s anxiety is also a reflection of her belief that her value lies in her sexual desirability. “Every so often I wonder, Why am I not having more sex?” she tells me. “It comes from a feeling that if I’m not doing certain things, then I’m not normal.”
It is fashionable these days to argue that we treat sex more lightly than we once did. That in laying sexuality bare and stripping it of mystery, we have drained it of its significance, and accordingly of its magic. But even the most casual sexual encounters still come with emotional strings attached, if not within the relationships in which they take place, then in their implications for how we perceive ourselves.
Sofia may aspire to an active, liberated sex life, but her approach to sex is far from carefree. To the contrary, sex is a matter of serious emotional significance for her, which goes far beyond her individual inability to live up to social expectations. It is a reaction to a culture that has taught her—and all of us—that sex is a matter of grave importance, which is central to her value as a woman and as a human being. It is a response, in other words, to the Sex Myth.
The Best (and Worst) Damn Thing
The belief that sex is uniquely powerful and important has deep roots in Western culture. The Christian priests of medieval Europe recorded all manner of sins, but they paid special attention to how and with whom their congregations had sex. Those who found pleasure in the “wrong” ways were forced to publicly atone for their bad behavior: dressed in sacks, starved of food, and excluded from the church until they had served their penance. The Victorians of the 1800s fretted about the dangers of unrestrained reproduction among the poor and the risks of not procreating enough among the middle and upper classes. They viewed sex as a degenerate, animal force, one that was necessary for the continuation of the species but also needed “to be brought under conscious control.”
Fears about the dangers of unrestrained sexuality persist today. They’re visible in concerns about the corrupting influence of pornography as an architect of sexual taste, or that same-sex marriage will lead to an increase in “gender and sexuality disorders” among children. In a 2011 essay for the Atlantic, journalist Natasha Vargas-Cooper claimed that Internet porn had “allowed many people to flirt openly with practices that may have always been desired, but had been deeply buried under social restraint”—among them anal sex, “first date doggy-style encounters,” and simulated incest. Pornography, she argued, offered “an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression,” revealing the “uncomfortable truth” that sex was neither neutral nor equal—that in fact it could be “a bitter, crushing ex
perience, no matter how much power you think you have.”
But our belief in the extraordinary powers of sexuality is not just apparent in our fears of how it might destroy us. It is also present in the ways we revel in its magic. We can see the Sex Myth in the emotive, larger-than-life language of glossy magazine covers—explosive, amazing, crave, #BestNightEver—and in the use of sex in advertising to render everything from burgers to toilet paper more exciting. The Sex Myth is visible in the worshipping of sex as an act of freedom and defiance, and in the belief that having sex is the act that transforms us from adolescents into adults.
Evan, a slight seventeen-year-old from Florida, describes what he perceives as the dividing line between those who have had sex and those who haven’t. “I can’t really put my finger on it, because I’ve never had sex,” he says. “But the way people make it sound, once you cross that line the entire world is opened up, as far as getting close to people and relationships go.” Greta, a twenty-five-year-old fashion blogger from Sydney, agrees. “I was eighteen when I lost my virginity, and I had built it up as this very big thing in my head,” she recalls. “You’re supposed to glow, or feel like a ‘woman.’ Then, when it happened, I was just like, ‘Oh, it just feels like there’s something in my vagina.’ I’d had fingers and toys up there already, but I still thought that a penis was going to feel different, just because it’s ‘sex.’ ”
Whether it is feared or venerated, sex is always special, and the ways that we engage with it are always steeped in culture and symbolism. Sex is seen as the key to our vitality: the strongest of all human desires and the most profound act of intimacy we can achieve with another person. Representations of sex in media and popular culture tend to use what linguists David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow call “low modality” images: those whose larger-than-life colors, stylized locations, and exaggerated lighting place sex in a fantasy space where everything is bigger, bolder, and more emotionally evocative. In contrast, images of people who are not sexually active—whether they are virgins, asexual, or in a sexless relationship—are drained of color and emotion, which, according to Canadian researcher Ela Przybylo, suggests “not only melancholy but also a boring life, caused by an ‘absence’ of something, an absence of ‘the thing.’ ”
Some believe that sex is so important, in fact, that it is the reason for almost everything we do—that we diet, buy makeup, fight, compete, create, and earn money all in the pursuit of getting laid and passing on our DNA. But American sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon argue that for most people, the desire for sex is weaker—or at least more variable—than its omnipresence in our culture might have you think. In their influential 1973 book Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality, they argue that the human desire for sex is strongest at particular points in the life cycle: adolescence and early adulthood, the early years of marriage, and during extramarital affairs.
The rest of the time, they write, “sex is a relatively docile beast” that occupies “very little of most people’s time and energy.” Rather than repressing sexuality, they contend, we have exaggerated its importance. Michel Foucault makes a similar claim in The History of Sexuality, arguing that far from being buried, sex is spoken about constantly. “It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else,” he writes. This belief in the “special” powers of sexuality means that everything we do when it comes to sex is infused with significance, with a profound impact on our understanding of who we are and how we measure up. With so much riding on how we conduct our sex lives, sex doesn’t need to be regulated externally: rather, we internalize the standards and implement them ourselves.
It’s Only Natural: The Science of the Sex Myth
If we believe that sex is more significant than other things, that is partly a reflection of the physical pleasures and ramifications of the act. Sex between a man and a woman, at least, has the potential to produce children, a consequence that has inspired awe, joy, and terror throughout human history. Sex can also be a source of sublime pleasure, releasing a cocktail of happy hormones such as dopamine, oxytocin, and testosterone, which simultaneously satiate us and make us thirst for another hit.
These qualities mean that sex is often viewed as an activity that is driven purely by biology, untouched by social or cultural forces. We can civilize every other aspect of human life—how we dress, what we eat, how we engage with one another in social settings—but in matters of sex, our true animal nature cannot help but make itself known. Sex is believed to be uniquely untouched by external influences—a characteristic thought to make it both more dangerous and a more authentic expression of the human condition.
This belief that the biological aspects of sex reveal hidden truths about human nature is present in many popular accounts of sexuality: from the view that women are attracted to men who are in relationships because their “cavegirl brains” identify them as good providers to the notion that men are attracted to younger women because they are more fertile. These explanations resonate because they offer “a ‘scientific’ account” of our behavior, “both at the species and the individual level,” contend York University academics Stevi Jackson and Amanda Rees. They argue that “in a world where many still take ‘scientific’ to be synonymous with ‘true’ . . . [these stories have] undoubted appeal.”
But to speak about sex solely in terms of biology implies that what we currently believe to be true, desirable, or deviant has always been as such and always will be, with little room for debate. It is no coincidence that the behaviors and traits we most frequently draw upon biology to explain are those that we are most invested in believing to be true. So-called scientific accounts of sexuality rarely challenge our expectations of how sex works or how men and women behave. To the contrary: they almost always confirm them.
Biological accounts of sexuality are also used to make sense of individuals, positioning sex not as something that a person does, but as an act inherent and fundamental to who or what they are. For gay and lesbian people, for example, the idea that sexual orientation is biologically fixed has been central to achieving mainstream legitimacy. If sexuality is a choice, it is one that can be undone. If a person is “born this way,” on the other hand, it is unchangeable and must be accepted.
But while sexual orientation might not be something we choose, it isn’t solely biologically determined, either. Like other aspects of human physiology, our sexual preferences are a product of a combination of biology, environment, and social conditioning. Height, for example, is genetic, but good nutrition makes us taller. Similarly, evidence suggests that humans have a biological inclination to be attracted to one gender or both, which is influenced by a mix of prenatal hormonal and genetic factors. But the degree to which we express those preferences will depend on the environment we find ourselves in.
In the most extreme cases, this might manifest itself in people who are deeply attracted to people of their own gender but who are forced to bury those desires for fear of violence or social stigma, like the stoic cowboys in Brokeback Mountain. But social factors can influence the way we experience sexual orientation in more subtle ways, too. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that 45.2 percent of men and 36.9 percent of women have fantasized about being with someone of the same sex. But only 2.3 percent of Americans identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This is not to say that most straight people are secretly “bi,” or that gay and lesbian people could be straight if only they chose to be. But it does suggest that our sexual desires are more complex than the labels we use to describe them.
Even the most physical aspects of sex are shaped by culture, right down to the question of what qualifies as “sex” in the first place. Not even the kiss, the cornerstone of Western romance, is universally erotic. In her book Sex Is Not a Natural Act, Leonore Tiefer shares the story of a couple she worked with as a sex therapist, both middle-class and in their midthirties. The man was Italian-American, and had come of age in a culture that co
nsidered deep kissing to be “highly intimate and erotic,” an expected part of any loving relationship. The woman, who had grown up in Myanmar in Southeast Asia, thought kissing was “dirty, dangerous, and disgusting . . . akin to sticking one’s tongue in another’s nose and wiggling it around.”
The man feared that his wife didn’t love him because she wasn’t more “passionate” in foreplay, and she worried he didn’t love her because he couldn’t accept that she didn’t want to kiss him in the manner he desired. But the problem wasn’t that they didn’t love each other. It was that they had different expectations of what a loving sexual relationship looked like. And if even something as fundamental as how we want to touch and be touched by our partners is influenced by our environment, it stands to reason that sex isn’t so immune to social influence after all.
Up Close and Very, Very Personal: How What You “Do” Became Who You Are
Under the Sex Myth, sex isn’t just a window into the truth of who we are as a species. It is a window into the truth of who we are as individuals. “When you get with someone, you’re making a statement about yourself,” says Yusuf, a smart, analytical twenty-four-year-old gay man with dark hair and eyes. “You’re good enough for me, or I’m good enough for you.” When Yusuf hooks up with a guy he finds attractive, it is an affirmation of his own attractiveness. When he is rejected, he falls into a tailspin of insecurity. “I’ll think of another guy, one who is really good-looking, and think to myself, ‘That guy would never be rejected.’ ” Sometimes, Yusuf will even have sex with someone he’s not attracted to, just to prove that he can. It’s gross, he admits with a smile, but says, “I enjoy the sex anyway, even if I’m not really into them.”