by Rachel Hills
Michael’s attitudes toward sexual norms are typical of people his age. “I don’t know what normal is,” Faith, a bohemian twenty-three-year-old American working as an English teacher in Spain, tells me over Skype. “In my experience, pretty much everything is normal,” says Max, a lanky frat boy from Ohio. “What I like about now is that everything is considered normal,” says Nicole, a Vancouver-based librarian with sci-fi-inspired gold eyeliner and a bright streak through her jet-black hair.
Remarks like these are not surprising. Of all the convictions that govern sexual conduct in the secular West, perhaps the most important is that there are no longer any rules. To suggest otherwise is to challenge the very fabric of how we perceive ourselves: as free, self-actualized individuals carving out our destinies from a sea of limitless options and living in an open, laissez-faire culture in which almost anything is “okay” so long as all people involved consent to it. In an era that prides itself on pluralism, the idea that some ways of being sexual might be more “okay” than others is borderline offensive, a throwback to a less enlightened past.
If normality seems passé, it is partly because the lines between deviant and desirable sex no longer fall as decisively as they once did. Some people and practices that were considered dangerous have been brought into the mainstream—think same-sex relationships, oral sex, or masturbation—while other behaviors that once flew under the radar have been recast as undesirable, like the long-term heterosexual couple who only have sex in the missionary position.
But the borders between “normal” and “abnormal” sex haven’t been erased completely. Another reason most people struggle to define what is normal is because normality is designed not to be noticed. The things that are most “normal” are often so seemingly ubiquitous that we don’t usually bother to talk about them.
Many of the people I spoke with in the course of researching this book had difficulty articulating what was normal in their city, within their generation, or even within their group of friends. But most of them had no trouble listing a swath of things that were considered abnormal—and these were often contradictory: Having a high sex drive. Having a low sex drive. Abstaining from sex until marriage. Losing your virginity before your fifteenth birthday. Losing your virginity after your eighteenth birthday. Being gay, bisexual, or transgender. Bestiality. BDSM. Pubic hair on women. Not being able to orgasm. Not caring whether or not you have an orgasm. Being in a sexual relationship with more than one person at a time. Not having sex with anyone at all. There may be more than one way to pass as normal now, but there are even more ways to fail to make the grade.
They were more detailed still when it came to the times in their lives where they felt less than normal themselves, and the consequences of breaching this divide. Nicole was fiercely independent and confident in her choice to refrain from dating until very recently. But as a twenty-five-year-old virgin gearing up for the fourth date of her life, she still felt like a late bloomer. “My friends think it’s hilarious because I’m usually the most self-assured of all of us, but here I’m wondering, What do I do if he tries to hold my hand?” Faith was a staunch political liberal, but admitted that questioning her sexual orientation over the past year had left her feeling “totally out at sea.” She explained, “Most people think that either you’re gay or you’re not, or else you’re bisexual and you’re half-and-half. It feels like there’s not really a place in between all those things, where you just don’t know yet.”
Whether we like it or not, norms still matter. In this chapter, we will look at how ideas of what is normal have changed over time and why being different scares us, and strip down the veneer of our laissez-faire culture to reveal the conventions and ideals that still lie beneath.
Normality Matters: What’s Normal and Why We Care
For a word that is so central to how we understand sex, what we consider to be normal is surprisingly amorphous. In its most literal sense, what’s “normal” is a matter of statistics: an objective measure of how frequently a given experience, attitude, or behavior occurs within a population. In a medical setting, normality is synonymous with health and abnormality with disease and dysfunction. Culturally speaking, what qualifies as normal and what doesn’t is a reflection of shared values and assumptions. People and practices that are held in high esteem are usually also labeled “normal,” whether their experiences are common or not, while those that are regarded with suspicion and contempt are labeled “abnormal.” Normality, in this social context, is a synonym for “okay,” while abnormality is equated with perversion or defect.
Sex sits at the juncture of these three approaches. It is practiced through the body, and therefore prone to the same medical analysis as any other health issue. Having a “normal” sex life is treated as a matter of physical and mental well-being. Sex is also deeply cultural, a subject of endless scrutiny in the media and in the everyday discussions that shape our perceptions of the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. And like most things that we collectively deem to be important, it is relentlessly measured, as experts scramble to inform us of what “really” goes on behind other people’s closed doors.
Our beliefs about what it means to be sexually “normal” draw upon each of these frameworks—medical, cultural, and statistical. That some men ejaculate more quickly than others, for example, is a biological fact. But the way that we respond to that fact is cultural, changing throughout history to reflect the ideals and standards of the day. What constitutes “too soon” has changed over time, too.
The earliest known tales of premature ejaculation date back to ancient Greek mythology. Erichthonius, a mythical early ruler of ancient Athens, was said to have been conceived when Hephaestus, the Olympian god of fire, dropped his seed on the earth while attempting to force himself on the goddess Athena. But it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that premature ejaculation began to be understood as a medical problem, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that the problem expanded to encompass not just men who ejaculated before intercourse began but also those who climaxed before their female partners did. Where the famous mid-twentieth-century sex researcher Alfred Kinsey “seemed to regard the quick ejaculator as a superior male,” equipped to efficiently spread his genes with minimum fuss, today the premature ejaculator is treated as a sexual failure.
These shifts reflect changes in our attitudes toward sex more generally. In a culture that is concerned with sexual pleasure, whether as a marital bonding agent or for its own sake, early ejaculation is a problem. It not only reduces the likelihood that women will orgasm during intercourse but also reduces the duration of men’s pleasure, too.
Despite this concern, there is still no clear consensus on what premature ejaculation actually is. Is it reaching orgasm more quickly than the average male? Ejaculating more quickly than 70 or 80 percent of men? Coming before your partner does? Kinsey’s 1948 studies found that 75 percent of American men orgasmed within two minutes of commencing intercourse. But more recent studies have reported a median time of between 5.4 and 7.5 minutes—suggesting that men may be adapting their sexual behavior to better fit the social ideal. It is no longer acceptable for the sex act to end before one party has even begun.
Our beliefs about what causes sexual problems have also changed. Nineteenth-century medical circles were deeply concerned by male impotence, but they viewed it as a moral issue rather than an anatomical one. Men who were unable to perform intercourse were viewed as weak, drained of their life force, and losing sperm in any noncoital context—be it intentional (masturbation) or otherwise (the dreaded “wet dream”)—put a man at risk of “total and sometimes permanent impotence.” But the problem was also considered easily resolved by a return to “normal,” upstanding sexual behavior. “Marriage alone is sufficient to bring about a cure,” one doctor, a medical professor at New York University, wrote in 1877. “There is nothing which will relieve the abnormal congestion of the genitals so much as moderate sexual intercourse
.”
Today, by comparison, our sexual norms and ideals are often cast as physiological issues: framed in terms of function and dysfunction. We blame impotence not on masturbation but on hormones or alcohol, and we treat it not with marriage but with a small blue pill. We approach premature ejaculation as a mechanical problem, enthusiastically investigating how long it takes the average man to orgasm following penetration in order to determine what time frame is acceptable.
What is “normal” is not a value judgment in and of itself. In any group of people, some beliefs, experiences, and physical traits will be more common than others—there will be an average height, for example, and an average number of friends and acquaintances. The issue arises from the moral and emotional weight that we attach to these numbers, when we start using them as a guide not just for what is, but for what we should be.
Rationally, most of us know that just because an experience is statistically common doesn’t mean it is something we should aspire to—and that just because something is statistically rare doesn’t mean it is inferior. But emotionally, it can be difficult to shake the feeling that what is typical is also better. “I always have this paranoid suspicion that everyone else is in consensus about appropriate sexual practices, and I am an awkward, immature, insecure anomaly,” admits Cara, an apple-cheeked twenty-three-year-old office administrator with shiny, dark hair and a chirpy, slightly nervous energy.
Cara lives in downtown Seattle, one of the most socially liberal communities in the United States, where “you can proudly buy your BDSM accessories in the sex shop across the street, see drag shows in abundance, and stuff cash into the thongs of pole dancers at nightclubs,” as she puts it. “It’s a really positive expression of sexuality, which is a great thing, but it also makes me feel like a prude.” Cara’s best friend owns eight vibrators, has had “countless threesomes,” and wants to be a sex therapist someday. As for Cara? Her dating life is “virtually nonexistent.” Cara has never had a long-term boyfriend, and she has only had sex twice in her life, with three people: a one-night stand and a threesome.
Cara first reached out to me via e-mail, explaining that she had been feeling confused about her sexuality: questioning not whether she is attracted to men or women, but whether she is attracted to anyone at all. She is drawn to men on a chemical level, she says—when she sits close to one, she feels a physical buzz—but that doesn’t often translate to wanting to have sex with them. Women don’t appeal to her in the same way, but she sometimes makes out with them anyway. “It’s almost like this mothering instinct,” she explains brightly when we meet at a grungy inner-city diner two months later. “As a woman, I know what it’s like to feel unworthy, so I feel bad turning [other women] down. I just want to show them that they’re loved and I accept them in all their sweaty bodily fluids. And just be like, you’re human and this is great.”
Much of the time, though, even the thought of sex makes Cara uncomfortable. It’s too messy. Too physical. Too vulnerable. “The possibility of someone seeing me naked is cringe-inducing,” she says. Cara is a casual dresser; when we meet, she is wearing slim-cut jeans and a red flannelette shirt. Her makeup is minimal, as is her grooming; she doesn’t color her hair or paint her nails. But Cara does carefully monitor her appearance in other ways—like contorting her body into the most flattering pose, for example, or cutting down how much she eats for a week or so if she knows she will be spending a lot of time around men. “I’m hyperaware of how other people see me,” she says. “So I know how to create an image that is desirable to men. But that doesn’t equate to a desire to have sex. Being sexy involves taking down this act that I’ve spent a lot of time creating.”
Cara’s nerves aren’t helped by her belief that she is less sexually available than most men her age expect or desire from a relationship. “It really baffles people that I’m not more sexually active,” she says. At one point, her friends were convinced that she was a lesbian and tried to help her come out. More recently, Cara’s closest girlfriend—the same one who wants to be a sex therapist someday—suggested that she might be asexual, a burgeoning sexual identity used to describe people who do not experience sexual attraction to other people.
When Cara first heard the term, she didn’t know what it meant, assuming her friend was calling her a prude. But then she got curious and looked it up online. She could relate to a lot of what she read and found it “pretty empowering,” she recalls. “Putting a name on it and seeing that there are other people out there who don’t want to have sex all the time made me realize that, okay, I’m not totally weird.” It also made her feel more comfortable saying no to the sex that she didn’t want. “It gave me a reason,” she says. “I’m asexual. This is my special classification, and it seemed like that’s something that would be more respected than just saying, ‘I don’t want to have sex with you.’ ”
Buoyed by what she had read, Cara told a guy she had been dating—a self-described feminist she had first met on OkCupid—that she had started to think she might be asexual. They had only met in person a few times, but they’d had some great conversations—about sexuality, their families, and their insecurities about the way they looked—and she trusted him. It would turn out to be their final date.
“It wasn’t like some big confession or anything,” she recalls. “But it was something I’d been thinking and fretting about, and I wanted to share it with him.” She was hurt when she didn’t hear from him again. “I’d told him quite a lot about myself, so it really felt like someone was dissolving a friendship with me. Like, I had no value to him whatsoever because I might not have sex with him anytime soon.” That same night, he gave her a link to his blog. She looked it up the next day, and the most recent post—written only a day or two before their conversation—was about how he could “never date an asexual.”
A week or two later, Cara stumbled upon a blog post by Seattle sex columnist Dan Savage, who was introducing the concept of asexuality to his readers. Savage argued that while asexual people “may have the same emotional needs as anyone else,” most “sexuals”—that is to say, most non-asexual people, or most people who experience sexual desire—expected their romantic relationships to meet their sexual needs. “Someone who is incapable of meeting a sexual’s needs has no business dating a sexual in the first place, if you ask me,” he wrote. Savage’s words hit Cara like a slap in the face. “It made me feel like there was something wrong with me,” she recalls.
The comments on the post were even more disheartening. “At least for me, if I’m not fucking you, I’m not dating you,” one read. “This is the 21st Century . . . if they’re not unzipped and ready to rumble by the time I’ve buzzed them in, the date is OVER . . .” read another. A third comment was more damning still: “I can deal with same-sex lust, diaper fetishes, BDSM, even the whole dress-up-as-a-furry-mammal thing, but the idea of there being NOTHING inside, no juice, no drives at all . . . well, to my mind that is the ULTIMATE FREAKINESS, the one eternally unfathomable kink.”
By the time we meet in person, Cara has decided that the asexual label probably doesn’t fit her. But the comments on Savage’s blog post still haunt her, in part because they echo the attitude she observes among her friends and neighbors: that true sexual freedom means being up for any activity, and that anything less is suspect. “It makes me feel isolated, unwanted, and dysfunctional,” she says.
Norms aren’t only enforced by making the people who don’t live up to them feel inadequate. They’re also upheld by making the people who do live up to them feel good about themselves. If being abnormal makes us feel isolated and unwanted, being “normal” helps us to feel accepted as part of a community. And the acts and revelations that make us feel accepted aren’t always the ones you’d expect.
Ben, a cerebral, politically aware twenty-year-old American, was one of the first people who reached out to me when I started researching the Sex Myth. Perhaps due to his work as a youth advocate, Ben is particularly concerned about t
he quality of sex education in schools. “I had quite a religious teacher in ninth and tenth grade who skewed us away from talking about contraception and toward talking about abstinence and the importance of marriage,” he explains. “You can cover those things, but they should only be one component [of sex education], not the major focus.”
When we meet, Ben has been dating his high school sweetheart for two and a half years. For a long time, the stability of their relationship had earned them a reputation for being prudes. “Because we didn’t talk about it, people just assumed that we weren’t having sex at all,” he explains. But that changed after a drunken party game in his first year of college, in which he and his girlfriend revealed they had experimented with BDSM. “[After that], we were kind of judged on the fact that we’d had a lot of sex, and we were kind of adventurous in terms of that,” Ben admits.
But for Ben, that “judgment” wasn’t a bad thing. “If anything, it meant my friends treated us more normally. Until that point, we were seen as horrendously innocent. But after that night, they saw our relationship as a normal, working relationship.” His serious face breaks into a smile. “It actually felt really good,” he reflects. “I liked that they saw me as a normal person, just like anyone else.”
From Kinky to Kosher: What’s Normal Now?
Handcuffs and silk scarves won’t earn you back slaps and congratulatory guffaws from everyone, but they are no longer as contentious as they used to be. Nor is it only young progressives who have embraced sexual liberalism. In 2012, the New York Times reported that young Republicans were distancing themselves from the conservative social policies of their party, embracing hot-button issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. “The students I know who are conservative are far less so on social issues than our parents,” Zoey Kotzambasis, the vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Arizona, told the paper. “People are more accepting of different lifestyles. . . . Honestly, there’s about zero judgment of [gay people] from the people in our club, and I think that reflects the direction my generation wants to take the party in.”