by Rachel Hills
Nyn’s version of “kink” doesn’t look like anything you’d find in the pages of a women’s magazine. As a trans man whose gender identity is not reflected in his physical body, there are parts of Nyn’s body that “don’t exist for all intents and purposes” when it comes to sex—his chest, for example, and his genitals. Intercourse is off the table, and much of the sex he does have is fully clothed, concerned more with the thrill of a power differential than with penetration. It is as valid a form of sexual expression as any other, but it is one that never even crosses many people’s minds. When kink is talked about in the mainstream, it is treated as a prelude, a form of foreplay used to get everyone excited before a penis enters a mouth, an anus, or a vagina. Without that reliable conclusion to the carnal narrative, many people find it difficult to imagine “sex” as they know it at all.
As much as the borders between “normal” and “deviant” have been redrawn, there are still people who are excluded from them. In order for something to be normal, there must be a counterpoint that is abnormal. And in order for new groups to be folded into the mainstream, there must be others that are defined as unacceptable or dangerous.
For those who are most in the outer group, the risk of being classed as “abnormal” goes far beyond an abstract sense of isolation and inadequacy. It still can—and often does—result in concrete discrimination. A 2011 report cofunded by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that transgender and other gender-nonconforming people were four times more likely than the general population to have a household income of less than $10,000 per year. Forty-one percent had attempted suicide, compared to 1.6 percent of the general population. Ninety percent had been harassed or mistreated at work, and 61 percent had been victims of physical assault. And although forty-seven US states have anti-hate-crime laws, only twenty-four of those include sexual orientation in their legislation. The lines between “good” and “bad” sex and gender identities may be more flexible than they used to be, but they are not as open as we would like to think.
Vanilla Disguise: The New Deviance
The behaviors that are embraced as normal and those that are rejected as deviant are not always imposed in obvious ways—through a law upheld in court or a pronouncement from a religious leader, for example. Just as often, they are something we learn through subtle repetition: a result of similar stories played out on television shows, in online comments, and in conversations between friends and acquaintances until they are internalized as truth. And we are not just passive consumers of these stories. We participate in their creation, consciously or otherwise, in everything we do or say when it comes to sex.
It is through repetition of ideas and assumptions that we come to believe that only social outcasts don’t date in high school, that college students will sleep with anything they can get, and that sex all but dries up once you sign a marriage license. It is through the duplication of the same stories, over and over, that we come to absorb the message that men will do anything for sex or that women only have sex out of a sense of duty and obligation (but that “cool girls”—or “sluts,” depending on the circles you move in—want it all the time).
Repeated often enough, these stories add up to what sociologists call “heteronormativity”: the systematic elevation of heterosexuality over all other forms of sexual activity and expression. But heteronormativity isn’t just an implicit pressure to be straight. It is a pressure to be a certain type of straight person. It is no longer only the traditional deviants of the queer, the transgendered, and the kinky who attract public censure and self-flagellation. As Gayle Rubin put it in her “Thinking Sex” essay, now even the “small[est] differences in value or behavior are often experienced as cosmic threats” to the self and the status quo.
Norms are always in the background, shaping our attitudes and expectations. But it is often only when we step out of line with them that we feel their full weight. Fortysomething Baltimore writer Pamela Haag spent little time thinking about her sex life until she stopped having sex with her husband after she gave birth to her first child at the age of thirty-five—and found her relationship suddenly at odds with perceptions of what constituted a good marriage. “Only when I fell out of step with marriage norms—when I stopped having sex—did I realize how much I’d been calibrating my marriage to other people’s standards,” Haag wrote in a 2011 feature for the UK’s Times Magazine. “Before, I hadn’t noticed, because I wasn’t a marital misfit.”
Where other people stop having sex “because they care too little about their erotic life,” Haag says she stopped because she cared “too much about it—too much to fill up on ‘junk food’ sex.” Physically and emotionally, Haag was comfortable with her temporary celibacy, but socially, she didn’t feel like she had the right to be. “ ‘Preferring not to’ [have sex] didn’t feel like a legitimate, non-pathological choice,” she wrote in the Times. “I was left thinking that we’re not permitted to not want sex, or, more accurately, to be happily autoerotic.”
Haag’s story reminds us that norms aren’t just oppressive instructions of what not to do. They also serve to tell us what we should be doing, urging us to modify ourselves to better reflect their scripts and standards, whether that means changing our stories or literally changing our behavior.
Courtney, twenty-two, is smart and outspoken, a bisexual, sex-positive feminist with short blond hair, a nose ring, and a maroon T-shirt with the words “Love Your Body” emblazoned across the chest. But she deeply regrets the first time she had sex. Not because, as stereotype would have it, she feels like she lost a treasured part of herself, or because she was exploited for someone else’s short-term pleasure, but because she feels like she “used” the guy she lost her virginity to—all in the service of feeling normal.
It happened two years ago, when she was still at college, with an acquaintance who had “a reputation for being a giant man-slut.” Courtney didn’t realize he was interested in her at first. “I’m just not used to thinking of myself as attractive,” she explains. “I’m getting better at it, but it seems so inconceivable to me that anybody would be interested in me that it tends to take me a really long time to pick up on signals. Like, This person wants me to come home with them and have sex?”
When Courtney finally realized her friend was into her, she responded by pursuing him relentlessly, showing up in places she knew he would be and making sure he knew she was interested in return. It culminated in a drunken night of brief, unenthusiastic sex. “It was not good,” she recalls. “Partly because I had to be drunk in order to make the moves in order to get into the place where we were actually having physical sex. Because I was a little tipsy my brain wasn’t working fast enough to realize, hey, we could change positions. And then it might have sucked less. I don’t think either of our hearts were really in it.”
She cried when it was over, regretting the way she had treated him and the fact that she had compromised her own desires just so that she could say she’d had sex. She had thought the experience would be fun, but instead she just felt empty. “I wanted to have sex so badly that I ended up doing it just to prove that I could do it,” she reflects. “Just to prove that I was attractive enough and that I was brave enough to have sex.”
Courtney would still like to be more sexually active than she is, but she wants to do it on her own terms. “It’s not trendy to only want to have sex in a relationship that you’re comfortable with,” she observes. “The news anchors expect that, as a young woman living in a city, I’m having a lot of sex and it’s terrible. Other twentysomethings expect that I’m having a lot of sex and it’s awesome. Or [they think that] if I’m not having sex it’s because I have negative views about sex and that’s bad. But in actuality, I’m really not having any sex that’s not with myself right now, and that’s okay. You can be comfortable with your sexuality and still have valid reasons for not being sexually active.”
While Courtney dealt wit
h her feelings of difference and defect by changing her behavior, I dealt with my own by carefully moderating the way I spoke about my experiences to other people. I never outright lied about my sexual history. I just kept quiet when the conversation turned from banter to specifics. I didn’t contradict the assumptions other people made about me and brushed away questions when they were asked directly. “Oh, I don’t talk about that stuff,” I declared blithely when a friend I was driving to the train station one night asked me how I lost my virginity. When acquaintances traded sex stories, I would laugh and joke along with everyone else. As a consequence, I passed: not as heterosexual, the way that other “deviants” before me might have, but as fun. Modern. “Normal.”
But whether or not we see ourselves as normal has less to do with how typical our desires and experiences are than with how closely they align with what we believe they should be. In the next few chapters, we will take a deeper look at some of the attributes that comprise today’s sexual ideal, starting with desire and desirability.
4
Hot, Horny, and In Control: The Importance of Desire
Growing up in small-town Wisconsin, Alice spent much of her time feeling like a nerd. She was into art and theater rather than football and cheerleading. She made her own clothes and was a member of the math club. But there was one thing that Alice felt set her apart from her fellow geeks: she’d had sex, losing her virginity at the age of seventeen to her long-term boyfriend.
“I felt like such a vixen,” Alice, now twenty, recalls. “Looking around the math club and knowing that I was probably the only person in the room who’d had sex.” Even now, she feels a rush of that same “vixen vibe” when she thinks about having sex with her current boyfriend. Her back straightens. She stands a little taller. Her lips curl into a smile, like someone in possession of a delicious secret. “I’ll be honest—I feel better about myself when I’m sexually active,” she admits. “It’s such an ego boost in a really specific way. If someone is willing to have sex with you, it means such a specific thing.”
And what, specifically, does sex mean to Alice? “Just that you’re generally attractive,” she says. She also thinks that being sexually active makes you a little bit cooler. “People who hook up often are cool because they don’t have any attachments to the experience,” she reflects. “They’re able to just let sex be fun.” Alice has never had casual sex herself, which she thinks is “a bit weird” for someone in their second year of college. But it’s something she’d like to try one day. “I feel like [a one-night stand] is a unique experience,” she says. “I’d like to have one at some point.”
Alice’s open and optimistic take on casual sex is typical of a generation for whom an active sex life is no longer a point of fear or shame, to be swept under the carpet, but a matter of personal pride. But her comments are also emblematic of the particular modes of sexual interaction that our era celebrates. In a culture that elevates sex as the heart of human vitality, being sexually successful means two things: desiring sex, and being desirable enough to be able to get it from the people you want to have it with.
Desire is entwined with promises of pleasure, adventure, and personal fulfillment. When we are in the thick of desire for another person, the world seems richer and more vibrant. When we are desired in return, the thrill is heightened further still—not only from the gratification of having our needs fulfilled but also from the affirmation that we have been deemed worthy by another person. Who and what we desire is the foundation upon which our sexual orientations are publicly cataloged and defined: are we gay, straight, asexual, kinky, or something else entirely?
Sex has long been a vessel through which we have attempted to realize our hunger to be seen by others. But that yearning for recognition is directed at more than just our partners. We seek out sexual contact not only for its own pleasure and intimacy, but also for what it projects about our social standing more generally.
Desire has historically been considered a force that strips us of our control, as we relinquish reason in the pursuit of animalistic pleasure. But it has also become a means by which we jostle for power, not only within individual sexual relationships, but within our broader social and peer networks. Under the Sex Myth, sex is not just a raw biological urge. It is also a status symbol, with success within the bars and bedrooms of the sexual playing field serving as an affirmation of our success outside of them.
The winners on today’s sexual playing field? Those who are hot, horny, and firmly in control.
Hot: If You’re Sexy and You Know It . . .
The evidence that our culture prizes physical beauty is inescapable—from Victoria’s Secret billboards to the toned, partially clothed bodies that populate Hollywood sex scenes and San Fernando Valley pornography; from the magazines that make a sport out of ranking the world’s “sexiest” men and “hottest” women to the portrayal on television and in the movies of anyone who is not sexually active as awkward and unattractive.
The intended equation is clear: having sex makes you hot, and hot people have more sex. “In the movies, you always have the really attractive male lead and the really attractive female lead, and they always seem to get together,” observes Nicholas, a clean-cut psych and finance major at a small Midwestern liberal arts school. “That’s the message I’m seeing. That if you’re hot, you can have sex all the time.” Chinara, an eighteen-year-old college freshman who intends to abstain from sex until she marries, agrees: “When I was younger, I always thought that the only reason people had sex was because the other person was really, really pretty.”
The symbolic link between beauty, sex, and social desirability is reinforced in real life, especially during adolescence, when our bodies begin to shape the way that we are received by the world. Meet the requirements for middle-school-approved attractiveness and find yourself catapulted to preteen popularity. Hit puberty before your peers and become the target of adult attention you’re not yet equipped to understand. Get a boyfriend—or a girlfriend—before the other kids in your grade, and become an object of admiring whispers and potentially poisonous gossip.
Sam, a twenty-eight-year-old computer engineer with dark hair and piercing blue eyes, cuts the figure of a classic alpha male. He is confident and charismatic, with a demeanor that alternates between East Coast enthusiasm and West Coast laid-back cool. Sam is good-looking, and he knows it. This first became clear to him when he was in the seventh grade and transferred from his small Jewish private school to a larger public school with four hundred kids enrolled in each grade. Sam had nine girlfriends that year, which was “possibly the best dating year of [his] life,” he jokes.
When he got to high school, Sam’s dating life slowed down. “I wasn’t a jock, and I wasn’t the cool new kid anymore,” Sam recalls. “I was about twenty pounds overweight, didn’t have great skin, and I lost my appeal.” In college, though, it picked up again, and he had sex with more than fifteen women over four years. Today, his “number” is close to fifty, placing him significantly above average for his age group: according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than a quarter of men age twenty-five through twenty-nine have had more than fifteen sexual partners in their lifetime. For Sam, sex and dating are a source of confidence, proof that he is attractive and that he has the social skills to charm whoever is the object of his affections at any given time. “When someone wants to go on a date with you or have sex with you, it’s validating,” he observes.
Sam’s appearance and his positive sexual experiences are self-reinforcing and symbiotic. His good looks saw him embraced by his peers at a crucial point in his emotional development, which gave him the confidence to pursue dates and hookups, and meant that his early dating experiences were largely affirming. Those positive experiences in turn enhanced his attractiveness: his peers viewed him as someone worth spending time with, and this boosted his social skills.
This reciprocity is reflected by studies that look into the social a
nd psychological benefits of being attractive. Research shows that people like Sam, who are conventionally good-looking, are beneficiaries of what is known as the “halo effect,” meaning they are presumed to be smarter, nicer, and more successful than their plainer-looking counterparts. What is more interesting is that over time, those assumptions often turn out to be true: not because pretty people are innately smarter or more talented or have better personalities, but because years of positive social reception and enhanced opportunity become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Treat a person as though they are likeable and successful, and they will often become so.
The same principle applies to sex appeal: past successes increase the likelihood of success in the future. Of the hundreds of people I spoke with over the course of researching the Sex Myth, it wasn’t those who were the most conventionally attractive who had the most confidence in their appeal—it was the people who’d had the most positive experiences with sex and dating. Those who had encountered early rejection or who had negative early relationships, on the other hand, were more likely to perceive themselves as unattractive, regardless of the way they looked.
If hot bodies are given a license to be sexual, less hot bodies are often denied any sexuality at all. As a teenager, Natalie, a porcelain-skinned twenty-six-year-old from the evangelical northern suburbs of Sydney, had sex on the brain. She daydreamed about anonymous men, fantasized about her crushes at school, and devoured erotic fiction online. But although she felt highly sexual on the inside, Natalie didn’t feel like she had the right to be. “I didn’t feel worthy of being considered sexy,” she recalls.