by Rachel Hills
At Natalie’s school, the sexual girls were the cool girls, who were simultaneously envied for their good looks and disdained for their superficiality and perceived sexual availability. Those girls were pretty, extroverted, and outspoken. In comparison, Natalie felt short, chubby, shy, and boring. Most of the time, she tried not to draw too much attention to herself.
“There was this view that you had to know your place,” Natalie explains. “You know, that if you’re not attractive enough then you shouldn’t go on about sex because it’s out of line. There was something a bit shameful about it—about wanting sex but not being attractive enough to have it.” Even now, almost a decade after she first became sexually active, she still hasn’t lost the feeling that her desire for sex is in some way revolting, that she is “a disgusting freak who is lasciviously cracking onto these ‘innocents.’ ” Natalie believes she needs to be “superhuman” in order to be attractive: someone who never smells bad, never says the wrong thing, and never has a hair out of place. “I’m a perfectionist,” she explains. “And I want to be perfectly desirable, which is, of course, impossible.”
It is not just women who are told that their right to feel desire depends on how much they are desired by others. But although a man’s perception of his attractiveness might play a role in determining the partners he pursues—or the partners who pursue him—a woman’s desirability can serve as a permission slip to be sexual at all. Whether others want to have sex with him or not, a man’s desire is presumed to be bubbling under the surface, aching to be set free. Too often, though, a woman’s right to desire hinges on her desirability in the eyes of other people. If they don’t want to have sex with her, she is presumed to be sexless.
Henry, a trainee electrician from Bristol in the UK, is tall and broad shouldered with pale, flushed skin and closely cropped brown hair. At twenty-three years old, he has never had a girlfriend and he has never had sex, though he did come close to it once. He tells me about a girl he met online, a curvy redhead with lip piercings who lived in a neighboring town. They had met in person for a drink and were back at her house making out when she received a phone call from her ex-boyfriend. Henry lay in her bedroom for three hours while she went to see her ex, before she returned to tell him they were getting back together. “It was mortifying as hell, really,” he recalls. “I was in a strange city in the middle of the night with nowhere to go.”
Henry is even more ashamed of his virginity, which he attributes to a combination of shyness, insecurity, and his size. “I’ll just say it—I’m overweight,” he says when I ask him why he is so convinced of his undesirability. He compares himself to the men his female friends salivate over, the “A-list actors with less than three percent body fat and Type A personalities.” And that’s fair enough, he reasons. “If that’s what they want, then they deserve to be with someone they’re attracted to.”
Henry’s self-doubt permeates his every move. He speaks softly, so that the other patrons in the converted London church café where we meet can’t hear what he is saying. His hands and voice shake whenever the conversation veers to anything that threatens to be emotionally revealing. “It’s hard work to make sure that I don’t wake up every day and feel like I’ve failed,” he says. “I just feel too old to be a virgin.” When he was seventeen or eighteen, it didn’t feel like such a big deal. “Even at nineteen or twenty, it felt like there was still time.” But Henry is now approaching his midtwenties, and his friends are starting to move in with their partners and get engaged. “I just feel like, What am I doing? I haven’t even gotten to stage one of that conversation yet.”
Henry’s friends shower him with what he calls “platitudes”—there are plenty more fish in the sea, there is somebody out there for you, and so on. But although their words are designed to make Henry feel better about himself, he doesn’t believe them. “It just feels like if that was the case, surely somebody would have come along by now.” He worries that he will still be a virgin when he is eighty, that he is doomed to be alone forever. “It’s a horrible thought to live with every day,” he says.
A month or two after our conversation, Henry is even less sure of himself, writing to tell me that he has rethought his views on sex. “I’ve realized that not everyone is meant to have sex,” he writes. “Sometimes it’s just not in a person, and after (almost) twenty-four years on this earth without ‘it,’ I’m one of those people.” Trying to pursue sex “like a normal” person, he says, has left him despondent and filled with rage. “People in the past told me that I ‘deserved’ sex. But I’ve come to the conclusion that no one really ‘deserves’ sex. It just is, and on the opposing rationale, sometimes, it just . . . isn’t.”
“You’re Ugly Because Your Girlfriend Is”
We don’t just want to be “hot” because we like the look of dewy skin and washboard abs, or even because we think it would help us get laid more often. We care about beauty for what it signifies about how we are valued, both by the people we love (and those we want to love us), and by society at large.
Beauty, whether it is our own or that of someone we are sleeping with, is a marker of status and affirmation—and Meghan, twenty-four, has been the beneficiary of more sexual affirmation than most. A smart, self-effacing young conservative with a sardonic sense of humor, Meghan knows that her appearance “very much fits the cultural archetype” of an attractive woman. She is slim but curvy, with natural-looking blond highlights and, she notes wryly, “massive boobs.”
In high school, Meghan was one half of her upper-middle-class New England high school’s golden couple, the trophy girlfriend of the captain of the lacrosse team and president of the National Honor Society. At college, her boyfriend was the charismatic president of his fraternity and a local celebrity in the small, Midwestern town where he grew up. Today, Meghan is rarely single—and that, she tells me, is intentional.
“I’ve always been the girl whose single friends have been like, you always have a boyfriend. How do you do that?” she says. “And I laugh and pretend like it’s not a big deal, but secretly, I’m like, yes, I always have a boyfriend.” For Meghan, being in a relationship is not just proof that she is desirable but an indicator of success—something that keeps her mother happy and reassures Meghan that her life is progressing as it is supposed to. “I like it to be done and sealed so that I can check that box,” she admits. “Like, have a boyfriend? Mission accomplished. Now I can move on with my life.”
If being in a relationship is a stamp of social approval, not being in one is considered a sign that something is amiss. Chloe, a psychology major at a women’s college in North Carolina, tells me that on her campus, “people who are single are lumped into the category of being losers because they can’t get a boyfriend. Like, maybe they’re socially awkward or not pretty enough or whatever.” Chloe is critical of many of the values that dominate at her school—the focus on remaining a virgin, for example, or the rush to secure an engagement “ring by spring.” But deep down, she still believes that there is something wrong with being single. “It’s not like people consciously choose not to date,” she reasons. At Chloe’s school, having sex outside of a relationship marks you as a slut. But not having any kind of sexual contact at all makes you a weirdo.
It is not sex itself that determines whether a person is perceived as “hot” or not. After all, no one ever really knows for sure how much sex other people are having. What matters is being recognized as having the opportunity to have sex—especially if that opportunity is with a person of equal or greater attractiveness. If you can’t be sure how much sex someone is having, you can at least have a reasonable indication of how sexy they are.
It is no coincidence that Meghan’s ex-boyfriends are mostly good-looking, or that Sam will zero in on the most attractive woman in the room when he’s looking for someone to hook up with. Such choices reflect and reinforce their self-perception as desirable people, and the fact that they are chosen by those people in return is part of what m
akes them desirable in the first place. Indeed, Meghan attributes her high school popularity not to anything specific about her, but to the popularity of the guys she went out with. “It was the halo effect of dating them,” she observes. “It had nothing to do with my own awesomeness.”
The link between sex appeal and social status is not a recent development. In 1937, the American sociologist Willard Waller published a paper on “the rating and dating complex,” his term for the process by which young people meet and form relationships.
Today dating is seen as a time-honored, even slightly old-fashioned practice, but back then it was a relatively new phenomenon. Dating only emerged in the 1920s with the popularization of the automobile, which gave young people the means and freedom to socialize—and court—outside the home. And like the baby boomers who complain about “hookup culture” today, Waller was less than impressed with it. He described dating as a “dalliance relationship,” more concerned with cheap emotional and sexual thrills than with the serious business of getting people married. (Less than two decades later, adults would be encouraging teenagers to date around more, fearing that “going steady” would lead them to commit—and have sex—before they were ready.) Drawing upon interviews with students and alumni at a large state university, Waller argued that dating operated on a market-based system, in which an individual’s dating success reflected his or her status according to the broader scheme of campus values.
Students at the top of the social ladder, whom Waller labeled “Class A,” dated other Class A students almost exclusively, while students at the bottom were often excluded from dating altogether. Women in particular would choose not to date at all rather than be seen dating a man their friends thought was undesirable.
But what made an individual rate highly as a dating prospect differed depending on the gender of the person being rated. For Waller’s men, like Meghan’s ex-boyfriends, desirability was tied to status elsewhere on campus. The men who were considered most datable were those who were members of the most prestigious fraternities, who were involved in high-profile campus activities, who were well dressed and good-looking, and who had access to a car. For Waller’s women, as for Meghan, the relationship worked in reverse. Rather than a girl’s popularity determining her datability, it was her desirability as a date that determined her popularity, more so than her personality, how much money her parents had, or even how pretty she was. “[In dating] as nowhere else, nothing succeeds like success,” Waller wrote.
Especially in the earliest years of our sex and dating lives, what we consider desirable is shaped not only by what we personally find attractive but also by what we think other people are attracted to. If the person you hook up with reflects your status and position, your peers’ approval of your partner is a proxy for their approval of you. As we discussed in chapter 2, the people you have sex with can become a kind of commodity, like the car you drive or the clothing you wear.
Caleb, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, takes the analogy a step further. “My friends and I came up with this theory that you are only as attractive as the girl you’re going out with,” he explains. “So therefore if you had an ugly girlfriend it would make you ugly, and if you had a really hot girlfriend it made you attractive. And that was the guideline.” He laughs. “One of our mates, pretty much all of his girlfriends were ugly.”
So, it was like you’re ugly and your girlfriend is, too? I ask. “No,” Caleb corrects me. “It was like you’re ugly because your girlfriend is.”
Horny: Want to Have It, Got to Have It
Being “hot” is more than just genetic luck. It is a measure of effort: of the hours you spend working out; the precision of your grooming habits; and how completely you have internalized and executed the symbols of sex appeal as dictated by your gender, age, and subculture. Jezebel blogger Emily Armstrong put it simply when she said, “Pretty is a set of skills.” Desire tends to be slippery and specific to the individual: one person might have a thing for curly hair, while another might prefer a strong nose or an acerbic sense of humor. But mass-approved hotness is not about what individuals find attractive. It is a form of peacocking, a visual calling card declaring that we are a particular type of sexual person.
A waxed pubic area, for example, is sexy to many not just because it allows the genitals to be more easily seen or tasted, but because it suggests that sex is a priority in your life, that you expect to have it regularly and are willing to sacrifice time, physical comfort, and money to prepare for it aesthetically. Tight dresses and T-shirts show the labors of a gym-toned body. Fake tans, colored hair, and breast implants beckon to be looked at not only because they mimic traits we associate with youth and health, but because of the exertion they convey. At its core, what we consider to be hot is about making an effort, attractive not only for its aesthetics but because it suggests one might be open to sex.
This matters, because desirability in the early twenty-first century hinges on more than just other people wanting to have sex with you. It also means wanting to have sex with them in return—or at least looking like you might. And part of that means enacting a particular set of behaviors—being confident, outgoing, and open to a good time.
It is a set of behaviors that Stephanie, a seventeen-year-old high school senior from New England, has pursued with enthusiasm. Vivacious and analytical, with short dark hair, Stephanie has never felt like she fits the beauty standard laid out for girls her age. The exceptions to this insecurity, she tells me, are her breasts, which she describes as her “master status.” When she was younger, she used to like to lift her shirt and flash them at people. “I thought it was hilarious, and it was, to be honest. It was pretty funny,” she recalls. But, she concedes philosophically, she lacks “a certain bangability,” that “special trait” that would elevate her from a girl people like to look at to a girl they want to have sex with.
When Stephanie was in her freshman year of high school, she and her friends entered into a race to see who would lose their virginity first. “It was an official competition,” she explains enthusiastically. “I would get a boyfriend and they would be like, ‘Ticktock, ticktock. When is it going to happen?’ ” Stephanie was the first of the group to start dating, but a year into their two-year relationship her first boyfriend came out as a transgendered woman. As such, he wasn’t interested in penetrative sex. “Feeling like he had the wrong parts sort of put a damper on it,” she says matter-of-factly. Her second boyfriend was an abstinence advocate who wanted to wait until marriage to have sex. “I was like, Come on!” she laughs, recalling her frustration. “So, that did not work out for me.”
As she nears the end of high school, Stephanie is now the only virgin left in her close group of friends. She’s okay with that, sort of. “If I wanted to have sex, I could,” she reasons. “I’d just show up at a party with a lot of drunk people around.” But her friends are more impatient for her to get it over with. “It’s not like I have to have sex before prom,” she jokes, “but it’s kind of like a ‘get a boyfriend and do it this summer’ kind of deal. So that we can all be at the same stage again. So we can all have a similar level of experience.”
Still, Stephanie admits, on some level she is as invested in the “race” as they are. “I don’t want to still be a virgin when I’m twenty-five or even twenty,” she says. She also doesn’t want to be a virgin when she gets to college. At college, it’s assumed that you’ll be sexually active, she explains, and it’s important to her to know what she’s doing before she gets there.
No one in Stephanie’s life right now expects her to be sleeping around. Her guy friends, in particular, are very clear that they think casual sex is a bad idea, telling her she shouldn’t have sex unless it has “meaning” to her. But people do expect Stephanie to be having sex—preferably with one person, and in an ongoing relationship. Maybe it’s because she’ll be eighteen soon, she muses, and “you can’t be an adult without having some kind of sexual e
xperience. Sex is a rite of passage in our culture, I think.” Losing her virginity would be proof that, as Stephanie puts it, “there are traits in [her] that people want, right over here.”
Like flashing her breasts at strangers and entering into a teen-movie-style virginity-loss contest, being sexually active would also mark Stephanie as someone who is doing young adulthood in a particular, socially desirable way. As we learned in chapter 1, sex plays a key role in our popular imagination of what it means to be young, free, and fun. Like people who are attractive, people who are “fun” are perceived to have more opportunities to have sex—and people who are perceived to have a lot of sex are in turn considered to be more fun. Modern media and popular culture tell us that young single people are dining at a buffet of almost unlimited sexual options—and doing sex “right” means taking advantage of those opportunities.
Behind this ideal of fun and freedom lies a view of desire as a near-unstoppable force, one that shouldn’t be interfered with. Left to our own devices, it says, we would fuck without fear or consequence, and anyone who does not do this must be repressed or otherwise eccentric.
But desire is also less straightforward than it is often portrayed. On-screen and in magazines, desire is powerful and immediate. But in practice, it often manifests itself more tentatively, sometimes emerging so quietly that we don’t notice its presence until it achieves full bloom. Other times, especially when they do not conform to the expectations we have set out for them, we might not register our desires at all.
Courtney, the twenty-two-year-old bisexual woman we met in chapter 3, illustrates this ambiguous relationship well. Growing up in suburban America in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Courtney and her family would often visit her great-aunt Jean, who lived with a woman—known as “Aunt Susan”—in Philadelphia. It wasn’t until she was in seventh grade, working on a family history project for school, that Courtney thought to ask her mother how exactly Aunt Susan fit into their family tree. “Well, Court, do you know what it means to be gay?” her mother replied.