The Sex Myth

by Rachel Hills

  And yet, I still can’t entirely shake the fear that I have crossed some kind of line if I make a dirty joke, or when I speak about pornography with an almost scientific detachment. I still feel like a bad lover—and a subpar human being—if I am too busy or distracted or disinterested to have sex one week. I still evade and obfuscate when it comes to the exact details of my sexual past, posturing as someone who more closely resembles the fun, free, sexy woman I would like to be seen as—to the point that I often don’t notice I’m doing it until the words slip out of my mouth.

  One night at the end of 2013, I was hanging out with my friend Penny, discussing potential cover designs for this book and contemplating how the Sex Myth might be distilled into a single image. She suggested a twist on the “walk of shame”: the young women you see traveling home in the clothes they wore the previous night who, as she put it, “really just fell asleep at a friend’s place after staying up too late watching DVDs.” I instinctively escalated the conversation. “And why do they call it ‘the walk of shame’ anyway?” I quipped. “Whenever I’ve done the walk of shame, it has been a stride of pride.”

  Never mind that the one sex-related “walk of shame” I’ve done in my life to date has been after sleeping with the man who ended up becoming my husband. Or that, as someone I have known since I was seventeen, Penny knew perfectly well that I didn’t have a past scattered with one-night stands. I called myself out on it immediately. “Look at me,” I said. “I’m being totally Sex Myth–y right now!”

  The Sex Myth wouldn’t be so insidious if it were solely a negative force, a cultural killjoy bent on telling us what not to do. The truth is, believing in the Sex Myth can be a lot of fun. Elevating sex as the ultimate pleasure inflames our imaginations, which in turn makes sex more pleasurable. Believing that it reveals the barbaric truth of human nature makes it feel more titillating and transgressive. Setting it apart from other acts transforms it into something more potent and dramatic. The Sex Myth may fuel our anxieties about our sex lives, but it is also a source of physical and emotional pleasure. We believe in the Sex Myth in part because we want to.

  But the pleasures of the Sex Myth are ultimately outweighed by the damage it causes. The Sex Myth doesn’t just make sex more exciting; it also renders it more dangerous, weighing down our sexual desires and histories with an excess of significance. And by inflating the importance of sex in this way, we have unwittingly bonded ourselves in chains of our own creation.

  You Are Not Your Sex Life

  The Sex Myth teaches us that sex is a subject of almost otherworldly importance that matters not just for the pleasure and intimacy it can contribute to our lives but also for its status as a harbinger of “truth,” a window into who each of us “really” is. The Sex Myth transforms acts into identities, defining us on the basis of our sexual histories and desires in ways that are often negative or otherwise compromised. Under the Sex Myth, you haven’t just had sex with a lot of people; you are a slut, a player, or a potential sex addict. You are not just sexually inactive but a virgin or a loser, someone who is alternately “pure” or ridden with unspecified emotional issues. You don’t just happen to be attracted to people of the same gender; you are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

  The British sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued that humans derive our sense of self not from the raw details of our experiences but from our capacity to weave those details into a consistent story. If we are liberal in our attitudes, we expect our sex lives to be similarly liberal. If, on the other hand, we value tradition and conservative values, we expect that, too, to be reflected in our sex lives.

  In real life, many people hold identities that might seem to be at odds with one another at first glance. Nyn, the polyamorous trans guy we met in chapter 3, told me that he struggled with the expectation that because he had multiple partners, he was “vastly experienced” and up for anything. “I’m quite young, still,” he said. “People tend to ascribe a lot of experience to me that I don’t actually have.” Greta, the twenty-five-year-old fashion blogger from chapter 2, considered herself politically radical but had a sexual history most people would associate with someone more conservative, having had only one partner since she was eighteen.

  Meghan, the sardonic blond Republican we met in chapter 4, told me about one of her best friends from high school—“a bleeding-heart liberal” who was studying to become a public defender and didn’t have sex until she was twenty-three. Meghan’s experiences, on the other hand, have been the opposite of her friend’s. “People tell me all the time that I look really sweet,” she observes. “Good girl, conservative, take her home to Mom . . . And it’s like holy shit, I have had sex with a lot of people!” Where Meghan’s friend spent her college years thinking she wasn’t “normal” because she was still a virgin, Meghan felt like being sexually active had put “a black mark next to [her] name.” Meghan, after all, had been brought up to believe that nice girls didn’t have sex until they were married. And yet Meghan had sex well before that, in her first semester of college.

  But while Meghan’s and her friend’s trajectories might outwardly appear to be opposites of each other, they share an emotional experience in common. When the stories we tell about who we are don’t seem to correspond with our experiences—when we lack “integrity of the self,” as Giddens puts it—shame and anxiety are the all-too-common results. To resolve this discord, we will often try to make our experiences and the stories we tell about them consistent.

  When it comes to sex, this consistency can be achieved in a number of ways: By omitting details of our histories that don’t fit with our desired self-image, or by hinting at events that never happened in order to better project an image that fits the ideal. Maybe we avoid sexual activities that don’t fit with our beliefs about who we are, or pursue experiences and relationships we are ambivalent about in order to maintain a particular self-image. A 1997 study of the relationship between young people’s self-image and their sexual practices found that the more important a belief or ideal was to a person’s self-perception, the more likely it was to be enacted in their behavior.

  In practice, achieving this alignment between sex and self might mean responding as Meghan did and staying in a relationship you’re not happy with in order to validate a decision you now regret. But it could just as easily mean having sex with someone you’re indifferent about—like Courtney, whom we met in chapter 3—just to prove that you’re worth having sex with. It might mean not trying an act that intrigues you, because you’re afraid people will think you’re a freak. Or it could mean engaging in activities you have no interest in, because you don’t want to seem boring or inhibited.

  The belief that our sex lives define us in a unique and profound way doesn’t just shape the acts we partake in. It also influences the experiences we believe we are capable of partaking in. When Henry, the twenty-three-year-old virgin from chapter 4, e-mailed me a few months after I interviewed him, he expressed his embarrassment about the things he had told me. When we had first spoken, he said, he had thought that he would eventually meet someone he cared about and who cared about him. “I seem to remember having a bit of an ‘it’ll happen when it happens’ rhetoric,” he wrote. But now he was more somber in his assessment of his sexual prospects. If he hadn’t had sex by now, he argued, who was to say he would have better luck in the future? For Henry, the belief that his sex life defined him had become a shackle that limited his capacity to change his situation.

  The stories that are told in media, popular culture, and in everyday conversation set out the parameters of what we should do when it comes to sex. But it is through our efforts to match our sex lives to our self-image that these standards are enforced, as we regulate our behavior and self-presentation not only to conform to the ideal but also to manage the way that we are perceived by ourselves and others.

  The French philosopher Michel Foucault coined a term to describe this process: subjectification, which referred to the mechanisms through
which individuals became objects not of other people’s authority but through which they learned to exert control over themselves. For Foucault, this process of self-discipline was exemplified by the panopticon, a type of eighteenth-century jail that allowed the guards to observe any prisoner at any time, without the prisoners’ knowing whether they were being watched. The effect was that prisoners behaved as though they were being monitored at all times, and thus learned to regulate their conduct to fit the prison’s rules and norms whether someone was observing them or not.

  The same dynamic can be seen in the relationship between sex and the self. For the most part, sexuality is not regulated by a tyrannical external force. It is something we manage internally, as we continually monitor our behavior to befit the type of person we think we ought to be.

  Foucault believed that the significance Western culture ascribed to sex was ultimately destructive—a tool not of liberation but of regulation and control. He was wary, too, of the degree to which sexuality was intertwined with the self, arguing that it would not lead to people being freer in their sexual practices, but that it would compel them to behave more conservatively and experiment less. “If the perennial question [people] ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility,” he predicted.

  Foucault’s words have not come true in the manner he expected. In today’s sexual climate, the dominant ideals are liberal—at least insofar as the values and aesthetics they promote, if not in the diversity of practices they preach. And as the stories I have shared throughout this book show, not everyone marches to the same sexual drum. Different people are drawn to different behaviors, identities, and desires, influenced by their life history, the people they surround themselves with, and their own tastes.

  But the peculiar “specialness” that we attribute to sex limits our inclination to explore it as freely as we otherwise might. If sex reveals who we really are, to step outside the bounds of the identity and practices we are already comfortable with poses a profound emotional risk.

  Still, just as our sense of self can evolve over time in other arenas, so too are our sex lives far from static. A year after Henry e-mailed me to express his embarrassment over our interview, I contacted him again to ask for his permission to include his story in this book. This time, he was in a very different state of mind. “I did have sex, last Saturday, as it happens,” he wrote. He thought it was great but said, “[N]othing really changed. It didn’t make me a better person, or a different person for that matter.” The real change was that Henry now understood that sex did not define him.

  Sex Is Not (the Only Form of) Freedom

  Another avenue through which the Sex Myth derives its power is through the potent associations between sex, freedom, and oppression. These connections are not without reason. The special importance attributed to sex means that historically, people whose sexual experiences and desires have deviated from the ideal have been punished with ostracism, imprisonment, and even death—and in many parts of the world, this is still the case.

  The fight for people to be able to pursue love and pleasure without fear of harm or intimidation is an important one, and it is not over. In 2011, two Cameroonian men were sentenced to five years in prison for the crime of “looking gay.” At the time of this writing, homosexuality is illegal in seventy-eight countries, and in the United States, young lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their straight peers, due to risk factors such as rejection from family, lack of social support, and the stress of living with daily discrimination and prejudice.

  Women’s sexuality, too, continues to be fiercely regulated, both legally and through the use of physical brutality. According to data from the World Health Organization, more than one in three women worldwide have experienced sexual violence, and in the United States, nearly one in five women have been raped. In war zones, rape is employed as a weapon, with hundreds of thousands of women sexually assaulted during the conflicts in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Yugoslavia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the United States, reproductive rights remain a hot-button issue, with lawmakers in states including North Dakota, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kansas, and Virginia enacting 231 restrictions on abortion between 2011 and 2014 alone.

  Under the old sexual ideal, the Sex Myth was most visible in what people were told not to do: in the message that if we had sex—outside of marriage, with someone of the same gender, or in a nonreproductive way—we were immoral, unnatural, or dirty. But today, the tension between control and freedom manifests in more complex ways. The Sex Myth is palpable not only in what we cannot do without fear of stigma or harm, but in what we feel we must do in order to avoid feelings of shame and inadequacy.

  The Sex Myth teaches us that we are disgusting if we are attracted to people of the same sex, or if we have “too many” sexual partners, or if we are not monogamous. But it also tells us that we are failing if we are not sexually active, if we have too few partners, or if we are not sufficiently sexually “skilled.” At first glance, these directives might appear to be opposites, but in fact they are two sides of the same regulatory system.

  Under both sets of standards, sex is infused with the same otherworldly significance, a level of primacy that makes it difficult to pursue an authentic desire, whatever that might be. As Sarah, whom we met in chapter 1, puts it, “Everything in our culture tells you that if you’re not having sex or on the hunt for it, you’re missing out on something incredible. No one ever tells you not to worry about it.”

  The Sex Myth feeds upon two mutually reinforcing ideas: that our “true” sexual appetites are being suppressed by an external force, and that we will find the truth of who we are, both as a species and as individuals, through unrestricted sexual expression. It is the fear that sex is being quashed that infuses it with such liberatory potential, and the sense that we are engaging in something forbidden makes freedom all the sweeter.

  But the belief that sex is an inherently liberatory force is founded on a view of power that is fundamentally flawed. Sex is no longer solely repressed in our society; it is also demanded of us. And with that shift in how power is exercised comes a demand for a new vision of sexual freedom.

  The Sex Myth Is Reactionary

  Today, the Sex Myth is sold through a mirage of liberalism, urging us to perform symbols of freedom such as casual sex, creative sexual experimentation, and passionate desire. But the Sex Myth is not inherently liberal, not even on the most superficial level. Nor is it inherently concerned with freedom. It is a regulatory force that shapes our sexual beliefs and behavior to reflect the preoccupations and ideals of the culture we live in. The Sex Myth can be—and still is—employed just as easily for conservative means as it is for progressive ones.

  Both liberals and conservatives believe that sex is powerful. But the way in which they believe it to be powerful is often split down ideological lines. Where liberals tend to frame sex as a positive energy that has been unfairly repressed, conservatives are more likely to view sex as a dangerous force that needs to be contained. The liberal celebration of sex as the ultimate pleasure is mirrored by the conservative belief that in order for the specialness of sex to be preserved, it should be enjoyed only in the most intimate of relationships.

  That is to say, the Sex Myth is not just responsible for performance anxiety, sexualized popular culture, and compulsory casual sex. It is also responsible for slut-shaming, homophobia, and abstinence education. It doesn’t just teach us that sex is the best thing, the source of our liberation, but also that sex is the worst thing, something that threatens and degrades us.

  We can see this reactionary side of the Sex Myth in the way that we respond to survivors of sexual assault: in the assumption that because sex is corrupting, the victim has been sullied, and that this act of violence and degradation is a reflection of the personal qualities of the pers
on who was attacked. Following the rape of a sixteen-year-old high school student in Steubenville in the summer of 2012, the young woman’s peers took to Twitter and YouTube with debasing comments such as “some people deserve to be peed on” and “you don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole.” The implication was that the girl was complicit in the crimes committed against her; that she would not have been assaulted if she were not already in some way compromised.

  The reactionary side of the Sex Myth is also present in the negative portrayals of gay and lesbian people. In a 2012 interview with anti-gay lobby group Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Christian minister and conservative politician E. W. Jackson asserted that same-sex attracted people had “perverted minds” and were “very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.” But gay sex didn’t just corrupt the individual, according to Jackson; it was a force so powerful that it had the potential to corrupt all of society. “Homosexuality is a horrible sin,” he said. “It poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies.”

  The belief that sex is a perilous force is echoed too in the lessons taught in abstinence education. In programs deployed by Colorado-based abstinence advocates Education for a Lifetime, students are taught that “sex is like fire . . . good when controlled, but dangerous otherwise.” In another analogy, sexual intercourse is likened to sticking together two pieces of duct tape—stick two pieces together often enough, and soon you won’t be able to stick to anyone else.

  The extraordinary significance of sex under the Sex Myth has made it a fixture of our conversations: in media, in popular culture, and in day-to-day life. But the specialness of sex can also make it more difficult to talk about, denying us the information we need to lead happy, healthy emotional lives. It is because we believe that sex matters more than other things that we are embarrassed to talk about it with our children, that we warn teenagers away from it, and that we find sex so difficult to address honestly in our own lives.