The Sex Myth

by Rachel Hills

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Rachel-Hills

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Notes

  Epigraph

  “The most toxic formulas”: Remarks by Junot Díaz at Word Up Community Bookshop, 2012.

  “My point is not that everything is bad”: Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231–32.

  Introduction

  The second-century theologian: Gail Hawkes, Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004), 50.

  The average answer: Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World in Which Boys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 209.

  80 percent is the proportion: Ibid.

  “The actual percentage”: Ibid.

  assumed that other young people: Kathleen Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 88.

  broad-scale quantitative surveys: Such as Paula England’s Online College Social Life Survey, which commenced in 2005.

  1 This Is Not What Liberation Looks Like

  “We go to a party”: Bryan Elsley, “Tony,” Skins, season 1, episode 1, aired January 25, 2007.

  “the most dangerous show for children”: Brett Berk, “Is Skins Really ‘the Most Dangerous Television Show for Children Ever’?” VanityFair.com, January 13, 2011. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/01/is-skins-really-the-most-dangerous-television-show-for-children-ever. Accessed November 21, 2014.

  “[made] light of lying to parents”: Morgan Jeffrey, “Parents’ group slams MTV’s Skins,” DigitalSpy.co.uk, January 14, 2011. http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ustv/s89/skins/news/a297965/parents-group-slams-mtvs-skins.html. Accessed November 21, 2014.

  Beyoncé: “Girls of Maxim: Beyoncé Knowles,” Maxim.com. http://www.maxim.com/girls-of-maxim/beyonce-knowles. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  Amanda Beard: “Amanda Beard in FHM,” SheKnows.com. http://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/top-female-athletes-gallery/amanda-beard/amanda-beard-in-fhm. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  would-be lawyers: Veronika Belenkaya, “It’s Juris-Imprudence,” Daily News (NY), April 10, 2007. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/juris-impru-dence-article-1.208599. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “What we once regarded”: Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005), 5.

  On NPR: Brenda Wilson, “Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships,” NPR, June 8, 2009. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105008712. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “sexual economics”: Mark Regnerus, “Sex Is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life,” Slate, February 25, 2011. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/02/sex_is_cheap.html. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “deeply disturbing . . . generation SEX”: Olivia Lichtenstein, “How the faceless and immoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing . . . generation SEX,” Daily Mail, January 28, 2009. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1129978/How-faceless-amoral-world-cyberspace-created-deeply-disturbing—generation-SEX.html. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “like G-stringed baboons in oestrus”: Fenella Souter, “Generation Sex,” Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, February 11, 2006.

  “They’re here, they’re mostly bare”: Richard Jinman, “Generation Sex,” Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, October 8, 2005.

  “how casually their daughters were accustomed”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (Scribner: New York, 1920).

  “lead to sexual anarchy”: Nancy Gibbs, “The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom and Paradox,” Time, April 22, 2010. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1983884,00.html#ixzz2pM7f5NaO. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “champagne parties for teenagers”: “Morals: The Second Sexual Revolution,” Time, January 24, 1964. http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,875692-1,00.html. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “one big Orgone Box”: Ibid.

  28 percent of American adults had never married: “The Fraying Knot,” Economist, January 12, 2013. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21569433-americas-marriage-rate-falling-and-its-out-wedlock-birth-rate-soaring-fraying. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  “[m]any teenagers and young adults”: Debra Jopson and Elicia Murray, “ ‘Generation sex’ as norms shift,” Age, May 17, 2009. http://www.theage.com.au/national/generation-sex-as-norms-shift-20090516-b6tn.html. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  72 percent of college students: Paula England, Online College Social Life Survey. Correspondence with author, November 21, 2014.

  40 percent of those surveyed: Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England, “Is hooking up bad for young women?” Contexts, Summer 2010.http://contexts.org/articles/summer-2010/is-hooking-up-bad-for-young-women/. Accessed October 3, 2014.

  Only one-third of students: Ibid.

  one in five students: Ibid.

  medical innovations such as penicillin: Andrew M. Francis, “The wages of sin: how the discovery of penicillin reshaped modern sexuality,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 42 (November 2013), 5–13.

  the Pill: Gibbs, “The Pill at 50.”

  “At the time”: Linda Grant, Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 130.

  “What sustains our eagerness”: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (New York: Penguin, 1998), 7.

  British cultural theorist Mark Jancovich: Mark Jancovich, “Naked Ambitions: Pornography, Taste, and the Problem of the Middlebrow,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (June 2001). URL not available.

  developing their own set of ethics: Erin Connell and Alan Hunt, “Sexual ideology and sexual physiology in the discourses of sex advice literature,” Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 15 (March 2006), 28.

  “respectability and restraint”: Jancovich, “Naked Ambitions.”

  “an ethic of fun”: Ibid.

  “Young New Yorkers”: Nate Freeman, “Sexless and the City: Web Warps Libidos of Coked-Up Careerists,” New York Observer, March 15, 2011. http://observer.com/2011/03/sexless-and-the-city-web-warps-libidos-of-cokedup-careerists/. Accessed October 6, 2014.

  “day laborers in film”: Ibid.

  “Sex is antithetical”: Ibid.

  “It’s harder to go home”: Ibid.

  through heated discussions: Foucault, History of Sexuality,25.

  sexual attitudes in Finland: Osmo Kontula and Elina Haavio Mannila, Seksin Trendit Meilla Ja Naapureissa (Helsinki: WSOY, 2001). Cited in Kaarina Nikunen, “Cosmo Girls Talk: Blurring Boundaries of Porn and Sex,” in Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, ed. Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 73–85.

  “It used to be that sex was so secret”: Leonore Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004), 102.

  2 Sex: An Act Unlike Any Other

  “the most fun you can have without laughing”: Martin Chilton, “Woody Allen’s 30 best one-liners,” Telegraph.co.uk. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/10196567/Woody-Allens-30-best-one-liners.html?frame=2624765. Accessed October 13, 2014.

  “has become the Big Story”: Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1995), 4.

  forced to publicly atone: Hawkes, Sex and Pleasure in West
ern Culture, 64–65.

  dangers of unrestrained reproduction: Connell and Hunt, “Sexual ideology and sexual physiology,” 26.

  “to be brought under conscious control”: Ibid.

  corrupting influence of pornography: Katherine Marrone, “Sex: Excessive pornographic exposure can screw you in the sack,” DailyEmerald.com, June 6, 2013. http://dailyemerald.com/2013/06/06/sex-the-dark-side-of-pornography/. Accessed October 29, 2014.

  “gender and sexuality disorders”: Family Research Council, “Ten Arguments From Social Science Against Same-Sex Marriage.” http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=if04g01. Accessed October 6, 2014.

  “allowed many people to flirt openly”: Natasha Vargas-Cooper, “Hard Core,” Atlantic, January/February 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/308327/. Accessed October 6, 2014.

  “first date doggy-style encounters”: Ibid.

  “an unvarnished (albeit partial) view”: Ibid.

  the most profound act of intimacy: Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, “Sexual antinomies in late modernity,” Sexualities 7 (May 2004), 243.

  “low modality” images: David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow, “Branding and discourse: The case of Cosmopolitan,” Discourse & Society 14 (July 2003), 459.

  “not only melancholy but also a boring life”: Ela Przybylo, “Crisis and safety: The asexual in sexusociety,” Sexualities 14 (August 2011), 446.

  the desire for sex is weaker: John H. Gagnon and William Simon, Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973), 17.

  “sex is a relatively docile beast”: Ibid., 103–4.

  we have exaggerated its importance: Ibid., 17.

  “It may well be”: Foucault, History of Sexuality, 33.

  releasing a cocktail of happy hormones: Natasha Turner, ND, “5 unexpected health benefits of orgasms,” Chatelaine.com, December 31, 2014. http://www.chatelaine.com/health/sex-and-relationships/five-unexpected-health-benefits-of-orgasms/. Accessed January 19, 2015.

  “cavegirl brains”: Korin Miller, “WhyTakenGuysSeemSexier,” Cosmopolitan.com, May 4, 2010. http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/relationship-advice/why-taken-guys-are-sexier. Accessed October 6, 2014.

  because they are more fertile: Christopher Ryan, “On Older Men, Younger Women, and Moralistic Claptrap,” Psychology Today, June 14, 2013. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201306/older-men-younger-women-and-moralistic-claptrap. Accessed October 15, 2014.

  “a ‘scientific’ account”: Stevi Jackson and Amanda Rees, “The Appalling Appeal of Nature: The Popular Influence of Evolutionary Psychology as a Problem for Sociology,” Sociology 41 (October 2007), 921.

  “in a world where many still take ‘scientific’ ”: Ibid.

  central to achieving mainstream legitimacy: Lisa Leff, “Actress’ claim to be gay by choice riles activists,” Yahoo! News, January 27, 2012. http://news.yahoo.com/actress-claim-gay-choice-riles-activists-201717513.html. Accessed October 29, 2014.

  prenatal hormonal: Jacques Balthazart, “Minireview: Hormones and human sexual orientation,” Endocrinology 152 (August 2011), 2937–47.

  genetic factors: Alvaro Rodriguez-Larralde and Irene Paradisi, “Influence of genetic factors on human sexual orientation,” Journal of Clinical Investigation 50 (September 2009), 377–91.

  45.2 percent of men and 36.9 percent of women: Christian C. Joyal, Amelie Cossette, and Vanessa Lapierre, “What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?” Journal of Sexual Medicine, published online October 30, 2014.

  only 2.3 percent of Americans: Jan Hoffman, “How Many Americans Are Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual?” New York Times, July 21, 2014. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/how-many-americans-are-lesbian-gay-or-bisexual/?_r=1. Accessed November 21, 2014.

  “highly intimate and erotic”: Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act, 80.

  “dirty, dangerous, and disgusting”: Ibid.

  a new interdependence and awareness of the self: Gail Hawkes, A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996), 20.

  “in order to be really courteous”: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 78.

  It was not uncommon to share a bed: Hawkes, A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality, 22.

  sex began to take on a new importance: Ibid., 23.

  our ability to create a cohesive story: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 54.

  not just through what we do: David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow, “Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women’s Magazines,” Social Semiotics 16, no. 1 (2006), 173.

  consumer sex: Hawkes, A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality, 117.

  “the girls you hook up with”: Kimmel, Guyland, 206.

  “beautiful twenty-nine-year-old”: Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, 188.

  “pretty fucking lame”: Ibid., 187.

  “The thing about when you start accumulating sex”: Ibid., 188.

  “constrain severely the powerful sexual impulse”: Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Conduct, 17.

  valued at $33 billion: Lucia Moses, “Millennial Guys Are Turning to Makeup: Survey Finds Masculinity Isn’t What It Used to Be,” AdWeek.com, June 19, 2013. http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/millennial-guys-are-turning-makeup-150313. Accessed October 7, 2014.

  France: Molly Moore, “As Europe Grows Grayer, France Devises a Baby Boom,” Washington Post, October 18, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/17/AR2006101701652.html. Accessed October 7, 2014.

  Germany: Suzanne Daley and Nicholas Kulish, “Germany Fights Population Drop,” New York Times, August 13, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/world/europe/germany-fights-population-drop.html. Accessed October 7, 2014.

  Estonia: Marcus Walker, “In Estonia, paying women to have babies pays off,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 20, 2006. http://www.post-gazette.com/life/lifestyle/2006/10/20/In-Estonia-paying-women-to-have-babies-pays-off/stories/200610200166. Accessed October 7, 2014.

  Australia: Nick Parr, “The baby bonus failed to increase fertility, but we should still keep it,” The Conversation, December 4, 2011. https://theconversation.com/the-baby-bonus-failed-to-increase-fertility-but-we-should-still-keep-it-4528. Accessed October 7, 2014.

  3 Freaks and Geeks: The Trouble with “Normal”

  earliest known tales of premature ejaculation: Otto F. Ehrentheil, “A case of premature ejaculation in Greek Mythology,” Journal of Sex Research 10 (May 1974), 128.

  it wasn’t until the 1960s: Lawrence K. Hong, “Survival of the fastest: On the origin of premature ejaculation,” Journal of Sex Research 20 (May 1984), 119.

  “seemed to regard the quick ejaculator”: Ehrentheil, “A case of premature ejaculation,” 129.

  75 percent of American men: Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 580.

  between 5.4 and 7.5 minutes: Marcel D. Waldinger et al., “Ejaculation Disorders: A Multinational Population Survey of Intravaginal Ejaculation Latency Time,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 2 (July 2005), 492–97.

  7.5 minutes: Donald L. Patrick et al., “Premature Ejaculation: An Observational Study of Men and Their Partners,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 2 (May 2005), 358–67.

  Nineteenth-century medical circles: J. S. Haller, “Spermatic Economy: A 19th Century View of Male Impotence,” Southern Medical Journal 82 (August 1989), 1010.

  “total and sometimes permanent impotence”: Ibid.

  “Marriage alone is sufficient”: Joseph W. Howe, “On the etiology, pathology, and treatment of spermatorrhoea and impotence,” Medical Record 12 (October 27, 1877), 698.

  “Someone who is incapable”: Dan Savage, “Asexuality for Beginners,” Stranger, September 1, 2009. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/09/01/asexuality-for-beginners. Accessed October 10, 2014. />
  young Republicans were distancing themselves: Susan Saulny, “Young in G.O.P. Erase the Lines on Social Issues,” New York Times, August 8, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/us/politics/young-republicans-erase-lines-on-social-issues.html?hp&_r=0. Accessed October 10, 2014.

  “rationalize the well-being”: Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London, UK: Routledge, 1984), 280.

  When the word “heterosexual”: Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995), 12.

  68 percent of Americans born after 1981: Pew Research Center, “Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” March 2014. http://features.pewforum.org/same-sex-marriage-attitudes/slide2.php. Accessed October 10, 2014.

  “gay couples should have exactly the same rights”: Populus, “Gay Couples’ Rights Survey,” March 2012. http://www.populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/OmGay_Rights.pdf. Accessed October 10, 2014.

  “At one time, I genuinely considered ‘looking gayer’ ”: Ariana Barreto, “ ‘Too Pretty to Be a Lesbian’: A Conversation with a Bigot,” In Our Words, January 5, 2012. https://inourwordsblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/ looking-gayer-a-conversation-with-a-bigot/. Accessed October 10, 2014.

  produced a YouTube video: GetUp! Australia, “It’s Time,” YouTube, November 24, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TBd-UCwVAY. Accessed October 10, 2014.

  four times more likely: Jaime M. Grant, Lisa A. Mottet, and Justin Tannis, “Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey,” 2011. http://endtransdiscrimination.org/PDFs/NTDS_Exec_Summary.pdf. Accessed October 10, 2014.

  forty-seven US states: “11 Facts About Gay Rights,” DoSomething.org. http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-gay-rights. Accessed October 10, 2014.