The positivity-negativity pendulum
Dear Reader,
How have you been? I’ve continued to be a busy, busy bee. M and I went from talking about moving in together, to starting to look for something that would be available mid-to-late-summer, to finding something pretty ideal much faster than we expected, to actually moving. So I’ve just finished packing up and schlepping all my stuff once again, but hopefully (please for the love of god) that’ll be it for moving for SOME TIME. I just finished setting up my desk today, so I figured I’d dash off a letter while I’m taking a breath.
There is a lilac bush just outside our front door that was in full flower as we moved in, and a huge peony laden with buds that is just about to bloom. Today is sunny and warm, and after this I’m going to pop out for a walk, which I’ve been saying to myself every afternoon for the last week but THIS TIME I MEAN IT. (Second use of emphatic all caps! Sometimes italics just doesn’t cut it.)
In all the chaos of moving (again), I have not been very online for the past several weeks, and even less engaged with social media than usual (starting from not all that much in the first place). But I do usually carve out a few minutes for the daily newsletter from The Morning News. And today TMN’s link to a Vox article caught my eye: Online fandoms are suffering from a wave of puritanism that finds anything vaguely sexual "gross." I’m linking to this article even though I haven’t fully digested the entire thing because just on the face of it, I find this so interesting.
The author delves into a bunch of evolution-of-internet-culture stuff, but starts from this central idea:
It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. … Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of “antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact.
I think this is an interesting take on this particular cultural trend. And there’s a lot layered into this, don’t you think? Just a few musings:
Young people who are not sexually mature, also known as kids — mostly older kids but even some younger kids who have unsupervised access to devices — are very significant consumers and drivers of internet culture. And this has been true probably at least since the days of AOL. Mind you, I didn’t go looking for any research to back that up.1 I’m just drawing on my own anecdotal experience as an old-ass millennial who has been online since pre-Dot-com bubble. So yes, the influence of youth culture on internet culture generally is very real and significant. But young people having less sex doesn’t equate to being anti-sex in consumption of media, just as more sex doesn’t equate to being genuinely more sex positive.
People can have a sex positive outlook while not being personally sexually active. Some people are demisexual and aren’t interested in casual sex. Some people are asexual and aren’t interested in sexual relationships. Some people choose to be celibate based on a particular ethical framework they ascribe to. And demisexual and asexual and celibate people may be totally sex positive. They may even be authors or creators or consumers of sexual content. Sex positivity doesn’t require a person to engage in sexual activity. It just means that a person views sex as a natural and healthy and positive part of the human experience.
And on the flip side, sexually explicit content is not inherently sex positive. And being sex positive doesn’t require someone to be sexually adventurous as to anything that comes along. Even among adults who are interested in sex, some forms of sex play can be very appealing to one person and entirely off-putting to another. BDSM practices, fetish play, sex parties or swinging, role playing, desired attributes of partners, even simply choice of sexual position — what may be terribly uncomfortable to one person may be deeply arousing to another, or what may be wildly sexy to one person may leave another cold. Sex positivity doesn’t mean warmly embracing every sexual practice under the sun. Rather, it means respecting that people’s preferences are different and varied and might evolve over time, and that’s all okay.
So, when it comes to young adults and sex: there’s all the above, on top of evolving social and sexual norms. Young people have access to more and better information on subjects related to sex and sexualities and gender identities. They are living in a different world when it comes to how people meet and get to know each other. Really excellent sex toys are just a click away. And they’ve also grown up through #metoo and Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Larry Nassar, and toxic beauty industry bullshit like Kardashian-inspired performative self-objectification.
Which kind of brings me back around to that last sentence I quoted, “they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact.” Because, in this context, how do you draw the line between what is fiction and what has a real world impact?
Human beings have a unique capacity for creating elaborate fictions. And that is a tool that we use to then actually create real things that exist in the world, like cathedrals and highway systems and amusement parks and coal-fired power plants, as well as things where we act like they really exist, like financial instruments and gods. In fact it’s entirely reasonable to be cautious about what you might summon into existence through the power of shared fiction. But alas, we’re not usually worried about the right thing. Humans may have a talent for fiction, but we’re not all that good at grasping reality.2
Sex negativity gains a foothold where sex becomes a scapegoat for predatory behavior, or dangerous overindulgence, or greedy materialism, or divisive politics. When sex positivity is on the upswing and people feel more free to talk candidly about sex, sometimes they share stories and experiences that other people, based on their own preferences or biases, find upsetting or threatening. And while other people don’t get to impose their preferences on me, other people do get to have different preferences. Just because someone else is grossed out by something that I dig, that doesn’t make me sexually enlightened and that other person a puritanical troglodyte.
What’s my point? Just, you know, it’s complicated.
It would be great if we could wave a magic wand so that every adult in the world suddenly had perfect insight into their own sexual preferences and where they happened to fall in the complex heat map of human sexuality. Oh, and simultaneously if suddenly everyone had a perfect understanding of consent (which really should be as easy as asking if someone wants a cup of tea) along with the ability to clearly articulate their own consent or lack thereof, including when it comes to things like sexual content in conversations. And! (the most elusive magic!) if people could develop the ability to just click away from or turn off or otherwise simply ignore content that is not to their taste, that would be really helpful.
It’s hard to grasp that cultural trends are not actually imposed on us by forces that can be neatly identified. We like to tell stories that give that kind of explanation (because we are good at creating elaborate fictions!) but it ain’t necessarily so (link is a killer violin interpretation of the Gershwin tune that was a delightful find). The messy truth is that cultural trends arise from the collective effect of countless individual actions, millions and millions of individual choices to say this or do that, open up or shut down, choose A over B or X instead of Y. There are things that influence those decisions, but they are not clean and tidy, and even if we can observe a connection or set of connections that seem to form an explanation, there’s no accounting for the thousand other influences that our narrative has missed.
One of the things that contributes to the apparent pendulum swing of culture is that people are able to garner attention by announcing opinions or prescribing advice that differs from whatever that came before. Media outlets tend to concentrate this effect, not because they’re part of some cabal of influence but because they have an existential stake in delivering fresh content that engages their audience. So in the short term, it’s really hard to tell whether a given trend of contrary-to-prior-opinion is a meaningful directional shift, or merely a superficial reactionary response that will level back out. Which is not to brush off the potential importance of a pendulum swing. Like, be vigilant against fascism and religious extremism. Hold fast in asserting your rights, and be bold in defense of others.
Just maybe don’t punch down on kids who don’t want to see sexual content. Getting snotty about “puriteens” isn’t helpful. Sex positivity includes being positive about people not being interested in sex. That’s ok too.
Hope you’re well. I looked up and suddenly it was summer (!), so stay hydrated and be safe.
Love,
Beas
And I kind of think it would be difficult to do any truly accurate demographic analysis of the ages of people online given that kids have every reason to lie about their age when asked, and the ease of being relatively anonymous makes age hard to objectively validate.
If you are like me, you are thinking, “Yes, other people have a very hard time telling truth from fiction,” and it is my sad duty to remind you that you and I are people too, my friend.