Caveat: because of the topic, this post will contain some fairly explicit references
to sex acts, something which I don't often have on this blog. Readers who
are uncomfortable with such references may prefer to skip this post.
(What I say here applies to the heterosexual world. I
know very little about gay pornography or sexuality and thus cannot
comment on it.)
It's been reported for quite a few years that sex is on the decline in the US; young people, especially, are having less sex than people in the same age range did a generation ago (
example). At first glance, this seems mystifying. Since the sexual revolution more than half a century ago, most of the taboos which discouraged mainstream sexual behavior or restricted it to marriage have lost their grip on most people, while the laws and social conventions which enforced those taboos have fallen away. Sex is a strong and innate biological drive, especially in young people. Since the drive remains constant from generation to generation, shouldn't less inhibition mean more activity?
I think that a major factor in this decline is that sex has become less appealing because it has been rendered disgusting.
A few months ago I posted about how almost all the pornography easily available nowadays depicts sex in ways that are ugly, formulaic, dull, unrealistic, disgusting, devoid of affection, and sometimes cruel. Even depictions of what purports to be normal, mainstream, "vanilla" sex are full of choking, ass-slapping, hair-pulling, deep-throating, anal, and suchlike degrading and painful practices. Before writing that post I watched a few videos on various mainstream porn sites, to verify that porn really is as bad as I remembered; but I found this stuff to be so repulsive that it was actually very unpleasant to watch, and I didn't keep watching any given video any longer than needed to confirm that, yes, it really
is that bad.
But what about younger males today, who are just becoming interested in sex and have easy access to the internet? Since our country remains unusually prudish by developed-world standards and in many areas doesn't provide clear and explicit sex education, they naturally turn to the internet to satisfy their curiosity. And what they find there isn't loving or healthy sex or any remotely realistic depiction of how female sexuality works. It's --
that stuff. And it shapes their sexuality because it's pretty much the only influence available to do so.
This situation has actually been a reality for a couple of decades now, and over the years it's become apparent that many younger males are indeed getting their sense of what sex is supposed to be like from internet porn (see for example
this post and
this comment, but I've seen a
lot of such observations in many forums).
I can just imagine what it must be like for a girl or young woman nowadays who starts exploring sex. She gets to know a guy she likes, their relationship progresses to the point of having sex -- and suddenly he turns into an alien. He wants to slap or choke her. During oral sex, he tries to shove his penis down her throat. He wants anal. Depending on how assertive she is, she tries to refuse the worst of it (but young men can be very insistent) or endures it as best she can; eventually she realizes he isn't going to change, and moves on. But the next guy is the same. And the next. So she gives up. Who would want to have a sex life at all if it's going to be like
that?
The guy, meanwhile, finding that most women are repulsed by or flat-out refuse what he has been deluded into believing is normal sex, decides they're "lame" or "boring" or whatever the current applicable epithet is. It's all too easy to just go back to masturbating to porn, as he's been doing for years anyway. In the worst cases, this leads to the "incel" phenomenon, males with irredeemably repulsive habits and personalities who marinate in a festering resentful hatred of women and congregate together in online forums of their own to reinforce each other's delusions of victimhood (sometimes culminating in actual
terrorist violence). More commonly, it just leads to isolation and a crippled capacity to form normal relationships.
Not everybody is like this, of course. Many young people still form lasting sexual relationships and even get married. Likely the males in such cases had less exposure to internet porn for whatever reason, or were viscerally repulsed by it from the start, or were smart enough to realize it bore no resemblance to actual normal sex, or had parents who were fully engaged in their lives and were able to counter its worst influences by educating them about reality, or were rescued from those influences by women in their lives who wouldn't put up with such crap and cared enough to educate them.
This suggests, though, that American society is splitting into sexual haves and have-nots -- a "privileged" class engaged in healthy sexuality within stable monogamous relationships based on strong emotional commitment, vs the deprived who exist in a chaos of shallow transient hook-ups, "kink", and anonymous encounters, disdaining those who live stable lives ("lame" and "boring"), and eventually sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of ever-weirder perversions in pursuit of the inchoate something that they know, deep down, is missing -- never realizing that their way of life is dragging them inexorably further and further away from it. I don't even want to think about what their old age will be like.
I don't know what should be done about this.
Censorship is not the answer -- it never is. The fact that so many people still emerge from adolescence sexually normal shows that it is possible. Better sex education in the schools, designed to explicitly counter the influences of online porn, would probably help (it would be interesting to know if countries which have better sex education have less of a problem with porn-warped male sexuality), but would encounter strong resistance from the shrinking but politically-powerful fundamentalist minority. There's no substitute for strong and self-aware parental involvement, but this is difficult when our modern capitalist peon-wage economy so often requires both parents to work outside the home, and one wonders how many parents are fully aware of this problem anyway.
In
my original post on pornography, I expressed bewilderment at why pornography is like this. Surely there would be a bigger market for more realistic, less degraded depictions of sex? At the risk of sounding paranoid, I'm starting to wonder if the warping effect on actual male sexuality was foreseen and intended all along. At least as far back as
Orwell, it's been understood that unrepressed sexuality is a problem for authoritarian regimes, which prefer the masses to be in a constant state of agitation and dissatisfaction, easily whipped up into unhealthy hysteria. But one could argue that it's a problem for capitalism too; it enables people to achieve a profound feeling of satisfaction without spending money. The system wants a dissatisfied population whom it can persuade, via advertising and marketing, that whatever expensive thing it's selling at the moment will finally bring them fulfillment.
Returning American society to a Victorian state of sexual repression is probably impossible, and would strengthen the "forbidden fruit" appeal of sex anyway. But if sex can be made so ugly and degrading and disgusting that millions don't even want it, then that will achieve the desired effect just as well -- perhaps better.
