Bringing Sexy Back
I don’t remember when I first started noticing that people I knew out in the world had lost their sense of erotic privacy, but I do remember the day it struck me as a phenomenon that had escaped my timeline and entered my real, fleshy life. It was last year, when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, who, for the record, is five years younger than me (I’m 31). I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified.
“They had no idea you felt something sexual about them,” she said. “What if they found out? Lowkey, I hate to say this but: you took advantage of them.” I was shocked. I tried to explain — and it felt extremely absurd to explain — that this had happened in my body and in my thoughts, which were private to me and which nobody had the right to know about. But they did have the right, my friend argued. She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them. Offended at having been accused — in my view, in extremely bad faith — of being some kind of peep-show creep, I tried to argue that I’d simply responded in a physical way to an unexpected, direct, and involuntary stimulus. Back and forth, back and forth, we fought like this for a while. In fact, it ended the friendship.
There were other conversations, too, that suggested to me that conceptions of love and sex have changed fundamentally among people I know. Too many of my friends and acquaintances — of varying degrees of “onlineness,” from veteran discourse observers to casual browsers — seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire.
Hence, there was the friend who justified her predilection for being praised in bed as a “kink” inherited through the “trauma” of her father always harping on her because of her grades. There was the friend who felt entitled to posting screenshots of intimate conversations on Twitter after a messy breakup so that she could get a ruling on “who was the crazy one.” Then there was the friend who bitterly described a man he was dating as a “fuckboy” because he stood him up, claiming that their having enjoyed sex together beforehand was “emotionally manipulative.” When I dug a bit deeper, it turned out the man in question had just gotten out of a seven-year relationship and realized he wasn’t ready to be sexually intimate, and while he was rude to stand my friend up, it shocked me how quick my friend was to categorize his rightfully hurt feelings as something pathological or sinister in the other person, and that he did this in order to preemptively shield himself from being cast as the villain in what was a multi-party experience. This last friend I asked: “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.”
I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent. It is quite easy to dismiss these “discourse wars” as a “puritanism” afflicting the young, a reactionary current to be solved with a different, corrective discourse of pro-sex liberation, distributed via those same channels. If only it were so! To me, the reality goes deeper and is bleaker.
The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there _,_ always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism. This was especially true after the prominence of organized campaigns such as #MeToo. #MeToo was smeared by liberals and conservatives alike (united, as they always are, in misogyny) as being inherently punitive in nature, meant to punish men who’d fallen into a rough patch of bad behavior, or who, perhaps, might not have done anything at all (the falsely accused or the misinterpreted man became the real victim, in this view). #MeToo did make use of the call-out — the story shared in a spreadsheet anonymously or in a signed op-ed — but the call-outs had a purpose: to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions. Underlying this was a discursive practice and a form of solidarity building in which people believed that sharing their stories of trauma en masse could bring about structural change. As someone who participated myself, I too believed in this theory and saw it as necessary, cathartic, and political, and far from vigilante justice.
But the pushback against #MeToo reveals a certain peril to storytelling as politics, not only in the retraumatization evident in the practice of revealing one’s most intimate harms before an infinite online audience, which could always include those listening in bad faith. But also, a discursive market opened up in which trauma became a kind of currency of authenticity, resulting in a doubled exploitation. This idea, while not very nice, lingers in the use of harm as an authoritative form of rhetorical defense. The problem here is not what is said, but how it is used. A friction has since emerged between an awareness of weaponization of harm and emotion and the continued need to express oneself as vulnerably as possible in order to come off as sincere. This friction is unresolved.
The organized goals of the #MeToo movement are missing from the new puritanism. I think that the prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex. Punishing strangers for their perceived perversion is a form of compensation for a process that is already completed: the erosion of erotic and emotional privacy through internet-driven surveillance practices, practices we have since turned inward on ourselves. In short, we have become our own panopticons.
> The prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex.
On the rightmost side of the spectrum, punitive anti-erotic surveillance is very explicit and very real, especially for women. The Andrew Tates of the world and the practitioners of extreme forms of misogyny have no problem with using internet tools and social media websites for mass shaming and explicit harm. Covert filming of sex acts, AI deep fakes, extortion, and revenge porn are all realities one has to contend with when thinking about hooking up or going to public places such as nightclubs and gay bars. This is blackmail at its most explicit and extreme, meant to further solidify a link between sex and fear.
But that link between sex and fear is operating in more “benign” or common modes of internet practice. There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement. When it became desirable and permissible to transform our own lives into content, it didn’t take long before a sense of entitlement emerged that extended that transformation to people we know and to strangers. My ex sent me this text, clearly she is the crazy one, right? Look at this dumb/funny/cringe Hinge profile! Look at this note some guy sent me, is this a red flag? Look at this random woman I photographed buying wine, coconut oil, and a long cucumber at the supermarket!
I think these kinds of posts sometimes amount to little more than common bullying, but they are on a continuum with a puritan discourse in which intimate questions, practices, and beliefs about queerness, sexuality, gender presentation, and desire are also subjected to days-long piles-on. In both instances, the instinct to submit online strangers to viral discipline is given a faux-radical sheen. It’s a kind of casual blackmail that warns everyone to conform or be exposed; a way of saying if you don’t cave to my point of view, redefine yourself in my image of what sexuality is or should be, and (most importantly) apologize to me and the public, I will subject you to my large following and there will be hell to pay. Such unproductive and antisocial behavior is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.
There are other ways the politics of surveillance have become a kind of funhouse mirror. It is seen as more and more normal to track one’s partner through Find My iPhone or an AirTag, even though the potential for abuse of this technology is staggering and obvious. There are all kinds of new products, such as a biometric ring that is allegedly able to tell you whether your partner is cheating, that expand this capability into more and more granular settings. That’s all before we get into the endless TikToks about “why I go through my partner’s text messages.” That men use these tactics and tools to control women is a known threat. What is astonishing is the lengths to which some women will go to use these same technologies, claiming that they are necessary to _prevent_ harm — especially that caused by cheating, which is now seen as some kind of lifelong trauma or permanently damnable offense instead of one of the rather quotidian, if very painful, ways we hurt one another. Each of these surveillance practices operates from a feeling of entitlement and control over other people, their bodies, and what they do.
Pundits like to decree sexlessness as a Gen-Z problem, to argue no one is fucking because they are too on their phones. However, it is always too easy to blame the young. It was my generation that failed to instill the social norms necessary to prevent a situation where fear of strangers on the internet has successfully replaced the disciplinary apparatus more commonly held by religious or conservative doctrine. Even when, as in my experience in the salon, I am acting in the privacy of my own body, someone is always there watching, ready to interpret my actions, problematize them so as to share in the same sense of magical thinking, the same insecurities, and to be punished for not being insecure in the same way.
It’s only in retrospect that I’m able to realize the toll that constant, nagging interaction with my devices and the internet has taken on my thinking life _and_ my sex life. I remember very viscerally when I’d just come out of the closet as bisexual in 2016. When I embarked on a journey to find the kind of lover I wanted to be, my only experience with the world of queerness was online through memes, articles, and others’ social media presentation of themselves and of politics. Queer sex was not something that could be discovered through sensation, through physical interaction, but was rather a catalog of specific acts and roles one was already expected to know. I was terrified of making some kind of mistake, of being the wrong kind of bisexual, of misrepresenting myself in an offensive way (could I use the term “soft butch” if I wasn’t a lesbian?), of being exposed somehow as a fraud. When the time came for me to have sex for the first time, what should have been a joyous occasion was instead burdened with a sense of being watched. I could not let the natural processes of erotic discovery take their course, so caught up was I in judging myself from the perspective of strangers to whom I owed nothing.
But it wasn’t just a matter of queerness, either. When I hooked up with men, I could only perceive of sex the same way, not as situational but as a set of prescribed acts and scenes, many of which I wanted to explore. However, this time I interrogated these urges as being sociogenic in nature and somehow harmful to me, when they were, in fact, private, and I did not, in reality, feel harmed. Because I wanted, at one point in my life, to be tied up and gagged, the disempowering nature of such a want necessitated trying to justify it against invisible accusations with some kind of traumatogenic and immutable quality. Maybe it was because I was raped in college. Maybe I was just inherently submissive. One of the great ironies in the history of sex is that pathologization used to be a way of controlling sexual desire. (All are familiar with the many myths that masturbation would turn one blind.) Now it is a way of exempting oneself, of relinquishing control of one’s actions so as to absolve them of scrutiny. My little bondage moment couldn’t be problematic if it couldn’t be helped. It couldn’t be subjected to interrogation if there was something I could point to to say “it’s beyond my control, don’t judge me!” One day, however, I came to an important revelation: The reality was much simpler. It was a passing phase, a desire that originated with a specific man and lost its charm after I moved on from him. There wasn’t some deterministic quality in myself that made me like this. My desire was not fixed in nature. My sexual qualities were transient and not inborn. What aroused me was wonderfully, entirely situational.
A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. It’s exhausting, how everything is so readily defined by types, acts, traumas, kinks, fetishes, pathology, and aesthetics. To me, our predilection for determinism is an expected psychological response to excessive surveillance. A situational eroticism decouples sensation from narrative and typology. It allows us to feel without excuse and to relate our feelings to our immediate embodied moment, grounded in a fundamental sense of personal privacy. While it is admirable to try and understand ourselves and important to protect ourselves from harm and investigate critically the ways in which what we want may put us at risk of that harm — or at risk of doing harm to others — sometimes desires just are, and they are not that way for long. Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves.
> We are very afraid not of sex, but of exposure.
But in order to facilitate a return to situational eroticism, we need to kill the panopticon in our heads. That means first killing the panopticon we’ve built for others. There is no purpose in vindictive or thoughtless exposure. Not everything needs to be subjected to public opinion, not every anecdote is worth sharing, not every debate needs engagement, especially those debates which have no material basis to them, no ask, no funnel for all that energy. We need to stop confusing vigilantism with justice and posting with politics. That does not mean we stop the work that #MeToo started, but that revenge is a weapon best utilized collectively against the enemies of liberation. We need to protect the vulnerable from exploitative technologies and practices, repeatedly denounce their use, and work towards a world without sexual coercion, digital or otherwise.
On an individual level, we need to abandon or reshape our relationships with our phones and regain a sense of our own personal and mental privacy. It’s a matter of existential, metaphysical importance. Only when this decoupling from ourselves and the mediated performance of ourselves is complete, can we begin the process of returning to our own bodies out there, in the world, with no one watching or reading our thoughts except those we want to. The truth is, we are very afraid not of sex, but of exposure. Only when we are unafraid can we begin to let desire flourish. Only when we return to ourselves can we really know what we want.
_Kate Wagner is the architecture critic at_ The Nation _. Her award-winning cultural writing has been featured in magazines ranging from_ The Baffler _to the_ New Republic _._
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