By Christine Emba
Ms. Emba is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” from which this essay is adapted.
If you talk to young people about sex, you may sense an unsettling malaise.
Nearly half of American adults — and a majority of women — say that dating has gotten harder for most people over the past 10 years. According to the Pew Research Center, fully half of single adults have given up on looking for a relationship or dating at all. Rates of sexual activity, partnership and marriage have reached a 30-year low, with young adults leading the retreat.
“I don’t think older generations realize how TERRIFYING dating is for the current generation,” fumed one young Twitter user, to the tune of 18,000 likes. “Absolutely chaotic out here.” When I interviewed dozens of people for my book on sex and relationships, I found that women, in particular, discussed their sexual experiences in visceral terms: encounters that end in unexpected and alarming acts — a choking, say, or other porn-inspired violence — that they go along with out of surprise or resignation. After all, if consent is given (and it often is), there are no grounds left for protest.
Navigating our love lives has always been difficult.
But today, the general outlook among heterosexual daters has come to take on a less playful, more depressive tone — manifesting in what the writer Asa Seresin calls “heteropessimism,” a mode of feeling “usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment and hopelessness about the straight experience.” (Queer relationships, being less beholden to male-female gender dynamics, may present fewer issues — but they aren’t perfect either.) It’s an anesthetic posture, one that young people use to avoid fully feeling a sense of sorrow for their lack of control and repeated disappointment or fully acknowledging the pervasive awfulness of a sexual culture that’s not suited to their happiness.
This pessimism comes at a moment when we might expect the opposite. After all, one could say that we’re living in a golden age of sexual freedom. The average age of first marriage is rising; it’s more acceptable than ever to remain single or pursue a wide variety of relationship styles. A majority of the public finds premarital sex acceptable; birth control for women is widely available and, with health insurance, often free. Sex positivity is celebrated in progressive circles, with sexual adventurousness championed and inhibition often looked down on. We have breached the ramparts of repression, and the wall of silence that prevented us from expressing our sexuality has, for the most part, fallen.
Getting rid of the old rules and replacing them with the norm of consent was supposed to make us happy. Instead, many people today feel a bit … lost.
“One of the most important pleasures of sexual intimacy,” the Washington University professor and ethicist Fannie Bialek told me when I asked why this might be the case, is “feeling like you have the possibility of the unexpected — but not too much possibility of the unexpected.”
Boundaries, as any therapist would tell you, are necessary and important.
By defining the scope of what isn’t wanted or acceptable, they lay out a space for everything else that might be. And in our haste to liberate ourselves, we may have left something important behind.
Dr. Bialek went on to use the analogy of a dinner party to explain some of the shortcomings of our current romantic landscape. “I mostly know what’s going to happen when I go to a dinner party. And the fact that unexpected things happen in the course of conversation is pleasurable, because the unexpected can be pleasurable. But it’s within a fairly tight boundary.”
She continued, “I can be interested in what someone says instead of worrying that they will stab me with a dinner knife. Not having to worry about all these radically unexpected things frees up that attention and that possibility of enjoyment.”
But these days, Dr. Bialek told me, many people “experience a lot more unexpected interaction in a sexual context than they do at dinner.” Because of our unwillingness to acknowledge a shared set of norms for sex beyond the bare minimum of consent — let alone the fact that we haven’t even gotten that bare minimum completely right — our current sexual culture can feel painfully unmoored.
[Social regulation]
It’s easy to see how overly stringent social regulation caused harm in the past; the sexual revolution happened for a reason. Yet we can recognize the benefits we have gained — less shame, more acceptance of sexual minorities, a recognition of the value of women’s sexual agency — while acknowledging the problems that persist or have worsened. Are there norms we might create or reclaim today that might paradoxically make our romantic landscape freer for everyone?
That enjoyment of dinner parties rests on a clear set of social standards: broadly shared, community-regulated understandings of what we hope a gathering will look like and how attendees should behave. For sexual encounters, setting these standards will require heated debate, and our vision for what sex means in our society must be corrected together.
[Need for public debate]
We will need to make substantive claims about what we think a good sexual culture looks like but also be willing to acknowledge the ways in which certain definitions might be exclusionary and how some norms have negatively affected women and others. We will have to be open to negotiation and open to hearing from voices that have been excluded from such conversations. And we will have to have these debates in public.
Still, some new understandings may be in order. Maybe even casual sex is significant, an act unlike any other. Maybe some porn-inspired practices — those that eroticize degradation, objectification, harm — shouldn’t be mainstreamed. Maybe we do have a duty to others, not just to our own desire. We need norms more robust than “anything between two consenting adults goes.”
It’s time to raise the standard for what good sexual encounters look like and hold ourselves and our peers accountable to it. Good — that is to say, ethical — sex is not simply about getting consent so that we can do what we want. The ideal we might strive for instead is to will the good of our partners, too — and hold ourselves back from having sex if we cannot or are unsure that our partners do.
This might lead to less casual sex, at least in the short term. But, considering the clear dissatisfaction with the current landscape, that might not be so bad….
