Desire Digest 004

The problem of casual sex, Gen Z's hatred of intimacy in film, looksmaxxing memes and a clip from my segment of Substack Originals.

It’s still summer whether you feel it is or not. Summer doesn’t end on Labor Day weekend just because you say so. It’s like how people think the first day of the week is Monday — wrong! It’s Sunday! You are not above the laws of the calendar.

With all that in mind I am still letting the last dregs of the season linger, though I am all too eager for fall myself. I love fall and Halloween, something that’s become more embarrassing in recent years. But like my respect for the calendar, I also respect the ceremony of tradition, the need for ritual to mark the passing of time.

I am trying to make writing here more of a ritual, too, with weekly posts growing into something potentially even more frequent. I am open to ideas about what that might entail. These digests and essays will continue, but I’d like to incorporate new ways to interact: live talks in the Chat, an advice column, whatever. This newsletter and the overall Substack platform are becoming an increasing priority for me, and I’m eager to shape this all together. This is, again, a very good time to become a paid subscriber to not only support the growth of this publication but help take part in it.

Speaking of Substack, they recently invited me to participate in their new video series, Substack Originals. You may have seen a brief clip of it on Notes, and here’s another fragment below. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing more. Yay!

“Was Casual Sex Always This Bad?”

So asked Emily Leibert, one of my dear friends and talented writer for The Cut. The question centered on nonconsensual choking — many young women are reporting that men will manually choke them during sex, without ever asking her or her otherwise indicating this is something she’d be interested in. These sorts of encounters present a common bind: that of wanting to speak up for your own desires, and the anxiety that articulating these desires will impede on the perceived spontaneity and eroticism of the moment. This issue is a distillation of the problem of casual sex writ large, even after years of sex positivity. “While the threat of a bad time has always been part of the packaged deal of sleeping with a stranger, those of us aspiring to operate as sexually free agents, ever the optimists, had hoped that with age and education, the quality of casual hookups would improve,” Leibert wrote. “Instead, the feeling of despair among young women engaging in casual sex has reached a fever pitch.”

As this topic gains momentum, I’d like to hear a bit more from the men. Specifically, where does this inclination to choke come from? Are they doing it because they’ve seen it in porn? Because they think it’s what women want? I’ve heard from some young men that they’re increasingly met with women who want to be dominated in increasingly hardcore ways, though the guys themselves aren’t all that into it. There’s an imbalance occurring, and as always, we’re inclined to blame the opposite gender.

We’re Being Tricked By That Gen Z Anti-Sex Scene Survey (A Little, Anyway)

A survey about how Gen Z is growing more and more opposed to sex scenes in fi;m and television is making the rounds again, and I think we’re all being duped a bit. Recently, X account DiscussingFilm shared that “Gen Z want less sex in movies… A new study of 10 - 24 year olds found that 47% said sex “isn’t needed” for most TV shows & movies while 44% believe romance is ‘overused’” The “new study” in reference is one from 2023, which itself has been the source of much of the discourse surrounding Gen Z and sex scenes in the last year. So, we’re essentially still referencing the same data set that has kicked off most of this conversation in the first place. But as the age range of the study suggests, there are probably some issues with how we’re interpreting it. The study only asked about sex scenes among people ages 13-24, while the younger participants were asked about romance in movies. Regardless, 13-24 is a massive age range to be gleaning youth sentiments towards sex from. Presumably, a 13-year-old and a 24-year-old will feel differently about it.

With that in mind, I’m inclined to think we might be inflating the whole “Gen Z hates sex” to some extent. However, the survey (called the Teens and Screens Survey, from UCLA) states that 46.7 percent of all participants were above 18, while 33.3 percent were between the ages of 13-18, and the remaining 20 percent were between 10-13. That means that at least some of that adult demographic agrees that sex isn’t unnecessary and overused, which suggests some truth to this conversation. Sex scenes are down 40 percent since 2000, meaning that a good chunk of Gen Z thinks even the dwindling number of sex scenes that do exist is still too much. Obviously, I’m inclined to think our culture is becoming more bizarre about sex, but without similar survey data from previous years, it’s hard to track precisely how much sentiments have changed.

Looksmaxxing Will Die a Meme

A few weeks back, I wrote about the phenomenon of looksmaxxing for Unherd. In it, I mentioned how my 11-year-old niece had begun making looksmaxxing-adjecent jokes, likes ones about mewing or sharpening your jawline. I worried that maybe the mainstreaming of these rigid body standards even through memes could produce even harsher anxieties about appearance, at a time when aesthetic norms are allegedly looser than ever. But now that I’ve just wrapped up another week with my niece, in which she didn’t make a single mewing joke at all, I think this moment was just a flash in the pan. Young men in particular will still engage with this ideology and the anxieties it represents to an extent we shouldn’t ignore, but it’s probably not the epidemic it could be.