A Second Sexual Revolution?
Young people today are having too much sex. Wait, no, maybe they’re not having enough sex. And when they do have sex, it’s the wrong kind—too porn-influenced, too gay, too…something. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong: that’s the main refrain we hear about young people and sex.
Carter Sherman isn’t interested in telling today’s youth that they’re doing sex right or wrong. But she is interested in the ways politics, culture, and technology are radically reshaping sex for millennials and members of Gen Z. “We are living through nothing less than the second coming of the sexual revolution,” she proclaims in The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, out this week.
I recently spoke with Sherman about her book, hookup culture, the sex recession, dictionary porn, abstinence-only education, and more. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.
Reason: In the book, you don’t really use the terms sex positive and sex negative, and instead you talk about sexual conservatism and sexual progressivism. Can you talk about that distinction a little bit?
Sherman: I don’t know that I actually have strong opinions on sex positivity and sex negativity, but I felt like they weren’t great terms for what I was trying to describe in the book because, frankly, I’m less interested in individual beliefs on sex and more interested in movements. Sex positivity and sex negativity [are] oftentimes so distorted by the way that we talk about them that everybody has a different view about what they mean. So I would be talking to young people—I interviewed more than a hundred young people, people under 30, for the book—and I oftentimes did ask them if they were sex negative, sex positive, how they would identify in that way. They oftentimes said that they were sex positive, but then they would have such an array of beliefs about sex and sex work and relationships between men and women, that it just started to feel like a label that didn’t really convey what I wanted to convey to the reader. So instead, I turned to these terms—sexual sexual progressivism and sexual conservatism—to identify the movements that I was seeing and the common threads that I saw in these attitudes.
For me, sexual conservatism describes the movement—politically, culturally, historically—to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is not straight, that is not married, that is not potentially procreative. Because part of what the movement is interested in doing is making it harder to access abortion and hormonal birth control. Then sexual progressivism is this trend that I noticed among the young people I interviewed that was not only indicative of an interest in expanding access to abortion rights, to LGBTQ+ rights, to contraception, but also an interest in really rethinking the ways that we approach sex, and by extension the ways we approach gender, and taking a more expansive view of both to free people from narrow ideas that I think have left a lot of young people feeling quite stifled.
One of the things that first drew me to your book and made me want to read it was your exploration of hookup culture and how so much of the media and pundit class got the story wrong there. Why do you think people were so willing to believe “hookup culture” hype?
I think because it’s sexy, frankly. People love to tell young people that they’re doing sex wrong, and this idea that sex was running amok on college campuses and high schools is really sort of fun to think about in a lot of ways. Obviously, this discussion about hookup culture came with all of this talk about downsides, but then you get to talk about this rampant sex while also moralizing about it, and people can never resist doing that.
Do you think that there’s any phenomenon today that you see getting this same treatment, with people pushing a false narrative or a narrative that there’s not really evidence for because it’s sexy or politically advantageous or confirms what they want to talk about with sex anyways?
I have two answers to this. I think the dominant narrative about sex among young people right now is the “sex recession,” which is this idea that young people are having sex later and less. That said, there is more evidence for that than there was for the hookup culture narrative. I don’t want to say that that’s a false narrative, but I do think it’s one of the dominant narratives.
As far as an actual false narrative that I think we talk abou
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