“Haven't you heard of the Sexual Revolution?”
“Who won, huh?” - St. Elmo’s Fire, 1985.
You can’t win, kids. When I was your age, us debauched young people were having too much sex. You, it seems, are having too little.
Kate Julian (whose skill is obviously not snappy titles) asks “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” in a recent Atlantic piece. The ultimate premise you have to accept is that more sex equals more happiness, and less or none equals less happiness. Julian does briefly acknowledge reasons why people may be affirmatively choosing less sex in the beginning of the piece, but never really asks her subjects, her readers or herself the following: Is sex as sex good for us, and does it make us happy?
I would refine the inquiry further: Are we mistaking means for ends? To paraphrase Freud, who himself was a bit obsessive on the subject, civilization is the productive channeling of sexual drive. But the end here is civilization. The act itself and what leads to it is simply an energy flow, a harnessed means. Water will flow as it does, but its flow can be harnessed for mills and dams.
The best of what we have stems from the harnessing of this sexual drive for peaceful ends. Houses and bedrooms are places where we safely have sex. The cultivation of agriculture, as opposed to hunting and gathering, allows us more energy and wherewithal for sex, and so on and so forth. When sex is seen as an end in itself, sexual fulfillment leads to nightmarish results as we have seen all too many times in both recent and ancient history: See ancient sieges of cities, joy divisions, trafficking, Weinstein, Cosby, Clinton, Trump.
In a more day-to-day sense, too often in modern hookup culture one, two, or multiple parties walk out of the bedroom with a mental limp, resulting from an act of base acquisition as opposed to shared venture. In pursuing a trophy without being part of a team, too many people leave the arena broken and disillusioned.
Kingsley Amis was a famously grouchy author regarding sex. In "Jake’s Thing,” he chronicles the misadventures of an Oxford don who has become impotent (only with his wife). The don goes through more and more ridiculous therapies in order to restore his potency, and realizes by the end that he simply is no longer on the same team as his wife, and it is this that leads to his impotence. Nevertheless, the therapists all regard his potency as an end (bad pun, I know), to be restored at any cost. The triumph of this pathetic hero, in the end, is walking away from consumerist therapy, sex and potency altogether, to focus on his other passions. I like to think that he realizes sex as a means without end is pointless, hurtful and stupid. Maybe you kids, finding wisdom, are realizing this too. Show us the way.
