When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was consumed by sex. Not by the physical urge to have it, although I had my share of crushes and unfulfilled desires. Nor was I overly concerned with the particulars of how I might go about it, although I studiously read Cosmopolitan each month so that I would know what to do when the occasion arose. My obsession was more esoteric. I was consumed by the idea of sex – by what it meant and by what it might reveal about who I was.
If I didn't have sex, did that make me frigid or a loser? If I did do it, but with someone I didn't love – or worse, with someone who didn't love me – would I regret the decision later? What if Cosmo's 36 hot new sex positions failed me in practice?
I had grown up on a diet of teen magazines that treated sex with cautious reverence, followed by women's magazines that celebrated it as a symbol of female empowerment. In the sitcoms I watched on TV, the single characters dated (and by implication, slept with) new people each week. In the conversations I had with acquaintances, sex was at once a subject of nervous excitement and an unspoken assumption - something it was expected that everyone was doing. I, meanwhile, had made it not only through high school a virgin, but through four years of university as well.
This was not an outcome of my own design, and it was not something that most people would have guessed about me. From the outside, I looked like a normal girl – or at least I hoped I did. I did "normal girl" things like go to parties, flirt and exchange dirty jokes with my friends. In some arenas, I even fared a little better than normal. I didn't just go to the occasional party; I was a veritable social butterfly. I didn't just try to make myself look "presentable" for class; I got up an extra 45 minutes early to wash, dry, and straighten my hair.
These two states – "girl about town" and "secret sexual loser" – seemed irreconcilable to me, each one cancelling out the other. My lack of a sex life felt like a mark of failed moral character, the physical manifestation of every flaw I had ever suspected I had and of every defect I feared that the people around me were all too aware of but were too polite to mention out loud. Why else would I be uniquely incapable of an act that everyone else appeared to navigate with ease?
In an era in which most of what we hear and read about sex tends toward the sensational, my story might seem unusual. But my concerns weren't unique to me at all. To the contrary, they were a reflection of broader social and political trends. They were a product of a culture that tells us that we must be sexy, sexually active and skilled in bed in order to be adequate human beings – and that teaches us that the truth of who we are can be found in our sex lives.
Despite our long-standing preoccupation with sexuality, most people know surprisingly little about the sex lives of others. One result of this information gap is that, like I did, many people assume that others are having better sex, and more of it, than they actually are.
While researching his book Guyland: The Perilous World in Which Boys Become Men, sociologist Michael Kimmel asked male university students across the United States what proportion of their classmates they believed had sex on any given weekend. The average answer they gave was about 80 per cent. In fact, according to the Online College Social Life Survey, a cross-campus study of more than 24,000 American university students, 80 per cent is the proportion of final-year students who have ever had sex. Writes Kimmel: "The actual percentage [who have sex] on any given weekend is closer to 5 to 10 per cent." Kathleen Bogle, another American sociologist whose research focuses on young people and casual sex, has made similar observations: no matter how much sex the students she interviewed were having, most of them assumed that other young people were having even more.
Even when I felt most isolated and insecure, I knew that many people had sexual histories that were less perfect – or at least more complex – than they let on in public. Most of the conversations I participated in about sex were at once embellished and notably lacking in detail: designed to convey an impression of experience and sophistication while giving away as little as possible. But the wall wasn't always up. I would drop my guard around my closest friends and they would drop theirs around me. The issues they were dealing with were often different from my own, but they were enough to suggest that others, too, may have covered up any cracks in their sexual facade with a metaphorical layer of paint.
My curiosity piqued, I decided to find out what my peers were really experiencing. I set up an online survey and distributed the call-out to my friends and acquaintances – all strictly anonymous, of course – asking them how many people they'd had sex with and what kinds of relationships they'd had. One guy, in his late 20s, confessed that after losing his virginity about a decade earlier, he didn't have sex again for two years. One 30-something colleague revealed that she hadn't had sex in more than 10 years, since her last relationship ended.
I began to realise that we were in the grip of a Sex Myth, which regulated our sexual behaviour even as on the surface we appeared to be more free than we had ever been before. The first layer of the Sex Myth was the most obvious: the media myth of a hypersexual society, visible in everything from moral panics over wayward youth to the saturation of sexual content in popular culture to the idea that to be sexually liberated – to be confident, free and, above all, true to ourselves – meant being sexual in one very particular way.
It wasn't sex that was the problem, but the importance that I, and so many others, had attached to it.
Celebrity sex tapes, Girls Gone Wild, and Generation SEX
Older people have wrung their hands over young people's bad behaviour since Plato complained about youth disrespecting their parents and rioting in the streets in the 4th century BC. But at some point in the mid-'00s, anxieties about teens, 20-somethings and sex began to hit a fever pitch.
Part of it was a product of popular culture. The first half of the '00s saw the rise of Girls Gone Wild, which enticed young women to take off their tops and perform on camera in exchange for GGW-branded hats and T-shirts. It saw Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (and later Hilary Duff, Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus) go from artificially chaste Disney stars to artificially sexy pop starlets in the blink of a music video.
Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian parlayed homemade sex tapes into international media empires encompassing jewellery, nightclubs, music, multiple reality-TV shows, and more. Playboy went from a soft-core porn magazine to an aspirational pop culture brand, and Victoria's Secret went from a staid underwear retailer to a family-friendly peep show starring some of the world's most beautiful women.
Enter Ariel Levy, whose 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, flipped the prevailing story about sex and popular culture on its head. Levy's concern wasn't about the proliferation of sex but its representation, and the way that sex and female empowerment had become entwined in a manner that was both ubiquitous and compulsory.
"What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality," she wrote. But the success of Female Chauvinist Pigs also provided a platform for a number of unarticulated anxieties that had been brewing just beneath the surface of public debate, and the news media and commentariat enthusiastically latched on to the idea that young people today – and young women in particular – were more sexually precocious than any generation that had come before them.
On National Public Radio in the US, sex educator Deborah Roffman worried that casual sex was robbing 20-somethings of their capacity to form intimate relationships, while Christian sociologist Mark Regnerus argued in online magazine Slate that "hooking up" tipped the scales of sexual power too far in men's favour, labelling it a matter of "sexual economics".
In Britain's Daily Mail, filmmaker Olivia Lichtenstein reported breathlessly on the "deeply disturbing... generation SEX." In Australia, the newspapers told stories of 10-year-olds smeared with too much lipstick and 20-somethings dropping their pants to shake their buttocks "like G-stringed baboons in oestrus". As one article said, salivating, "They're here, they're mostly bare, and they don't care who's looking."
But although teenagers and 20-somethings were the subject of much of this moralising, the real anxiety wasn't about young people – not really. They were just a lightning rod for a broader set of concerns about a sexual culture that was changing then and is still doing so now, in ways both real and imagined.
And a lot has changed. Over the past half century, the way we form our families has diversified from the cookie-cutter nuclear model that wallpapered popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s to encompass same-sex couples, single parents, blended families and more. We are marrying later and in smaller numbers – in 2013, 28 per cent of American adults had never married, up from just 15 per cent in 1960.
In the space of 50 years, sex has gone from being permitted only within marriage to being accepted within a monogamous relationship to being embraced – in some circles, at least – outside the framework of any ongoing relationship at all. And with the rise of new online and mobile dating technologies such as Tinder and OkCupid, if you're looking for no-strings-attached sex, it is easier to find now than ever before.
"Sex? Not so much."
More than an anxiety about young people in particular, the hysteria over teen and 20-something sex that emerged in the '00s was rooted in a fear that, in an attempt to create a sexually liberated society, we had accidentally unleashed more freedom than we could handle.
When I first began to notice these articles in my early 20s, I was sceptical of how accurate they were.
Like most university students, most of my friends had had sex at some point, whether it was with a high- school sweetheart, a one-night stand, or a first love they had met on campus. Some of them had had casual sex, or had hooked up in relationships that petered out before either party had a chance to define them. But the sex my friends were having didn't look like the scandalous descriptions in the newspapers or the aspirational hedonism in the magazines we read.
It wasn't just our experiences that diverged from the media stereotypes. In the US, the Online College Social Life Survey found that 72 per cent of university students engage in some kind of hook-up at least once by their final year, but it also found that most of them don't do it all that often, with 40 per cent of those surveyed hooking up with three or fewer people over the course of their university career. Nor did hooking up necessarily translate to the type of sexual activity that most people who write about its dangers might imagine. Only one-third of students had engaged in intercourse during their most recent hook-up. Even more telling, one in five students hadn't hooked up at all.
These statistics were echoed in stories I heard from young people across the English-speaking world. "A lot of people say that uni is so full of sex," reported Shannon, a pretty first year university student. "And it is a pretty party-hard environment in terms of drinking. It can be full-on. But sex? Not so much."
For most 20-somethings, not taking a stranger home at the end of a party is more typical than picking someone up. Sarah, 25, hasn't had sex in four years, and not because she is morally or even personally opposed to it. She says, "It just literally has not happened. Like, I have not been in a situation where sex has even been a possibility."
Sarah is attractive and outgoing. Two years ago, she packed her bags and moved from her native Melbourne to live and work in Beijing, where she is studying Mandarin. During her university years, Sarah channelled some of her thirst for excitement into her sex life, sleeping with guys she met at house parties and in her local theatre scene. She is yet to have a serious boyfriend, but she had her first threesome the same year she lost her virginity. Then, all of a sudden, she stopped hooking up entirely.
Officially, it was a one-night stand gone wrong that caused her to take pause. She had met a guy at a house party, and at the end of the night they went up to his room to have sex. "I wasn't really planning it, I was just such a go-with-the-flow kind of person back then," she says. After it was over, they went back downstairs and he showed her out. It had been nice meeting her, he said. And then he shut the door.
Sarah had had one-night stands before – in fact, they were the only type of sex that she'd had. But this felt different from all the times before. "I think with the others, there was at least some pretence that they would call," she says. And Sarah always wanted them to call. On reflection, she concedes that most of the guys she slept with weren't great matches for her anyway. "I never stopped to think if we got along. It was just all being young and wanting to love life. And to have these exciting hook-ups. And yes," she admits sheepishly, "wanting them to call."
After that night, Sarah didn't just stop hooking up with strangers. She stopped having sex altogether. At first it was intentional, a bid to regain control over her body and emotions.
Now Sarah channels her thirst for excitement into non-sexual aspects of her life: travel, activism, friends, her blog. But she admits that she sometimes feels like she is missing out. "I have this angst, this feeling that now is the youngest and hottest I'm ever going to be," she says. "I feel like I should be 'out there' more. I mean, sex is fun, and relationships are fun. I get jealous hearing about other people's interesting love lives, and feeling like I'm missing out on that."
Where once we were condemned for being too sexual, today we are admonished for not being sexual enough. Where it was considered perverse to engage in any activity more adventurous than the missionary position, today you risk being labelled boring if you don't. In our attempt to overturn the rules that once governed our sexuality, we have replaced one brand of regulation with another.
The old sexual regime was repressive because it narrowed people's options in a manner that was both painful and psychologically unsustainable. If you were gay, you weren't allowed to be with the person you loved. If you were a woman, sex was fraught with risk and stigma. But it wasn't just the terms of the regime that needed to be dismantled. It was the very fact that there was a regime at all.
Tall and classically handsome, 24-year-old Caleb could hook up on a regular basis if he wanted to. And he does from time to time, making out with girls he meets at parties and out at bars. But Caleb is still a virgin – partly by choice, and partly because the right woman hasn't come along yet.
Until recently, Caleb played cricket on a semiprofessional level for a competitive team in his home town of Melbourne. But Caleb's attitudes toward women set him apart from his teammates and meant that no matter how well he played the game, he was always on the outside of the group.
"It was a high-grade team, so you got a lot of egos," he says. Not to mention a lot of bragging. In warm-ups, the team would play a game they called "roots and pulls", in which they'd go around the circle and discuss who had had sex, who had jerked off, and who had done nothing sexual at all the previous week.
One of Caleb's teammates kept a topless photo of every woman he'd had sex with on his phone, while another claimed to have bedded 45 people when he travelled through Canada for three months. "You're in an environment that encourages high performance," Caleb explains. "Who can run the fastest? Who can do the most sit-ups or the most push-ups? It's a very competitive kind of masculinity."
Caleb never bought into that culture of one-upmanship, preferring to stay silent when the subject of sex was raised, which made him "pretty much the resident gay bloke" in his teammates' eyes. "You could be the biggest player going around, but if you don't talk about it, they immediately assume that nothing happened. It's a bizarre environment." Eventually, he decided to switch to a lower grade of cricket. "You play a sport because you love it, but in a team sport, so much of your enjoyment comes down to getting along with your teammates."
But there is a growing ambivalence towards "bro culture". "The idea is that you get drunk a lot, you have your bros, and you all go out together and have the confidence that you are going to get laid," Nate explains when I ask him about his attraction to the subculture.
"It all sounds pretty f...ing good," he admits. "But at the same time, the ideal bro – he treats women like shit. He's the guy who sleeps with a woman, then automatically says, 'All right, are you ready to leave now?' When it comes to sex, the 'bro culture' often comes down to 'Be the biggest arsehole in the room and get laid'. " It is a strategy Nate used himself, hitting on girls with boyfriends to try to get them to cheat, bailing on plans when a better option came along, and brushing off girls after he had sex with them. "But at the end of the day, is that who I want to be? Is that who I want to tell other girls I am? Or tell my parents I am? There is a fine line between being an arsehole as a hook-up strategy and having it become who you are."
There are signs that the way our culture speaks about sex is starting to change – that we are starting to question the standards that have been laid out for us, and even beginning to question the Sex Myth itself. The major force driving this shift is the internet, which with its plurality of voices and lower barriers to publishing has allowed a greater variety of sexual stories to be heard than ever before.
Websites such as Jezebel, Role Reboot, The Good Men Project, The Hairpin, and Feministing have carved a niche for themselves as myth-busters that question received wisdom and challenge our perceptions of what it means to be "normal" in the process. The crowd-sourced Tumblr site Do Tell collates anonymous sex stories from women that look nothing like the confessions typically aired in women's media. Instead of stories about public sex or bikini waxes gone wrong, the accounts on Do Tell are tales of profound triumph and shame.
A new brand of sexual freedom
These changes in the dialogue have begun to trickle down to popular culture, too. When Lena Dunham's cult HBO series Girls first hit our screens in 2012, it was praised for its unglamorous, "awkward" depictions of young people's sex lives. "I feel like I was cruelly duped by much of the television I saw," Dunham told The New York Times. With her show, she said, she aspired to create a more realistic picture of 20-something sex.
But what is even more radical about the show – and what sets Girls apart from previous "gritty" or confronting depictions of young people and sex, such as Skins or Gossip Girl – is the relatively tangential role that sex plays in its characters' lives. The young women on Girls have sex – in some cases quite a lot of it – but sex isn't what keeps them up at night or what they grill each other about, Sex and the City-style, over brunch. On Girls, sex is just an ordinary part of life, something that happens (or doesn't happen) between eating a cupcake, going to the bathroom, and ruminating on the state of your creative and economic prospects. Sometimes it is great, sometimes it is terrible, but most of the time it is just a thing.
There are signs, too, that we are beginning to grow tired of the Sex Myth and its mystical elevation of sex as the most powerful and profound act known to humankind. When third-wave feminist author Naomi Wolf published her book, Vagina, in 2012, she was criticised by New Yorker journalist Ariel Levy for "situating the essence of the female" in the body, and specifically, in one particular part of it: the vagina.
Where Wolf believed that the vagina was "a gateway to a woman's happiness and to her creative life" and even the source of her connection to "the Goddess", Levy argued it was just another body part like any other – and certainly no substitute for a woman's brain.
It is time to forge a new brand of sexual freedom, a freedom that incorporates the right not to do as much as the right to do. A freedom in which our sexual choices and histories are not burdened with such an excess of significance, in which there is no stigma attached to the gay, the transgendered or the sexually audacious, but in which there is equally no stigma attached to the asexual, the vanilla or the carnally prudent.
And then there is the ultimate freedom: the freedom in which these desires and experiences can be just one small part of the puzzle of who each of us is, instead of the load that defines us.
Edited extract from The Sex Myth: The Gap Between our Fantasies and Reality by Rachel Hills (Penguin).
