007: The sexless generation
It’s one of the most private and most politicised things we do. So what does the state of sex tell us about ourselves in 2024?
Last Saturday night, for reasons best known to us, we (Divya and Diana, hi!) found ourselves flicking through old magazines from 2003. That’s officially ‘vintage’ now — so vintage that when Diana asked the sales assistant in the vintage store, “Is this top early-2000s enough for a Y2K party?” she just narrowed her eyes and said, “I don’t remember the early 2000s, obviously.”
Our overwhelming takeaway from noughties mag land? Hoo boy, has a whole lot changed since then. Much has been written about the hyper-sexualisation of female bodies in the early 2000s (e.g. the paparazzi’s penchant for upskirting). But it wasn’t just women that were sexualised. Apparently, everything was sexy in 2003: a blender, an orthopaedic mattress, and a big bowl of salad were all advertised via pictures of near-naked women. Honestly, flicking through these glossies was like stepping into the psyche of a randy tween — kind of depressing but also… hilarious?
It got us thinking: what role does sex and sexiness have in our culture now? Without a doubt it’s a good thing that, unlike 20 years ago, we don’t use gratuitous female nudity to advertise household objects. But does it also reveal something else? There was this NY Times piece that basically said that, across all demographics, people are having less sex than ever. And what about all these reports that Gen Z is quite prudish? Are they accurate, or is it just more intergenerational infighting? Does improved education about consent and the ‘dangers’ of sex mean… less sex?
What’s been on our minds this past fortnight…
Divya: Our little foray into 2003 crystallised an idea that’s been swimming around in my mind for a while now: as a society, I think we’re much less sex-focussed than we used to be. I’m really not saying I think we should emulate the weird, objectifying horniness of the early 2000s. But what does the fact that Mormon-coded tradwives are some of our most popular influencers and Gen Zs say they want to see less sex on screen say about where we are now?
Diana: Yes! We’re very concerned with not objectifying anyone, and when we do talk about beauty it’s often in a more abstracted sense, of self-love and feeling powerful. It’s like there’s less space to just… talk about how hot people are lol. Like, where has horniness gone? Have we found a less leery outlet for it, or has it just vanished?
Divya: You know where there is space for sexiness? In Bridgerton. It’s like it has to take place in a very removed-from-reality context. I mean, it’s probably the most mainstream ‘sexy’ show of the last few years, but it’s… a period drama. Same with Outlander. Same with The Great (amazing show). And even Lady Chatterley's Lover (the Emma Corrin one). Explicitly raunchy stuff like The Idol was roundly (and fairly) criticised. This can’t be a coincidence.
Diana: Same with books. Fantasy is in a very horny moment. I’ve heard a lot of people describe A Court of Thorn and Roses as dragon-porn (and they mean it as a compliment!) Is it something about sex in a fantastical or non-realistic context that makes it safe? Or just sexier?
Divya: I think it has at least something to do with the restrictions and restraint (societal taboos/honour/familial duties) of those fantastical and historical worlds. In our world, sex is very accessible. Watching porn is so easy. And dating app culture has made it such that you can, theoretically at least, sleep with people with a swipe and a quick text exchange. Is it that the permissiveness and ease of where we are, sexually, has made it… not that exciting?
Diana: Which is why people retreat to imaginative spaces, where there are taboos and artificial limitations.
Divya: With literal corsets! Quite the heavy-handed metaphor.
Diana: I was thinking about it in terms of writing, too. Whenever you’re trying to dramatise an attraction between two characters, it’s all about delaying the moment of gratification. For an audience, what’s sexy narratively is never the actual sex. It’s the lead up.
Divya: And that’s why Fleabag, the Hot Priest, was so popular. That tension. That unavailability. The repressed desire.
Diana: I also wonder whether the fact that we now frame sex around consent is having an impact.
Divya: I don’t think I’ve read much (not from anyone who I would consider reasonable/not a right-wing misogynist) about, I guess, any negative aspects of the way we talk about consent.
Diana: Totally, and I’m so wary of being seen to be criticising what is obviously an unmitigated good thing. We love consent! But I also think we need to be able to have conversations where we take for granted that consent is crucial. Then we can ask other questions. Because consent is necessary, of course, but it’s not sufficient: you can have perfectly consensual sex that’s still unfulfilling and fraught and weird.
That’s partly why feminist academics have always had reservations about hinging the ethics of sex on consent — it puts something so intimate and complex in this very neat, transactional context. Like, I think that’s sort of where our culture is at right now. We’ve started to conceive of sex as a series of transactions. And there’s something so unerotic and almost businesslike about two parties negotiating what they want and what they’re prepared to do for each other. All of which is obviously compounded by dating apps which, as you said before, makes sex so accessible that it’s almost unromantic. It just becomes this very boring assertion of preferences, and exercise in desire-satiation. Like online shopping.
Divya: It’s all very logical and clean and buttoned-up. Where in reality, actually being a person in a body is about being spontaneous and responsive.
Diana: Exactly! And also… being confused and, like, a mystery to yourself. Which is another argument philosophers make — basically, that consent is an imperfect mechanism because it presumes that you know what you want and can articulate those desires. But most people have no idea what they really want! And often what’s sexy is those sublimated desires: the things we don’t know we want, or feel we shouldn’t want. Do you remember that character in White Lotus Season 2? The young guy who tries to seduce Portia? And she’s like, “Stop asking me if it’s okay! Just make a move!” He’s so deferential to what she wants but the whole point of her character is that she doesn’t know what she wants.
Divya: That is fascinating. I get what you’re saying. But it is overall better to have people who are hyper-educated, right? And over-cautious? Over the alternative.
Diana: Absolutely. It’s way better to have a society full of men who are excruciatingly deferential to what women want, rather than, like, entitled opportunists. Needless to say, I’d rather be Fleabag or Portia than a victim of abuse. But it doesn’t mean Fleabag and Portia’s problems — not knowing what they want; wishing someone would just tell them what to do — aren’t real, or, like, very true to our cultural moment.
Divya: I do think there’s also something about the fact that politics has entered the conversation about sex on so many levels. Post Me Too, we read about sex so often in the context of abuses of power. We don’t talk about sex now, really, without also talking about power dynamics — whether that’s the ethics of employee-employer relationships, or age-gap relationships, or even more difficult topics like sexual violence.
And then in the US, so many states are stripping abortion rights. I guess it means that when sex comes up in culture — in news, in magazines, in documentaries, in podcasts — it’s often fraught and complicated and political. Unless it’s at a Bridgerton ball, which is ‘allowed’, it’s not ever really portrayed as healthy, or fun, or safe.
Diana: I think you’re right. There is a distrust of sex, you see it portrayed negatively from so many angles and you can’t really afford to decouple sex from fear and politics, ever.
Divya: It’s not really a productive environment for sexy sex.
Diana: And maybe society will advance to a point where we can sexualise our contemporary world in a way that’s fun and playful and de-politicised — the way we currently do with fantasy worlds.
Divya: In the meantime, I’m just grateful it’s not 2003. Because what does this even MEAN:
OTHER SEXY (OR NOT-SO-SEXY) LINKS
This New Statesman piece says that Gen Z are the most socially conservative generation in the UK. This one says the same about the US.
The Right to Sex. This book of essays by philosopher Amia Srinivasan is probably Diana’s most-recommended nonfiction book of all time. And not just because she likes everyone to know she did philosophy at uni. (She did, though. She might not have mentioned it.) Srinivasan covers everything from incels to the porn industry, and makes well-worn debates seem newly complicated and urgent.
Apparently Challengers is a really sexy film? We couldn’t see it before we wrote this edition because it came out in the UK a bit later than in Australia. But we can’t WAIT. Has anyone seen it???
What we’ve loved this past fortnight…
Divya
Object: It’s happened. I’ve finally given in to the low-profile sneaker trend. My downfall was these Adidas SL 72s. This is such a great example of kind of hating a trend for a long time — I never got into Gazelles or Sambas at the height of their popularity — and then suddenly, some switch flicked somewhere, and I’m j’obsessed. Why are we like this? Is it a matter of saturation? Have I finally seen enough damn pictures of these on the algorithm and my brain just decided to give in? Or is it some contextual switch — maybe someone styled them in a way I actually like — that I didn’t even notice? Thoughts welcome!
Experience: In New York City’s Lower East Side this week a whole bunch of writers from around the city assembled to take part in a 52-hour marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s wacky modernist The Making of Americans. Lydia Davis! Natasha Stagg! Et al. I can’t stop thinking about how wonderful it is, the idea of bringing art to life like that in such a communal way, passing on the reading baton to the next person and the next and the next until the last page is turned.
Taste: Rochelle Canteen is a restaurant in a bike shed at the back of an old school in east London and yes, doesn’t this all sound a bit like that fake restaurant that that Vice guy made up in his garage and convinced reviewers was the hottest table in town? That is a piece of pop culture I hope I never forget. Anyway, this is not that: Rochelle Canteen is very real and also lived up to my other expectations, which were: earthy, British, and very sweet. Confirmed on all counts.
Diana
Object: Spring means I’m back in the pool (or “lido” as it’s inexplicably called in London). The water is heated but the pool is outdoors so the dash to the changerooms can be 🥶🥶🥶. I’m reminded every single time how obsessed I am with my Jamoo jumper. A Sydney-based brand that up-cycle vintage towels, Jamoo is admittedly expensive. Even when I bought mine over 3 years ago, friends mocked me for paying so much “for an old towel”. But I stand by it!! On brusquer days, the prospect of a cosy, post-swim Jamoo hug makes the difference between getting in the water and staying in bed.
Experience: One of my favourite new podcasts is the New Yorker’s Critics at Large. If you like this newsletter but wish it was a podcast, you might find that this scratches a similar itch: three writers have wide-ranging discussions about cultural themes. The one on Ripley narratives (also covering Saltburn and White Lotus) is a great starting place.
Taste: I’m an absolute sugar addict… minimum one treat per day (which ofc doesn’t include treats-that-are-meals, like croissants for breakfast). After almost a year in London I have found The Best Treats. For moisture, decadence, and value-for-money, it’s a tie between the Gail’s Reverse Cookie and the OG Cookie at Fantail, Islington.
Bye for now!
Divya and Diana xx
Thanks for such a great conversation. That shredded wheat ad is incomprehensible and I can't stop thinking about it.
Nothing better than a post swim jamoo hug 💕