Culture | Sexuality

The New Puritanism: Living in the Shadows of Sexual Liberation

Where Everything Old is New Again…

This is an article May More 💜 Tales suggested a while back, and I’m very much indebted to her for the discussion that led to it. The political backdrop has only grown worse since then, and made this topic all the more important.

I don’t have a Reddit account — I don’t have anywhere near the stomach for diving headlong into that sort of frenzied battleground — but I do lurk there rather often to try and get a better sense of how the younger generation sees the world. Reddit, of course, isn’t the official voice of Gen Z: there are prolific users twice my age, and, regardless, it’s a very particular audience. But it’s as good an online place as any to put one’s finger to the pulse.

A fairly recent thread on an advice subreddit offered just such a peek at the world we Gen Xers have created. I won’t link to it, but the gist was that a teenage girl talked about how terrified she was of venturing outside her home because she hated the idea of men looking at her, seeing her in a sexual way. She insisted she’d never been sexually abused (and had never had any intimate experiences at all) and didn’t come from a particularly repressive or religious home, but she’d seen how men talk and think online and hated the thought of being subjected to their attention.

That’s a horrible way to feel about yourself and the world. What’s worse was the advice given — and that’s what truly left me heartbroken for her.

On a very bland and mainstream advice forum, the uniform response was agreement that her feelings were justified and that she shouldn’t have to go outside and subject herself to the possibility of male attention. No one tried to reassure her that most people are too wrapped up in their own lives to take notice of us, that the world isn’t a stage and an audience watching our every move (this was the advice from a cognitive-behavioral therapist that helped me overcome such fears). No one brought up that some men aren’t attracted to women, and some women are attracted to women, and some people aren’t attracted to either, and so we really can’t be sure of whose attention we’re holding unless they make a point of telling us.

One reply in particular haunted me, a sympathetic remark about how awful it is to realize that men are born with a “weapon between their legs” that they can use to hurt any woman they want. No one disagreed. The idea that sex could be anything other than violence wasn’t even a consideration. That thing between men’s legs is a weapon to hurt women.

It’s been fifty years since the sexual revolution. Is this its legacy?

Everybody Must Get Laid

For one brief, glorious time in the 1970s — a time mostly before I was born, but instrumental in my sexual awakening — female sexuality ran wild and free in the media, without any cynical ad executives or Hollywood moguls who knew how to make a profit off it. They were certainly trying, but no one had cracked the code yet, and all their different efforts in different directions meant that everyone’s voice had a chance to be heard.

In 21st-century hindsight, I suppose it must have felt a little like the 1990s and the early days of the internet, when nobody had figured out how to monetize it and the future seemed wide open. Playboy started publishing letters from women about women’s desires, and Playgirl arrived in 1973. Harlequin romance novels exploded in 1971. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) hit the bookshelves in 1969 and was then bizarrely adapted into a Woody Allen comedy in 1971. The I Am Curious films arrived, and then the Emmanuelle movies, and then a whole genre of gauzy French art-house erotic films that focused on women’s sexual escapades. Second-wave feminism had a message for the patriarchy: Women think about sex too, and we’re joining the conversation.

By the turn of the century, though, something had gone very wrong.

For one thing, Hollywood had now found its secret for making money off sexual liberation: “If you can’t join them, beat them.” Instead of marketing to female sexuality, it just ramped up the crudeness of male sexuality to make men the loudest voice in the room again. Welcome to the age of Porky’s and Debbie Does Dallas and 2 Live Crew, and then American Pie and Bloodhound Gang and The Hangover. The intimacy of sex, the vulnerability and overwhelming power of eroticism, found its antidote in gross-out humor and brute physicality. Sex was reduced to boner jokes.

At the same time, the message of the sexual revolution became distorted. What had originally been the freedom of grown women to embrace their sexuality became a demand for young women to embrace sex itself, to treat it as worthless, and to never expect more. We’ve always had pressure to avoid being a “slut,” but now “prude” became the Scylla to its Charybdis. Slut or prude — we have to pick a poison. Which will it be?

A whole generation has now grown up seeing sex through that jaded lens. My childhood perspective on it all was filled with religious metaphors about sin and seduction, Eve and the Serpent. It was repressive, it shamed victims of abuse into silence, but it also acknowledged the power of sex. Sex could save or damn our souls. It could transform the world.

I‘m not sure trading that for “sex is worthless” was an improvement.

Meet the New Boss…

One Reddit thread doesn’t prove much by itself. There are plenty of other subreddits out there that are sex-positive, and still others that are toxic in entirely the opposite direction. Still, a trend did strike me in my wide-eyed lurking of its discussions. Myths that we thought we’d dispelled decades ago are creeping right back into popular culture: women aren’t interested in having sex; women don’t have fantasies; women don’t masturbate.

Among erotica writers, all of this is shockingly outdated thinking. This is precisely the regressive mindset that sexual liberation fought to overcome. But we’re all in our twenties and older: most of us, in my experience, are at least approaching middle age. And the voice we fought so hard to gain is being silenced by the same forces that drowned us out before.

Have you heard of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation? Sounds very official and impartial, doesn’t it? You’d probably think it was a government agency or maybe a nonprofit organization, something along the lines of Amnesty International. After all, who isn’t against “sexual exploitation?” That just means stopping sex traffickers and abusers, right?

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is a decades-old right-wing religious group that, until 2015, was called Morality in Media. Its stated purpose is to abolish all pornography, including erotica: its first court case in 1963 was a failed effort to ban the 1748 novel Fanny Hill. It’s opposed to same-sex marriage and to sex education. And it’s winning.

NCOSE is the reason why Medium’s erotica writers have to worry about the threat of demonetization: in 2020 the group successfully pressured Visa and Mastercard to stop supporting Pornhub, other pornography websites, and anything else that fits their definition of “pornography,” which includes erotic literature. Those are the rules payment processors like Stripe are now following. We’re being pushed into the shadows.

When I started working as a cover designer and editor this year, my first payment was almost immediately declined by the processor: I had three minutes to celebrate my first happy client before the other shoe dropped. Why? Because I have a reputation as an erotica writer. It didn’t matter that the work in question was mainstream fiction. My name and every financial transaction associated with my name had been blacklisted by that company because I’ve written indecent stories that promote immorality. This isn’t a warning about things to come: it’s the world we live in right now.

A very dear friend (who I won’t name since I don’t know that they want such details shared) was rejected by a mainstream publication for also being an erotica writer. They certainly weren’t submitting erotic fiction and they had no intention of ever doing so, but their association with explicit sexual content alone was enough to make them untouchable.

If portraying sex is taboo, writing about sex is taboo, and teaching about sex is taboo, then who’s left to set the record straight when someone says that women don’t like sex and don’t fantasize about it? Who can reassure a fearful teenager that being sexually noticed is not, all by itself, a bad thing, and that a penis is just a wiggly bit of flesh, not a sword that gives every man the power to cleave our virtue in two whenever he likes?

No one, that’s who. And that’s just the way the ones pushing this like it.

Make Sex Beautiful Again

It’s hard to overstate just how much the push to financially ban erotic content over the past decade came from NCOSE and how much cultural damage it’s done all by itself. Still, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. The sexual revolution lost its way: what should have given everyone the freedom to acknowledge and celebrate their sexual selves turned into pressure for everyone to embrace meaningless sex. The pressure to conform may have changed directions, but it never stopped being pressure.

Online porn certainly didn’t help things. My first brushes with erotica involved books of old letters and nude paintings, but it’s very easy these days to Google search your way right into the deep end of the kink pool, with dog collars and whips, with choking and slapping. I think some of those things can be hot, in the right context. Would I have felt that way at age twelve? No, I’m pretty sure I would’ve found the concept of sex awful if that’d been my first glimpse of it. For a lot of Gen Zers, that’s their very first glimpse of sex. Now they find the concept of sex awful, and some very powerful conservative groups are quite happy to agree with them — and to protect them from ever having to see or think about sex.

So what’s the answer? Well, it isn’t to declare every frank portrayal of sex immoral and it most certainly isn’t to ban same-sex marriage and sex education classes. I don’t know if there’s any solution besides to keep doing what we do and refuse to be shamed for it. Maybe all we’ll have to show for it is a moral victory while we wait for the pendulum to swing again.

But in those early days of sexual liberation that I love so much, there was a beauty to erotic fantasy that commercialism eventually swallowed up. People often make fun of such a tone these days: there’s a sort of tall-poppy syndrome in the mainstream where any erotica that doesn’t mock itself is ridiculed for being pretentious. But there’s nothing pretentious about honestly appreciating the beauty of sex, in trying to express how blissful and transcendent it can be. If some people sneer at the thought of us trying to share that, maybe it’s because they’ve never experienced it.

Each week I’ll be posting a chapter from the Dreadful Desire erotica series, a collection of taboo, sometimes forceful — but never degrading — sexual fantasies. You can find links to my Medium stories in this handy compendium…

And now there’s a Dreadful Desires novel! The five-part supernatural romance The Fallen Sky is available in an omnibus edition that contains the complete erotic fantasy adventure. You can find it on Kindle and Smashwords!