Sexual Restraint: The 'New' Sexy

The internet is full of articles about why we should talk more about sex. And one of the most influential concepts to emerge from 2010s Tumblr youth culture was "sex-positivity": the idea that we should all give one another maximum space to explore our diverse sexual desires in a non-judgemental way. 

The implicit assumption is that more openness and less judgement will result in more sex, which will be nice. The sex will be better—also nice. What’s not to like?

Chiefly, the fact that it’s not working. Six decades into the Sexual Revolution, as documented in these pages, America is in the grip of a sex recession. And it’s worst among the young: one 2016 study showed that among young people born in the 1990s, more than twice as many reported no sexual partners after the age of 18 as had been the case for those born in the 1960s and 1970s. 

What’s going on? In her influential 2018 Atlantic article on the “sex recession,” Kate Julian characterizes the resulting openness and sexual diversity:

Polyamory is a household word. Shame-laden terms like perversion have given way to cheerful-sounding ones like kink. Anal sex has gone from final taboo to “fifth base”—Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue) even ran a guide to it. With the exception of perhaps incest and bestiality—and of course nonconsensual sex more generally—our culture has never been more tolerant of sex in just about every permutation.

Julian wonders at how “despite this,” America is having less sex. But one possible explanation never seems to be considered: that this isn’t happening despite the new “sex-positive” culture of openness but because of it. 

The always insightful “Default Friend,” a Bay Area writer on sex and relationships, recently published a set of predictions about “The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity,” that detail an emerging critique of just such “openness.” DF predicts that this will drive phenomena such as a re-emergence of sex roles, younger childbearing, and a wave of neo-trad Gen Z women offering advice on how to be good wives and mothers.

One member of this “sex-negative” vanguard is Charlotte Broukhim, a 23-year-old LA social media influencer, who created an Instagram content about her embrace of modest dress. Her Clubhouse events often gather large groups of Gen Z Americans in condemnation of hookup culture, and wistful hope for a revival of marriage and self-restraint. 

Such gatherings may seem marginal at present. But six decades on from the Sexual Revolution, there’s a growing sense that younger millennials and Gen Z folks are wondering if our collective decision to unchain desire in all its forms really was the unalloyed good we were promised. 

Real “sex-positivity” means mounting a paradoxical, countercultural defence of human sexuality, by embracing the power of restraint as an erotic accelerant. 

Take the “sexual openness” of free-access porn, for example, which now routinely results in teenage girls enduring acts they don’t enjoy, in exchange for the barest signs of affection. Among adults, a recent BBC Scotland survey suggested over two-thirds of men under 40 have spat on, slapped, or choked their partner during consensual sex, with a majority indicating they’d been inspired to do so by porn. 

Do we really believe two-thirds of women under 40 enjoy this kind of violence? I very much doubt it. Certainly the number of girls using the Twitter hashtag #WeCantConsentToThis to tell stories of being “groomed into kink,” often while still children, suggests that the result at least some of the time is not just bad sex but violence and abuse marching under the banner of “sex positivity.” 

In contrast, studies show an inverse correlation between the number of sexual partners and the likelihood of a marriage being happy and stable. And this is even more pronounced for women than for men. The counter-argument suggests “maybe these losers just weren’t getting any, and don’t think they can do any better so they settled quickly.” 

But it’s just possible that the inverse correlation between sexual promiscuity and long-term relationship success obtains in part because it reflects the relationship prospects of people who have exercised self-restraint in the interests of keeping sex special. It’s not wildly implausible that—having chosen a partner—such people are having better sex than the people who embraced sexual openness. A young woman whose first sexual experience is with someone who vowed in a public ceremony to spend the rest of his life with her just might enjoy that experience more than a teenage girl who finds anal sex painful and degrading but submits to it as the cost of getting a boy to hold her hand.

Commenting on the increasingly evident society-wide collapse of sexual desire, writer Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested “our civilization has become bored with vanilla sex and we must move towards a more BDSM […] aesthetic in order to survive.” But what happens when we reach that new level of openness and people become still more jaded? We’re already seeing calls to legalise consensual incest.

Earlier cultures understood the importance of both desire—and its restraint. In Puritan New England, courting couples were strictly chaperoned, but also provided with a long, hollow “courting stick” with which to whisper to one another. Do we really imagine such a combination of supervision and privacy was less conducive to desire than a culture of drunken, loveless hookups? 

Which is likely to be hotter: a casual one-night stand with only a 40% chance of orgasm for women, or a kiss after allowing sexual tension to build over weeks or even months? Which delivers more of a charge: a conversation with carefully half-hidden sexual subtext, or a photo of someone’s genitals? Pointing this out isn’t an argument for sex-negativity so much as reframing what we understand “sex-negativity” to be. 

For it is the proponents of sexual saturation—the “sex-positive” embracers of prostitution, porn, hookup culture, and polymorphous perversities of all kinds—whose net effect is sex-negativity. The cumulative effect of collective assent to ever greater “openness” is libidinal burnout, relational apathy, and a diminishing capacity to form and sustain emotional and sexual connection with others. A culture of deadening, hyper-mediated erotic excess is leaving a generation of young people jaded and numb at the peak of their sexual vigor.

It’s time to reclaim “sex-positive” from the proponents of ubiquitous, porny titillation. Desire is like a liquid: spread over a large open area, it will start to evaporate. But the more it’s pressurised, the more forcefully it will flow. Real “sex-positivity” means mounting a paradoxical, countercultural defence of human sexuality, by embracing the power of restraint as an erotic accelerant. 

Mary Harrington is a UK-based writer, mother, and Contributing Editor of the UK current affairs magazine UnHerd. She tweets as @moveincircles.