The Celibacy Dichotomy
- Posted on
- By L
Is purity culture in the watchful ever-present eye of the internet keeping people from not just having sex, but being able to recognize their own sexual desires at all?
I know, kind of a mouthful. Have you felt more perceived recently? Like the world has started to feel like a window whose curtains you cannot draw closed? Like anyone wearing Ray-Bans might be recording you, like every emotion felt in public is up to the entire world’s scrutiny, that expressing who you are at all externally comes with the heavy price of being hyper-visible to everyone who hates specifically you and specifically what you are doing? Does that make you, like… super horny?
Yeah, me neither.
Scientific journals and gossip magazines alike love to release articles about young people are having less sex than ever. Young people are going to less restaurants than ever, young people are buying less houses than ever, and of course young people are having less sex than ever. But why? What is creating this perceived gen z celibacy? Well… it’s a lot of things. A lot of things that all intertwine and work alongside each other to create a perfect storm of keeping to yourself. Let’s get into it.
ULTRA-COMMODIFICATION OF SEX
You’ve probably heard the term “sex sells”, right? That is truer now than it ever has been before. Whether its women dressed in Shein goth attire on Instagram swallowing whipped cream or shirtless men in aprons fingering bread dough, everything has become coated in a thick sheen of sexuality. Notably- sexuality, not sensuality, not eroticism. The presence and existence of sex, the trademarks of it, commodified through advertisement to spark the little endorphin receptors within your hypothalamus. It can often feel nowadays that things are either sad, cringe, or sexy. And you may notice- only one of those things is a positive adjective. When sex gets commodified to sell a product, whether the product is the subject of the sex itself (think OnlyFans models, hot tub Twitch streamers, Twitter porn accounts) or its secondary to the product, it reroutes your brain to create skewed dopamine reactions, taking the enjoyment and ability to engage normally in sex and sexuality and foisting it into the world of capital- sex is no longer a thing you DO, it’s a thing you CONSUME. You see this in the currently rising gooner culture that’s becoming more and more emblematic of the internet’s revulsion with sex- its disgusting and shameful and deprived to engage in the pornographic landscape of the internet, and therefore one must fetishize the shame and disgust, the frequent self-labelling of “gooner” as a faux-derogatory. Never before has it been more disgusting to be sexy with the expectation to engage in it nonetheless.
THE OVER-CORRECTION OF NEW PURITY
So then what? What happens when you’re not a gooner, when you’re not a depraved jerkoff maniac, or whatever else you are expected to become in the scope of the internet? You try to put as much distance as you can between you and them. You’re not some disgusting masturbation addict, no, you’re an upstanding citizen! You’re a normal person, you don’t even THINK about sex, you’re beyond such things! You pursue noble things, you have less base wants, you’re an enlightened creature! You don’t want sex in your movies, referenced in your music, spoken about in your friend groups, seen on your Twitter timeline- you HATE that stuff, actually. And always have! And always will! It’s quite easy to fall into patterns of rejecting that which disgusts you and trying to make as much space between you and the object of your scorn as possible. But in the same way that the commodification and consumption of sex is unhealthy, the complete rejection of it is equally unhealthy. To deny yourself a base instinct is to deny yourself humanity. Not that everybody wants sex and must have it- no, rather, if you have these urges and desires and you are keeping them under wraps on purpose for fear of becoming that which you despise, you will only find shallow, tepid conversation and movies about nothing. Sex is a part of the human experience, no matter how disgusting or embarrassing it may seem or feel, and when you cut yourself off from that, it’s an easy inroad to cutting yourself off from much of humanity.
That’s really the whole deal. You either have a warped relationship to sex through the lens of commodity and interact with it solely through consumption and disconnect, or you’ve overcorrected so as not to be associated with that first crowd so hard that any possible link to sex is eradicated and sanitized to create the distance. This is obviously not true for everyone, I would argue it’s not true for MOST people. Most young adults I know have a perfectly reasonable and nuanced relationship with sex, which is the same as it ever was. But the reason that the data says young people aren’t fucking anymore is because in the brand new beautiful world of the self-imposed surveillance state, wouldn’t you want to keep something, anything for yourself, too?
On that bleak note, if you want to NOT fall into that dichotomy of having a bad relationship to sex, come visit us! We’re a very open, sex-positive, gender-inclusive, queer and trans friendly store, and we’ll answer any questions you have. It’s hard to find good information out there, and sometimes all you need is a friendly face who’s job it is to know what you’re asking!
Happy discovery!