Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now

this is what happens when no one reads anything

Recently the actress Victoria Justice made waves by saying that her experience filming a sex scene was uncomfortable. This was catnip to a particularly voluble slice of the People Who Yell Online, those who think that movies should simply not have sex scenes. This cohort has gone from a goofy meme to an inescapable part of online political life, fast. They’re inherently coercive!, they shout. Sex scenes are unnecessary!, they insist. You can just fade to black and convey the exact same information!, they demand. These and all of the points typically used by this excitable crew of terminally-online people are wrong, but they speak with the zeal of those who think the point of politics is to make the world a more comfortable and safe place for them, specifically, always them. And with Justice’s comments giving people ample leeway to ground this discussion in the broad realm of sexual misconduct, they were able to pull in their pet issue under the mantle of opposition to sexual assault or harassment, in so doing raising the rhetorical stakes in a very 21st-century-way. These days victory goes to those who make others say “I’m not getting involved in that.”

As a few brave souls pointed out, Justice had voluntarily agreed to appear in the movie - a movie named Depravity, for the record - and that SAG-AFTRA rules require contracts for films that include nudity or sex to disclose those elements prior to filming. Justice didn’t say anything about not having the information necessary to consensually and contractually agree to the role that she took. She in fact clarified that, as uncomfortable as the scenario was, her director and costars helped to make the shoot as pleasant as it could be, given the circumstances. Besides, there is of course a big difference between complaints that shooting a particular sex scene was uncomfortable and the attitude that no such shoots should exist. It’s entirely possible that the conditions on the set were inappropriate and amounted to sexual misconduct, in which case that should be treated seriously and potentially legally. But that’s not what Justice said, and more importantly that’s not what the conversation online was about. The conversation was about whether sex scenes should just stop existing because they make (some) people uncomfortable. You might note that there’s a little swicheroo there, from a conversation about what’s good for Justice to a conversation about what’s good for the people who don’t like sex scenes.

It was perhaps inevitable that taking sexual misconduct seriously, as with any other social ill, would open the door for opportunistic people to use that effort to get what they want. But it’s particularly bald here; in forum after forum, “should movies ever depict sex?” has been swamped by broad innuendo that anyone who answers “yes” is somehow approving of sexual harassment or assault.

It will not surprise you to learn that I think the case against sex scenes is juvenile and absurd and based on a series of flatly incorrect assumptions. As is the case with actors, consent obliterates the objection - unless someone has strapped you down with your eyes held open like in A Clockwork Orange, you can refuse to consent to watch movies with sex scenes, just like you have the right to refuse to watch movies with violence or voiceover or Dakota Johnson. The claim that you can always just fade to black and imply sex rather than depicting it, as is constantly claimed, is both inconsistently applied and false. Inconsistently applied, because you can say that about literally anything in movies - you could just fade to black right before a fight scene and cut to the next moment, or a dialogue scene, or a courtroom scene, or a scene where the hero learns a lesson about toxic masculinity…. Taken far enough, you end up with opening credits, a fade to black, and end credits. Think of how much time you’ll save!

And that claim is false because it assumes that all sex scenes are the same and contain no narrative, thematic, or character information, which is absurd. The sex in American Psycho demonstrates Patrick Batement’s utter narcissistic blankness, his inability to connect with another human being even in the midst of sexual coupling, pointing to the all-appearances nihilism of 1980s status culture. In A History of Violence, the main character and his wife have sex at the beginning of the film, their physical expression of love demonstrating innocence and tenderness; later on, after their family has been emotionally poisoned by an act of violence, sex between them is desperate, adversarial, and disturbing. In Mulholland Drive, Betty and Rita fall into a sexual embrace that both makes the throbbing homoerotic undertones of the film explicit and which further underlines David Lynch’s intermingling of the ecstatic and the foreboding. The sex between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s characters in Eyes Wide Shut directly dramatizes the movie’s recurrent theme of sex and love as matters of possession, demonstrating the way reflection and voyeurism are inherent to their relationship even separate from their journey into a weird dream world. The sex scene in Love & Basketball shows how our lead characters are still green and unsure in sex, even while they’re so savvy and guarded in so much else in life. The gay sex in The Raspberry Reich literalizes the movie’s belief in the inherent liberatory potential of queer life and queer love. Etc, and etc, and etc.

The New York Times reports that, perhaps, sex is making a comeback in movies. But since only 1.2% of the films released between 2010 and 2020 contained a sex scene, there’s a lot of coming back to do. I couldn’t tell you what the “right” percentage is, but I can tell you that as a species that is the product of evolution, sex plays comprises considerably more than 1.2% of the human experience.

It’s not just that the arguments for “no sex in movies” are unconvincing to me. It’s that I don’t even believe that the people making them are convinced by them. Instead I think that it’s pure visceral emotion being sold as actual argument - most of these people are simply scared of sex. They find it icky and frightening. The good news is that they are of course free to avoid sex in their own lives, to whatever degree they choose. The trouble is that they want to consume pop culture and, because sex is a big of life and narrative art must be free to depict all elements of human experience, they often find themselves confronted with the existence of sex in movies and TV. And it appears that, because they’ve been brought up in a social and political environment that has taught them that their momentary psychic comfort is the only thing that matters, they assume that all of the rest of us have to accept sexless and sanitized movies and television. This is the sort of thing that many people will reflexively groan about, because I’m embracing a point of view that has been communally mocked and rejected, but I believe the cliche position is correct: many young people these days are afraid of the world generally and of sex particularly, a generalized anxiety in the face of the risk and danger that are endemic elements of human life and without which their is no pleasure and no fulfillment.

Here’s the thing that’s really frying my noodle: this is all happening against a backdrop of an endlessly-mushrooming sex industry, driven by OnlyFans and the broader world of pro-am pornography, along with widespread support for sex workers and their rights within the broad world of progressive politics. I mean this both generally (progressive people tend to support sex work and the people making the case against sex scenes are progressives) and specifically (you can search in the feeds of specific people and find that they are both passionately opposed to sex scenes and passionately supportive of sex work.) In other words, there appears to be a lot of people out there who think that paying people to simulate sex on camera is wrong, but paying people to actually have sex is fine. This is, I would put it to you, not a position that can be made coherent. If an adult can consent to trade sex for money, surely they can consent to trade the simulation of sex for money. If an adult can consent to be paid to act in a pornographic film and have actual sex on camera for money, they can consent to be paid to act in a conventional movie and pretend to have sex on camera for money. If on the other hand you are opposed to both trading actual sex for money and trading simulated sex for money, I think that’s not very wise, but it’s at least internally consistent. “You can take money to have real sex on camera but taking money to have fake sex on camera is unethical” is not.

I just find it so bizarre, where we are as a culture when it comes to sex - there’s a lot of explicit “sex positivity” married to a society full of people who find sex scary, in a way that’s connected to a broader fear about human experience and its many risks. The result is a culture where a young woman starting an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and immediately filming herself performing sex acts for cash is seen by many as a matter of feminist empowerment, but where there’s perpetual controversy about whether it’s OK to talk to a stranger on the street. (You know, the reason a lot of us exist, because our parents or grandparents struck up a conversation on the street.) This publication from the University of Pennsylvania reports on “a pervasive shame that straight Gen Z women feel about being attracted to men.” They’re not gay, they’re straight, they’re not rejecting someone else’s attraction, they’re rejecting their own. The mere act of being attracted to the gender to which they are attracted fills them with shame. But also it’s totally not shameful to get into a 50-person orgy with all the members of your extended polycule. Nothing having to do with sex is shameful but sex itself. Desire is shameful. Everything is permitted, except simply existing as a human being with the same carnal desires we’ve shared for 350,000 years.

The “age gap” discourse trundles on. As a society we have a clear interest in criminalizing sex with people below a given age of consent, as the emotional risks of sex can only be borne by those who can consent, and only those capable of understanding what sex really is can consent. But past that age, we often maintain natural concerns when a much younger but of-age person and a much older person date, given the potential for unhappiness of various sorts. And if my niece were dating a man who was 20 years older than she was, I would have some of those concerns. If a close male friend of mine who was 40 was dating a 20-year-old, I would tell him privately that his relationship makes me uncomfortable.

But as modern-day progressivism ceaselessly devolves into a parody of itself, age gap discourse is not allowed to be a matter of concern - that is to say, a matter of thinking, of worrying through certain conditions even while we recognize that often there’s nothing to be done. Instead, age gap issues must be binary matters of black and white, waged with absolute rhetorical maximalism, and bent always towards more and more judgment, even though that judgment usually accomplishes literally nothing. The size of gaps that are considered permissible shrinks and shrinks; I promise you that I am not exaggerating when I say that there are people in this debate who insist that three years difference is too much. Continuity and stability in long-term age-gap relationships are seen as no defense. And so you have this endless social media policing of relationships that, while they may very well justifiably invite raised eyebrows and Marge Simpson noises, simply do not present any opportunity for meaningful moral behavior.

Recently, when a documentary about Steve Martin was released, we saw a little spasm of age gap discourse about his wife, who is 25 years younger. 25 years is a long time! But, my friends, they got together when she was in her 30s, they’ve been together for 20 years, they have a child together, I think we’re safe. I think she’s safe. I think a woman in her 50s whose been in the same consensual relationship for 20 years and who is married to her partner and shares a child with him is not in fact a sex-trafficking victim. And I think therefore there’s simply nothing left to do, morally. There’s no dilemma there, now, if there ever was. You can, in some theoretical way, disapprove. Knock yourself out. But… why bother? To what end? For what purpose? Morality is about what we do. There is nothing to be done with Steve Martin’s marriage, or Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s, or Patrick Stewart’s, even if you find them distasteful. They just aren’t anyone’s business. If you think Steve Martin is making a move on your cousin then you’re entitled to have concerns and share them with her. A decades-long marriage with a woman who is now in her 50s is safe. Save your tweets.

Almost none of this actually stems from, like, political reasoning. It’s not thought out, not the product of logic. The people who yell online have not resolved the tension between being pro-sex work but anti-sex because they’ve never really thought about it. There has been, traditionally, a divide between sex-positive and sex-negative (for lack of a better term) feminists. You have a branch of feminism that has celebrated women’s sexual desire as a rejection of traditional repression of that desire, which then became a broader celebration of LGBTQ sexual legitimacy. Another branch has tended to be much more skeptical of sex, or at least most expressions of sex, fixating on the history of sexual coercion that men have inflicted on women and tending to define sexual harm expansively. I have my own opinions about that divide. What’s important though is that these dueling positions stem from values, from principle, from argument. In the internet era, I’m afraid, those things are getting rarer and rarer. The way that political attitudes have tended to spread, whether right or left, has been mimetically, via social contagion - you log onto your app of choice and you see what everybody else thinks and you want to think that way too, for fear of being unpopular or uncool.

I happen to believe in decriminalization of sex work, and I’m glad that position has spread. But I’m also aware that the reason it’s spread has less to do with a considered weighing of various interests and more to do with the adoption of the term SWERF - Sex Worker Exclusionary Feminist. You see, in the 2020s, that political idea which wins is that which is snappiest. All is branding. If it’s TikTok-able, it might be going places, and what thrives on such networks is that which is simplistic, morally binary, and likely to produce the visceral pleasures of engaging in shameless and righteous judgment.

There has, of course, always been a great deal of politics waged as fashion; always been a great number of people who express political opinion without much grounding in theory or fact; always been a great deal of internal political contradictions even within the beliefs of the most informed; always been a great deal of need for ordinary people who can’t spend all their time on politics to nevertheless engage politically. I understand all of that. But there’s also a threshold past which mimetic politics leaves us in an incoherent pile of conflicting attitudes, unable to fitfully grope our way towards meaning. It’s great that Tumblr and TikTok get people radicalized and engaged. But that kind of engagement only matters to the degree that it gets people reading. Yes, I am ableist enough to say that people who do politics should read! But the endlessly-mushrooming sources of political #content and our era’s fake populism contribute to an attitude that suggests that it’s enough to feel more, to judge more, to be politics instead of to do them. To watch someone talk for 90 seconds about bell hooks and declare yourself an educated political leader. Coherence doesn’t stand a chance. And thus you get totalizing fear of sex among people who are simultaneously lobbing sexual photos and videos of themselves around their high schools, without a second thought.

Yes, I know; I’ve said that young people are afraid of everything and that their political positions are the product of cliquishness and social media substitutes for actual political education. OK Boomer, old man yells at cloud. Well, sorry, I think this is all true, and I think it’s bad. And sooner than you think, the young people won’t be so young anymore, and they’ll be just as fucked up. They’ll be no better able to grapple with the relentless compromise and endless discomfort of adult life, only because they will no longer be young our culture won’t kiss their asses anymore. They’ll suddenly find themselves, like Gen X and the Millennials before them, wandering around a little blankly, wondering where their status as The Youth went. I don’t think we’re doing them any favors by reflexively defending them just because some people reflexively attack them. They get a lot of dumb and unfounded criticism. They also get a lot of criticism because they’re goofy jamokes who don’t let their ignorance trouble their righteousness.

And to state the obvious, if you don’t like sex scenes in movies, don’t watch them.