#209: The death of sex, 3 years later

Three years ago I wrote an essay called “The Death of Sex,” and over the past month I’ve noticed it making the rounds on Substack again. I haven’t been able to identify who or what caused this, but when I revisited the piece to see whether the surge in pageviews ought to embarrass me (it didn’t, thankfully), I realized it was ripe for revisiting for other reasons, too.

The essay was about the sexlessness of 2022 life: the nitpicking culture wars, the gamified pleasures of being anti-social, the unrelenting push to flatten and digitize human values. When I used the word sex I meant it metaphorically—as a “euphemism for earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence. Essentially everything the internet can’t meaningfully give us.” When I published it, Allison P. Davis’s piece about the “vibe shift” had just gone viral, crypto and NFT commercials had just dominated the Superbowl ad breaks, and there were murmurs about the return of “indie sleaze.” Recalling all this made me wonder if, in hindsight, the predicted shift had indeed occurred, and if it had, where it’s landed us regarding sex.

One way our vibes shifted over the past three years is that the question feels more grating than ever. As a cultural heuristic, we’ve officially killed “vibes”:

via The New Yorker, Jacobin, The Atlantic, CNBC, Sam Kriss

But when I take the question seriously, I have to admit the answer is undeniable. Things feel substantially shifted. Admittedly, I’m fresh off the post-inauguration trend pieces announcing as much (thinking of Brock Colyar’s “Cruel Kids Table”, the prolific coverage of “the broligarchy,” and the “intellectual” rebranding of young conservatives), but it feels like the mic pass to Republicans was more than procedural. As of now, “anti-woke” sentiment appears to be winning the culture wars, if not through ideological dominance than at least through the gutting of the alternative’s momentum. And while many of the new right’s thought leaders fancy themselves edgy for their refusal to play by liberals’ “woke” rules, in reality they’ve merely replaced one rulebook for another. Where this leaves us vis-a-vis sex is, roughly, pouting in a corner in a dunce cap.

In my 2022 essay, I discussed some of the more sexless liberal fixations: personal branding, being extremely online, corporate activism, cancel culture, labels for every type of person and personality, the increasing infantilization of adults, the politicization of everything, the dumbed-down appeal to literalism, internet scolds. These represent, in my view, many of the ways liberals went wrong as the arbiters of the cultural mainstream. Which is why it’s ironic that, in an attempt to rebuke “the left” for these missteps, the right appears to have taken this exact modus operandi (sensitivity, scolding, canceling) and swapped in a different ideology. As Max Read explains it, this cohort, nicknamed the “Soy Right,” is made up of “right-wingers who have adopted the sensitive, aggrieved victimhood pose and corny rhetorical and personal style that they have spent the last 10 years attributing to liberals.” It’s hard to imagine anything unsexier than being offended by pronouns or protesting children’s books.

That Trump has won the support of our tech oligarchs adds an accelerating dimension to all this. Tech is the central villain in the death of sex, and that’s only become truer in the last three years. Setting aside the embarrassingly flaccid promise of NFTs and the creep-turned-tidal-wave of AI integration, tech has always been geared toward speeding things up (efficient, sexless) rather than slowing them down (human, sexy). Just take a look at the latest innovations CES had to offer: a spoon that makes your food taste saltier than it is, a compact that tells you how fast your skin is aging, a stringless guitar, smart glasses that let you watch TV by yourself, and all kinds of at-home tech gadgets that provide health information a doctor could give you (if healthcare were affordable). I won’t deny new tech can be amusing, occasionally very helpful, but it alienates far more often than it communes—unsexy to a T.

The drift away from each other is happening across the political spectrum. In “Left-Wing Irony,” The Point writer Jessi Jezewska Stevens explores how this presents an opportunity for the left. Theorizing that leftwing setbacks throughout the West can be partially attributed to liberals’ rhetorical posture of contempt for those who disagree with them, she believes the left needs to collectively navigate toward a more expansive political vision. This is not a traditional bid to reach across the aisle or compromise on human rights issues, but a challenge to “take others’ good-faith descriptions of the world into account”; find new, more comprehensive ways to describe the world we all live in; and offer compelling alternatives that speak to larger groups of people. She argues this would involve actually modeling leftwing values of democratic pluralism—moving toward rather than away from tension, questioning our assumptions, opening ourselves up to contradiction. It may involve talking to more people offline. “[O]ne cannot begin an argument with the assumption that history, or reality, is on one’s side,” she writes. There’s something alive and sexy about this proposal, like learning to see the beauty in a face you always assumed was ugly. I don’t think she’s suggesting softening convictions, but giving them depth and verve. Solidarity as a practice, rather than a word.

The new right may think they’ve put the sexlessness of liberal orthodoxy to rest, but to me it just feels like a pendulum swing of the cultural dialectic: their recent victories less a widespread embrace of conservative values in the long-term than a cathartic rejection of liberal moralizing in the short-term. Sex, then, is still up for grabs.

The best article I read last week was “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong,” by Eugene Ludwig for Politico—a fascinating look into why Democratic officials kept insisting the US economy was strong when voters’ lived experiences said otherwise. (Shout out to believing people.) Friday’s 15 things also included my beloved new cutting board, my senior portrait, the dark horse of M&Ms, and more. The rec of the week was Valentine’s Day plans, from conventional to less so. Very inspired by these answers to actually do something next year!

On the podcast last week, Danny and I answered six questions that concerned: a husband who doesn’t read, a boyfriend who doesn’t cover his mouth when he coughs (lol), a pubic hair dilemma, a deeply chaotic friend, a pre-wedding panic, and a particular fear about having a baby. Upgrade to listen and access the full paid archive:

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley