Opinion: Heterosexuals need better sex rules

If you talk to young people about sex, you may feel an uneasy unease. Nearly half of American adults — and most women — say dating has gotten harder for most people in the last ten years. According to the Pew Research Center, half of single adults have given up looking for a relationship or dating. Rates of sexual activity, dating and marriage hit a 30-year low, with young adults leading the way.

“I think older generations don’t realize how terrifying dating is for the current generation,” one angry young man declared on Twitter, with 18,000 likes. “Absolutely chaotic out there.”

When I interviewed dozens of people for my book on sex and relationships, I found that women, in particular, discussed their sexual experiences in visceral terms: encounters that end in unexpected and alarming acts — an asphyxiation, say, or other pornographic-inspired violence — that they accept out of surprise or resignation. After all, if consent is given (and it often is), there is no reason to protest.

Navigating our love life has always been difficult. But today the general outlook among heterosexual boyfriends has taken on a less amusing and more depressing tone — manifesting itself in what writer Asa Seresin calls “heteropessimism,” a form of feeling “generally expressed as regret, embarrassment and hopelessness about straight experience”.

(Queer relationships, being less reliant on male-female gender dynamics, may present fewer problems — but they aren’t perfect either.)

It is an anesthetic posture young people use to avoid feeling outright sadness at their lack of control and repeated disappointment, or fully acknowledging the pervasive horror of a sexual culture that is not suited to their happiness.

This pessimism comes at a time when we might have expected the opposite. After all, it can be said that we are living in a golden age of sexual freedom.

The average age of people at first marriage is increasing; it is more acceptable than ever to remain single or pursue a wide variety of relationship styles.

Most of the public consider premarital sex acceptable, birth control for women is widely available and, with health insurance, often free. Sexual positivity is celebrated in progressive circles, with sexual adventurism advocated and inhibition often despised. We broke through the walls of repression and the wall of silence that prevented us from expressing our sexuality has largely fallen.

Getting rid of the old rules and replacing them with the norm of consent should make us happy. Instead, many people today feel a little… lost.

“One of the most important pleasures of sexual intimacy,” University of Washington professor and ethicist Fannie Bialek told me, when I asked why this might be the case, is “feeling like you have the possibility of the unexpected — but not too much.” possibility of the unexpected”.

Boundaries, as any therapist would tell you, are necessary and important. By scoping out what is not wanted or acceptable, they make room for everything that might be. And, in our rush to free ourselves, we may have left something important behind.

Dr. Bialek went on to use the analogy of a dinner party to explain some shortcomings in our current romantic landscape. “I know almost everything that’s going to happen when I go to dinner. And the fact that unexpected things happen in the course of a conversation is pleasant, because the unexpected can be pleasant. But it’s within a pretty fair range.”

She continued, “I can be interested in what someone says, rather than fearing they’re going to attack me with a dinner knife. Not having to worry about all these radically unexpected things frees up that attention and that possibility of fun.”

But these days, Dr. Bialek told me, many people “experience far more unexpected interactions in a sexual context than they do at dinner.” Because of our reluctance to recognize a shared set of norms for sex beyond the consent minimum — let alone the fact that we don’t even fully understand that minimum — our current sexual culture can feel painfully ungrounded.

It’s easy to see how overly rigid social regulation has done damage in the past. The sexual revolution happened for a reason. However, we can recognize the benefits we’ve gained – less shame, more acceptance of sexual minorities, recognition of the value of women’s sexual initiative – while acknowledging problems that persist or have worsened. Are there norms we can create or claim today that might, paradoxically, make our romantic landscape freer for all?

That pleasure we get from dinner is based on a clear set of social standards: widely shared and community-regulated understandings of what we expect a meeting to be and how participants should behave. For sexual encounters, establishing these standards will require heated debate, and our view of what sex means in our society must be corrected together.

We will need to make substantial claims about what we consider a good sexual culture, but also be willing to recognize the ways in which certain definitions can be exclusionary and how some norms have negatively affected women and others. We will need to be open to negotiation and to listen to the voices that have been excluded from these conversations. And we will need to have these debates in public.

Still, some new understandings may be needed. Perhaps even casual sex is meaningful, an act unlike any other. Perhaps some practices inspired by pornography –those that eroticize degradation, objectification, maleficence– should not be disseminated. Perhaps we have a duty to others, not just our own desires. We need stronger norms than “anything goes between two consenting adults.”

It’s time to raise the bar on what good sexual encounters look like and hold ourselves and our partners accountable for it. Good sex – that is, ethical – is not simply getting consent so that we can do whatever we want. The ideal we can strive for is to wish our partners well too — and avoid having sex if we’re not sure our partners want it.

This can lead to less casual sex, at least in the short term. But considering the clear dissatisfaction with the current scenario, this is perhaps not so bad.

On a frosty Sunday morning in January, I ran into some college students at a noisy brunch spot on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (New York). A 21-year-old woman described a date where her partner said he didn’t want to have sex, which startled the friends she later told.

“Are we surprised that someone with the opportunity to potentially have sex abstains to prioritize getting to know someone?” she said, still sounding amazed. “It was very kind, but it shouldn’t be so…” her friend interrupted her, “We shouldn’t have to treat you like you’re a unicorn.”

“When you imagine some pleasure,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Epictetus to his students, “wait a little and pause.” We need to recover that break. For those of us raised in the wake of the sexual revolution, this might sound like a call to repression.

But it doesn’t have to be a rejection of our sexuality or desire. On the contrary, it can be more liberating (and initiative-generating) to be able to say no or “no now,” especially in a culture that pushes us to say yes whether we like it or not. Embracing the break can give us space to stop and think, decide what we don’t want — and make room for what we do want.

In all the other situations common to the human experience – eating, drinking, exercising, even sending an email – we find that limits produce healthier results. Sex and relationships are unlikely to be exceptions to the rule. An unbridled sexual culture has not necessarily led to better sex for everyone or better relationships. In many cases it has inspired numbness, insensitivity, hurting others and being hurt. And instead of being exciting, sexual overload became boring.

Rules can make things more exciting, more beautiful, more open to the possibility of something better – even if we’re not quite there yet.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves