Rachel Hills - The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality

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T he first episode of the British teen drama Skins began with a cacophony of phone calls. Tony Stonem, the shows charismatic alpha-male lead, was on a mission: to help his best friend, the hapless but lovable nerd Sid, lose his virginity before his seventeenth birthday. And the key to achieving this goal? We go to a party and get some girl raucously spliffed, joked Tony. In her confused state, she comes to believemomentarily, of coursethat youre attractive. And then she bangs your brains out.

As plotlines go, virginity-loss quests like this one are a standard coming-of-age trope. Think of the pact between four friends to get laid before senior prom in American Pie , or Blair Waldorfs increasingly frenzied attempts to seduce her reluctant high school sweetheart Nate in the first season of Gossip Girl . But when Skins launched in the United States at the beginning of 2011, the notoriously conservative Parents Television Council declared it the most dangerous show for children we have ever seen.

The reaction may have been over the top, but it wasnt surprising. Skins , after all, was a show about young people writ wild that, in the words of PTC president Tim Winter, [made] light of lying to parents and showed all manner of harmful, irresponsible, illegal, and adult-themed behaviormuch of it sexual. And there is little that simultaneously terrifies and titillates more than the spectacle of youth out of control.

Skins , to its credit, took the allure of the out-of-control teenager to a less glamorous place than many of its counterparts. Where the high school juniors on Gossip Girl had earth-shattering orgasms in the backseats of limousines, their counterparts in Skins got it on in bathroom stalls, their adolescent butt cheeks awkwardly on display. Where the teenage cast of the CWs 90210 sipped on cocktails in upscale Mexican resorts without so much as a request for an ID, their equivalents on Skins got wasted at seedy outdoor raves.

But just because Skins employed a grittier brand of hedonism than other teenage dramas doesnt mean that it revealed an unspoken truth of young adult life. To the contrary, shows like Skins tell us exactly what we want to hear: that young people today are more shameless, wanton, and darkly glamorous than any generation before them. They dont challenge our preconceptions of sex so much as they affirm them, while wrapping up our voyeurism with a bow of rebellion. In other words, shows like Skins feed directly into the first layer of the Sex Myth: that our culture has never been more sexually debauched, and that this debauchery is alternately the source of our downfall and our freedom.

Older people have wrung their hands over young peoples bad behavior since Plato complained about youth disrespecting their parents and rioting in the streets in the fourth century BC. And as signs of aging go, that first moment of horror at what the next generation might be doing with their genitals ranks up there with sprouting your first gray hair or hanging up your dancing shoes in favor of a night in with Netflix. But at some point in the mid-00s, anxieties about teens, twentysomethings, and sex began to hit a fever pitch.

Part of it was a product of popular culture. The first half of the 00s saw the rise of Girls Gone Wild , which enticed young women to take off their tops and perform on camera in exchange for GGW -branded hats and T-shirts. It saw Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (and later Hilary Duff, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus) go from artificially chaste Disney stars to artificially sexy pop starlets in the blink of a music video. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian parlayed homemade sex tapes into international media empires encompassing jewelry, nightclubs, music, multiple reality TV shows, and more. Playboy went from a soft-core porn magazine to an aspirational pop culture brand, and Victorias Secret went from a staid underwear retailer to a family-friendly peep show starring some of the worlds most beautiful women.

Where the 1980s had been dominated by antiporn crusaders such as radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the cultural pendulum had swung in a more libertarian direction. The sex wars, which had pitted feminists against one another on the integrity of everything from sex work to BDSM to having sex with men, had been won, and the winning position was that sexual imagery didnt have to be degrading or objectifying. To the contrary: eroticism could be a source of power.

And increasingly, for younger women especially, sexuality had become a key arena in which power was exercised, whether it was books such as The Ethical Slut or The Happy Hook-Up , which promoted the invigorating possibilities of casual sex, or dynamic, successful women such as singer Beyonc, Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard, and would-be lawyers taking off their clothes for soft-core mens magazines like Maxim and FHM .

Enter Ariel Levy, whose 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs , flipped the prevailing story about sex and popular culture on its head. Levys concern wasnt about the proliferation of sex but its representation, and the way that sex and female empowerment had become entwined in a manner that was both ubiquitous and compulsory. What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality, she wrote. But the success of Female Chauvinist Pigs also provided a platform for a number of unarticulated anxieties that had been brewing just beneath the surface of public debate, and the news media and commentariat enthusiastically latched on to the idea that young people todayand young women in particularwere more sexually precocious than any generation that had come before them.

On NPR, sex educator Deborah Roffman worried that casual sex was robbing twentysomethings of their capacity to form intimate relationships, while Christian sociologist Mark Regnerus argued in Slate that hooking up tipped the scales of sexual power too far in mens favor, labeling it a matter of sexual economics. In Britains Daily Mail , filmmaker Olivia Lichtenstein reported breathlessly on the deeply disturbing... generation SEX. In my home country of Australia, the newspapers told stories of ten-year-olds smeared with too much lipstick and twentysomethings dropping their pants to shake their buttocks like G-stringed baboons in oestrus. As one article said, salivating, Theyre here, theyre mostly bare, and they dont care whos looking.

This wasnt the first time there had been widespread alarm about the sexual habits of the young and single. In his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise , F. Scott Fitzgerald told tales of Victorian mothers startled by how casually their daughters were accustomed to being kissed. When the oral contraceptive pill made its debut in the early 1960s, US News & World Report worried that it would lead to sexual anarchy. A 1964 cover story for Time despaired the dawn of champagne parties for teenagers, padded brassieres for twelve-year-olds, and going steady at ever younger ages. The magazine recalled the Orgone Box, a closet-shaped device popularized by Austrian psychoanalyst and sex liberationist Wilhelm Reich in the 1940s, which claimed to unleash the sexual energy of the person inside it. Now, the anonymous editorial lamented, it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box.