Recent research published in The Journal of Sex Research has uncovered intriguing findings about how different types of pornographic content are related to sexual satisfaction and function among young adults. The findings indicate that while pornography themed around passion and romance is linked to higher sexual satisfaction, content focusing on power, control, and rough sex tends to be linked to lower sexual satisfaction and function, particularly among cisgender men.
Pornography is widely accessible and forms a significant part of many adults’ sexual experiences. While previous research has shown mixed outcomes on sexual satisfaction and function, these studies primarily focused on the frequency of pornography use without considering the nature of the content. The vast array of sexual themes in pornography, ranging from romantic and consenting acts to more aggressive or non-consensual scenarios, prompted researchers to explore how these different themes potentially affect users.
“Pornography use is often blamed in popular media to explain sexual dissatisfactions and sexual dysfunctions. However, results related to the relationship between pornography use and sexuality are mixed,” explained study author Marie-Chloé Nolin, a PhD student at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and member of Marie-Pier Vaillancourt-Morel’s SAIL Lab.
“As a diversity of pornographic contents is available on pornographic websites and experts in the field have suggested to examine the context in which the pornography is used to shed light on the mixed findings, we chose to examine the associations between the frequency of use of different contents and sexuality.”
Researchers conducted the study using a convenience sample of 827 young adults, varying in age from 17 to 30 years, who were recruited through university email lists, advertisements on Kijiji (a popular classified advertising platform), and targeted social media campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Once recruited, participants were directed to complete an online survey. This survey was part of a larger longitudinal study focusing on digital technologies and intimate relationships among adolescents and young adults. The survey was designed to be comprehensive, including sections that assessed sociodemographic characteristics, detailed pornography use habits, sexual satisfaction, and sexual function.
The frequency of masturbation was also recorded and used as a control variable in the analysis to differentiate the effects of pornography use from other sexual behaviors that might influence sexual satisfaction and function.
The researchers found that men were more likely to view almost all types of content more frequently than women, except for power, control, and rough sex pornography, which saw no significant difference in consumption rates between genders. This indicates a potential shift in the traditional understanding of gender preferences for pornography, suggesting that aggressive content is not more appealing to men than women as often presumed.
Passion and romance pornography was highly popular, with the highest usage reported by cisgender men (83.06%) and gender-/sex-diverse individuals (83.33%), and a significant prevalence among cisgender women (56.97%). This type of content typically involves scenarios that depict intimacy, mutual pleasure, and emotional connections, which might resonate more with positive sexual values and expectations.
Multipartner sex pornography also showed substantial usage across genders, particularly among cisgender men (78.07%) and gender-/sex-diverse individuals (75.00%), and less so among cisgender women (45.41%). Taboo and forbidden sex content was most favored by cisgender men (84.05%), showing high engagement from gender-/sex-diverse individuals (75.00%) and considerably lower usage by cisgender women (31.47%).
Power, control, and rough sex pornography had moderate popularity, with the highest usage among gender-/sex-diverse individuals (62.50%), followed by cisgender men (39.20%) and cisgender women (29.28%).
Importantly, the researcher found a positive association between the consumption of passion and romance-themed pornography and higher sexual satisfaction across all participants, regardless of gender. Individuals who frequently watch this type of pornography might experience an enhancement in their sexual satisfaction, possibly because these themes align better with real-life sexual experiences that are consensual and pleasure-focused.
In contrast, pornography that included themes of power, control, and rough sex was associated with lower sexual satisfaction. Such content often involves dominance, aggression, and sometimes non-consensual acts, which might lead to unrealistic or harmful sexual expectations. These themes could also induce feelings of guilt or discomfort due to a mismatch between the depicted acts and personal moral values or real-life sexual preferences.
Regarding sexual function, the researchers found a significant negative relationship with power, control, and rough sex pornography among cisgender men. This finding suggests that viewing aggressive or coercive sexual content could potentially distort men’s sexual expectations or desensitize their emotional response to normal sexual activities, leading to difficulties in achieving sexual arousal or satisfaction during partnered sex.
Passion and romance pornography, on the other hand, was unrelated to sexual function, which might suggest that the content that aligns more closely with real-life sexual behavior does not negatively influence sexual health.
“The use of passion and romance pornography (i.e., romantic place, romantic sex or couple having sex, massage, and mutual masturbation) was associated with higher sexual satisfaction, while the use of power, control and rough sex pornography (i.e., sadomasochism, bondage and domination, spanking, and rape/sexual assault) was associated with lower sexual satisfaction,” Nolin told PsyPost.
“Cisgender men’s use of power, control and rough sex pornography was associated with lower sexual function (i.e., more difficulties related to sexual desire, arousal, and orgasm). These results could be explained by how using specific pornographic contents creates sexual expectations that can vary in their levels of realism or of how actually satisfying they can be when recreated with a partner.”
But the study, like all research, includes some caveats. “Given the correlational design, no causal inference can be made,” Nolin noted. “For example, this means that we do not know if people who use more power, control and rough sex pornography are less sexually satisfied because of their pornography use or if people who are less satisfied turn to this type of content to cope with their dissatisfactions.”
Additionally, the sample, though diverse, primarily consisted of young adults and may not represent older age groups or varying cultural backgrounds.
Future studies should look to longitudinal designs to better understand the directionality of these relationships and expand the diversity of participants. Researchers could also explore other contextual factors that influence the relationship between pornography use and sexual outcomes, such as relationship status, the presence of a sexual partner during consumption, and individual psychological traits.
— How these terms changed and why states now want to define them
Transgender rights advocates rally at the Kansas capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024. In 2023, the state enacted a measure that says there are two sexes, male and female, based on a person’s “biological reproductive system” at birth.
This year, 17 state legislatures sought to narrowly define “sex” or “gender” in state law as based solely on biological characteristics. In Utah, one became law.
Although they’re sometimes used synonymously, “sex” and “gender” have different meanings to medical professionals. Sex traditionally refers to one’s biological characteristics, whereas gender is how a person identifies.
Laws redefining sex in state law could require driver’s licenses and identifying documents to display a person’s sex assigned at birth, a policy that transgender advocates say would lead to discrimination.
After decades of creating laws that assumed “sex” and “gender” were synonymous, lawmakers across the country are taking another look at how states define those terms.
Scientific and legal interpretations of these words have evolved considerably in the past century. Today, medical experts understand biological sex assigned at birth as more complex and consider it distinct from gender identity.
In 2020, the Supreme Court also broadened its understanding of sex discrimination in employment to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Grappling with this cultural, scientific, and legal shift in the meaning of “sex” and “gender,” lawmakers in some states have tried defining the terms narrowly in state law as biological and binary. In 2023, four states passed such laws and, this year, 17 states introduced bills defining “sex.” Some bills in Florida and West Virginia were defeated, but 15 bills are still advancing in states across the country.
This focus on terminology may seem rhetorical, but these legislative changes can restrict access to driver’s licenses and documents that match a person’s gender identity. Transgender rights advocates say that requiring IDs to match the sex a person was assigned at birth can expose transgender Americans to discrimination.
So, how do we understand these terms, and what could these definitions mean for everyday life once codified?
How have the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ evolved?
Until the mid-20th century, Americans’ understanding of “sex” was largely biological and binary.
“For a substantial time period, law in the United States defined identity categories, such as race and sex, in biological terms,” said Darren Hutchinson, an law professor at Emory University law professor.
In the 1950s and ’60s, psychological research emerged that differentiated biological sex from “gender.” Researchers coined terms such as “gender roles” as they studied people born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that didn’t fit the typical definitions of male or female and observed how children sometimes developed identity distinct from their biological sex.
By the early 1960s, the term “gender identity” began appearing in academic literature. By 1980, “gender identity disorder of childhood” was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ third edition. This inclusion signaled that the concept of gender identity “was part of the accepted nomenclature being used,” said Dr. Jack Drescher, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.
Before the 1970s, the word “gender” was rarely used in American English, according to research by Stefan Th. Gries, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He said evidence suggests it was used mostly when discussing grammar to describe the “gender” of a noun in Spanish, for example.
Edward Schiappa, a professor of communication and rhetoric at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in his book “The Transgender Exigency” that the rising use of “gender” in English coincided with the term’s introduction into psychological literature and its adoption by the feminist movement. Feminists saw the term as useful for describing the cultural aspects of being a “woman” as different from the biological aspects, he said.
After the 1980s, gender’s term usage rose rapidly, moving beyond academic and activist circles. In common American English, “sex” and “gender” began to be used more interchangeably, including in state law — sometimes even in the same section of the law.
In Florida’s chapter on driver’s licenses, for example, the section on new license applications uses “gender,” but the section on replacement licenses uses “sex.”
Modern legal and scientific views of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’
Sex is a biological category determined by physical features such as genes, hormones and genitalia. People are male, female or sometimes have reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical definitions of male or female, often called intersex.
Our legal understanding of “sex discrimination” has also evolved.
In 2020, the Supreme Court decided Bostock v. Clayton County, a series of cases in which employers were accused of firing employees for being gay or transgender. The court held that this was a form of “sex discrimination” prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Whether the court will extend this interpretation to other areas of federal law is unclear, legal experts told us.
How have lawmakers responded to this shift?
Recently, lawmakers have tried to codify their understandings of “sex” and “gender” into law.
In some cases, these laws aim to recognize and protect transgender Americans. The Democratic-backed Equality Act, which passed the House, but not the Senate, in 2019 and 2021, would have federally protected against discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity. Some states have passed similar equality legislation, creating a patchwork of anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people.
But lawmakers in many Republican-led states have proposed narrow definitions of sex and gender that would apply to large sections of state law. “Women and men are not identical; they possess unique biological differences,” Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds said in a press release detailing her support for the state’s version of such a bill. She added, “This bill protects women’s spaces and rights afforded to us by Iowa law and the Constitution.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds speaks July 28, 2023, at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa.
Opponents reject the idea that the bills relate to women’s rights and claim the bills are an attempt to “erase” legal recognition of transgender people.
The Kansas Legislature, for example, passed the “Women’s Bill of Rights” overriding Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. The law says that “pursuant to any state law or rules and regulations … An individual’s ‘sex’ means such individual’s biological sex, either male or female, at birth.”
The law defines male and female as based on whether a person’s reproductive system “is developed to produce ova,” or “is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”
The Kansas law also states that “distinctions between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms and other areas where biology, safety or privacy are implicated” are related to “important governmental objectives” a condition required under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Rose Saxe, lawyer and deputy project director of the LGBTQ and HIV project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Kansas law does not explicitly require those spaces to be segregated by “sex” as the bill defines, but tries to justify policies that would do so.
Current bills defining ‘sex’
This year, 17 more states considered bills that would narrowly define “sex” and/or “gender” in state law according to the ACLU’s anti-LGBTQ legislation tracker. One, Utah, signed a definition into law, and 10 other states are advancing 15 bills combined. In the remaining six states, the bills were carried over to next year or defeated.
The Utah State Capitol is viewed March 1, 2024, in Salt Lake City.
Some bills, such as Arizona’s S.B. 1628 change the terms for the entire statute: “This state shall replace the stand-alone term ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ in all laws, rules, publications, orders, actions, programs, policies, and signage,” it reads. The state Senate passed the bill 16-13 on Feb. 22, along party lines with Republicans in favor.
Other bills, such as Idaho’s H.B. 421, don’t replace the word “gender” but declare it synonymous to “sex.” Gender, when used in state law, “shall be considered a synonym for ‘sex’ and shall not be considered a synonym for gender identity, an internal sense of gender, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender role,” reads the text of the bill, which passed the Idaho House 54-14 on Feb. 7.
Saxe said the bills could have a cascading effect on other laws.
Transgender rights advocates say access to identification that matches an individual’s identity and presentation is important. “If you can’t update the gender marker on your ID, you are essentially outed as transgender at every turn,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality to PolitiFact for a previous story on drivers licenses in Florida. This can happen during interactions with potential landlords, employers, cashiers, bartenders and restaurant servers.
“Even in the states that have passed these bills,” said Paisley Currah, a political science professor at the City University of New York, “there’s still going to be these contradictions,” because a person’s driver’s license might not match the gender on their passport, for example.
“Unless you’re a prisoner or immigrant or you are in the Army, the government actually doesn’t get to look at your body,” said Currah, who wrote a book on how government agencies address “sex” categories. “It’s always some doctor that signs a letter … and so there’s always a document between your body and the state.”
How these sex-defining laws would affect state agencies remains to be seen. And the laws may face court challenges, likely on the grounds that they violate the Equal Protection Clause or right to privacy, Saxe said.
In the United States, gender has been considered a relatively ordinary term. We are asked to check a box on a form, and most of us do so without giving it too much thought. But some of us don’t like checking the box and think there should be either many more boxes or perhaps none at all. The myriad, continuing debates about gender show that no one approach to defining or understanding it reigns. It’s no longer a mundane box to be checked on official forms.
The anti-gender ideology movement, however, treats the range of sometimes conflicting ideas about gender as a monolith, frightening in its power and reach.
The fear of “gender” allows existing powers — states, churches, political movements — to frighten people to come back into their ranks, to accept censorship and to externalize their fear and hatred onto vulnerable communities. Those powers not only appeal to existing fears that many working people have about the future of their work or the sanctity of their family life but also incite those fears, insisting, as it were, that people conveniently identify gender as the true cause of their feelings of anxiety and trepidation about the world.
The project of restoring the world to a phantasmatic time before gender promises a return to a patriarchal dream order that only a strong state can restore. The shoring up of state powers, including the courts, implicates the anti-gender movement in a broader authoritarian, even fascist project. We see the rolling back of progressive legislation and the targeting of sexual and gender minorities as dangers to society, as exemplifying the most destructive force in the world, in order to strip them of their fundamental rights, protections and freedoms.
Consider the allegation that “gender” — whatever it is — puts children at risk through programs such as reading books with queer characters cast as examples of indoctrination or seduction. The fear of children being harmed, the fear that the family, or one’s own family, will be destroyed, that “man” will be dismantled, including the men and man that some of us are, that a new totalitarianism is descending upon us, are all fears that are felt quite deeply by those who have committed themselves to the eradication of “gender” — the word, the concept, the academic field and the various social movements it has come to signify.
The resulting authoritarian restrictions on freedom abound, whether through establishing LGBTQ+-free zones in Poland or strangling progressive educational curricula in Florida that address gender freedom and sexuality in sex education. But no matter how intently authoritarian forces attempt to restrict freedoms, the fact that the categories of women and men shift historically and contextually is undeniable. New gender formations are part of history and reality. Gender is, in reality, minimally the rubric under which we consider changes in the way that men, women and other such categories have been understood.
As an educator, I am inclined to say to these people, “Let’s read some key texts in gender studies together and see what gender does and does not mean and whether the caricature holds up.” Reading is a precondition of democratic life, keeping debate and disagreement grounded and productive.
Sadly, such a strategy rarely works.
A woman in Switzerland once came up to me after a talk I gave and said, “I pray for you.” I asked why. She explained that the Scripture says that God created man and woman and that I, through my books, had denied the Scripture. She added that male and female are natural and that nature was God’s creation. I pointed out that nature admits of complexity and that the Bible itself is open to some differing interpretations, and she scoffed. I then asked if she had read my work, and she replied, “No! I would never read such a book!” I realized that reading a book on gender would be, for her, trafficking with the devil. Her view resonates with the demand to take books on gender out of the classroom and the fear that those who read such books are contaminated by them or subject to an ideological inculcation, even though those who seek to restrict these books have typically never read them.
To refuse gender is, sadly, to refuse to encounter the complexity that one finds in contemporary life across the world. The anti-gender movement opposes thought itself as a danger to society — fertile soil for the horrid collaboration of fascist passions with authoritarian regimes.
We need to take a stand against the anti-gender movement in the name of breathing and living free from the fear of violence.
Transnational coalitions should gather and mobilize everyone the anti-gender ideology movement has targeted. The internecine fights within the field must become dynamic and productive conversations and confrontations, however difficult, within an expansive movement dedicated to equality and justice. Coalitions are never easy, but where conflicts cannot be resolved, movements can still move ahead together with an eye focused on the common sources of oppression.
Whether or not people are assigned a gender at birth or assume one in time, they can really love being the gender that they are and reject any effort to disturb that pleasure. They seek to strut and celebrate, express themselves and communicate the reality of who they are. No one should take away that joy, as long as those people do not insist that their joy is the only possible one. Importantly, however, many endure suffering, ambivalence and disorientation within existing categories, especially the one to which they were assigned at birth. They can be genderqueer or trans, or something else, and they are seeking to live life as the body that makes sense to them and lets life be livable, if not joyous. Whatever else gender means, it surely names for some a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way.
As much as someone might want to clutch a single idea of what it is to be a woman or a man, the historical reality defeats that project and makes matters worse by insisting on genders that have all along exceeded the binary alternatives. How we live that complexity, and how we let others live, thus becomes of paramount importance.
There is still much to be understood about gender as a structural problem in society, as an identity, as a field of study, as an enigmatic and highly invested term that circulates in ways that inspire some and terrify others. We have to keep thinking about what we mean by it and what others mean when they find themselves up in arms about the term.
Sexual minorities say they have faced a wave of abuse since Uganda’s harsh anti-LGBTQ+ law was enacted last year
Tough laws targeting homosexual acts or abortion in African nations are often preceded by lobbying from American hard-liners. Often well-financed, these networks campaign against equality and diversity.
By Martina Schwikowski
Fundamentalist Christian churches from the United States are increasingly gaining power and influence in societies and political spheres across Africa. Many of them have been whipping up negative sentiments against LGBTQ+ people and abortion rights.
Haley McEwen, a sociologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, has examined some of their influential networks.
“US Christian right-wing groups have been very active in the US foreign policy since the early 2000s,” McEwen told DW.
“There are several organizations that have been around since the 1970s — and in the early 2000s they started to increase their influence internationally.”
Conservative activists often portray LGBTQ+ people as alien imports who threaten African societies
According to McEwen, the networks also focused on UN organizations “in response to the advances being made by the international feminist movement to gain recognition of sexual and reproductive health and rights within the UN frameworks.”
‘Hatred from outside our history’
These conservative activists — who describe themselves as “pro family” — seem only interested in safeguarding one special type of family: heterosexual, monogamous nuclear families ordained by marriage.
“We continue to advocate that this is hatred that is deliberately being stirred, that it is not organic and not within our history and it is actually producing the conditions for violence and assault of LGBTQ+ persons in Kenya,”Irungu Houghton, Kenya director at Amnesty International, told DW.
Homosexuality has always been being practiced discreetly in what is now Kenya, according to Houghton. British colonialists enacted the first laws that criminalized gay sex in the 1930s.
Influence comes with money
These days, it’s African leaders who introduce the new laws — which is why they’ve been targeted by far-right networks from the US.
According to McEwen, these groups want to win over African leaders in order to implement what is being described as “family friendly agendas” — both in their home countries and internationally at the United Nations.
McEwen said this influence was also being exerted by funding African organizations which domestically propagate “nuclear family” policies and oppose LGBTQ+ rights and comprehensive sexuality education.
There is a homegrown network of such groups in Africa, but according to McEwen, they heavily rely on funding from outside Africa.
Who’s funding the anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment?
UK-based media platform openDemocracy published a 2020 report that examined more than 20 American Christian groups.
The paper revealed that the groups — which are known for their campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights, access to safe abortion, contraceptives and comprehensive sex education — have spent at least $54 million (€49.5 million) in Africa since 2007.
One of these groups is Christian conservative organization Family Watch International (FWI) which, according to openDemocracy “has has been coaching high-ranking African politicians … to oppose comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) across the continent.”
According to activist Frank Mugisha, director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, FWI was highly influential in the genesis of Uganda’s legislation.
However, FWI said in a statement on its website that it is “opposed to the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023” and it “opposes legislation that penalizes a person for having same-sex sexual attractions or for their gender identity.”
“Family Watch opposes the death penalty or harsh penalties in the context of Uganda’s pending law and other similar bills,” according to the statement.
Africa’s tough anti-LGBTQ+ laws ‘stirring up hatred and acrimony’
Shortly afterward, Uganda passed the law, and a Kenyan lawmaker proposed a bill that has often been described as “copy paste” of the Ugandan law. The Kenyan bill is still undergoing parliamentary procedures.
In Ghana, a similar bill was recently passed by parliament. But it’s still unclear when and whether president Nana Akufo-Addo will sign it into law.
“There is a direct link between the emergence of hate bills in Uganda and Ghana and now Kenya with these interests,” said Amnesty’s Houghton.
“We have been very concerned that this is not only focusing on stirring up hatred and acrimony between societies but is also focusing on reversing many gains with regards to comprehensive sex education and sexual productive health rights.”
As a child of the Eighties and Nineties, I remember well that homosexuals were fair game in the mainstream media. One columnist in The Star railed against “Wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers, lezzies — the perverts whose moral sin is to so abuse the delightful word ‘gay’ as to render it unfit for human consumption”. After the death of Freddie Mercury, sympathy in The Mail on Sunday was limited. “If you treat as a hero a man who died because of his own sordid sexual perversions,” one writer cautioned, “aren’t you infinitely more likely to persuade some of the gullible young to follow in his example?”
It was sadly inevitable that the AIDS crisis would exacerbate this ancient prejudice. A headline in The Sun declared that “perverts are to blame for the killer plague”. And while a writer for the Express held “those who choose unnatural methods of self-gratification” responsible for the disease, letters published in its pages followed suit. One reader called for the incarceration of homosexuals. “Burning is too good for them,” wrote another. “Bury them in a pit and pour on quicklime.” Someone had been reading his Dante.
I happened to come out in a much less hostile climate. In the early 2000s, we were enjoying a kind of Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold. We weren’t generally on the receiving end of homophobic slurs, but nor were we patronised by well-meaning progressives. My memory of this time was that no one particularly cared, and I was more than happy with that. Being gay for me has never been an identity, it’s simply a fact, as unremarkable as being blue-eyed or right-handed.
And so it has been troubling to see a resurgence in the last few years of the kind of anti-gay rhetoric that was commonplace in my childhood. Of course, it could be argued that the rise of social media has simply exposed sentiments that were previously only expressed in private. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, before the digital era “we couldn’t read every toilet wall in the world. And now we can.”
Yet the most virulent homophobia appears to be coming from a new source. Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:
“Cis gay men are a disease.”
“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”
“I hate cis gay people with a burning passion.”
“If you’re a cis gay man and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave.”
“Cis gays don’t deserve rights.”
“There’s so many reasons to hate gay people, most specifically white gays, but there’s never a reason to be a transphobe.”
“It’s time to normalise homophobia.”
Of course, any bile can be found on the internet, but these kinds of phrases are remarkably commonplace among certain online communities. Even a cursory search will reveal innumerable examples of gender ideologues casually branding gay men “fags” or “faggots”, praising the murder of gays and lesbians, and claiming that the AIDS epidemic was a positive thing. Many thousands of examples had been collated on Google Photos under the title “Woke homophobia: anti-gay hatred & boxer ceiling abuse from trans activists & gender-identity ideologues”. The site was taken down last year, presumably because it violated Google’s policy on hate speech — or perhaps because it revealed the toxicity of the ideology the company has spent so long promoting.
If such ideas were restricted to the demented world of internet activism, we might be justified in simply ignoring it. But we now know that the overwhelming majority of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Whistleblowers have spoken out about the endemic homophobia, not simply among clinicians but also parents who were keen to “fix” their gay offspring. And of course there was the running joke among staff that soon “there would be no gay people left”.
And now a series of leaked internal messages and videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), has revealed that clinicians in the leading global organisation for transgender healthcare have openly admitted in private that some teenagers mistake being same-sex attracted for gender dysphoria. The result of the “gender-affirming” approach has amounted to what one former Tavistock clinician recently described as “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s list of psychiatric disorders in 1993, and yet here we are medicalising it all over again.
So how did we reach the point where gay conversion therapy is being practised in plain sight by the NHS? Much of the responsibility has to lie with Stonewall, a group that once promoted equal rights for gay people but now actively works against their interests. It has even gone so far as to redefine “homosexual” on its website and resource materials as “same-gender attracted”. It should go without saying that gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, any more than lesbians should be denounced for excluding those with penises from their dating pools. What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.
“What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.”
Indeed, activists often claim that “genital preferences are transphobic”, or that sexual orientation based on biological sex is a form of “trauma”. The idea that homosexuality is a sickness was one of the first homophobic tropes I encountered as a child. Now it is being rebranded as progressive.
As for Stonewall, its former CEO Nancy Kelley went so far as to argue that women who exclude trans people as potential partners are analogous to “sexual racists”. She claimed that “if you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions”. It is worth remembering that Stonewall is deeply embedded in many governmental departments and quangos, as well as corporate and civic institutions. Anti-gay propaganda is being reintroduced into society from the very top.
Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service has been meeting with trans lobby groups such as Mermaids and Stonewall to discuss changes to prosecutorial policy in cases of sex by deception. Since these meetings — only revealed after sustained pressure from a feminist campaigner who submitted Freedom of Information requests — the CPS has recommended what Dennis Kavanagh of the Gay Men’s Network has described as “a radical trans activist approach to sex by deception prosecutions that would see them all but vanish”. In trans activist parlance, the barriers to having sex with lesbians and gay men are known as the “cotton ceiling” and “boxer ceiling”. Now it seems the establishment is attempting to support the coercion of gay people into heterosexual activity.
Consider a recent post on X by Stephen Whittle, OBE, a professor of equalities law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In a reply to LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson, Whittle took issue with the notion that “love is all about genitals” (an argument that Jackson has never made). Having dismissed this straw man as “a very hetero/homo-normative perspective”, Whittle then claimed that “a lot of gay men can’t resist a young furry ftm [female-to-male] cub”.
While it is true that there are some bisexuals who identify as gay, it is simply not the case that homosexual men “can’t resist” certain kinds of women. As Jackson rightly noted in her response, this is rank homophobia, “disturbed and disturbing on every level”. Yet it has been expressed by an individual who has been described as a “hero for LGBTQ+ equality”. With heroes like these, who needs villains?
Another example is Davey Wavey, a popular online influencer, who has encouraged gay men to perform heterosexual acts in a video called “How to Eat Pussy — For Gay Men”. It may as well have been called “Gay Conversion Therapy 2.0”. We are firmly back in the Eighties, where gays are being told that they “just haven’t found the right girl yet” and lesbians are assured that they just “need a good dick”. And yet now these demeaning ideas are being propagated by those who claim to be defending the rights of sexual minorities.
The Government’s recent guidance on how schools are to accommodate trans-identified pupils — in which biological sex will take precedence over identity — has been met with horror from gender ideologues. One of the common refrains one hears from activists is that it represents “this generation’s Section 28”. But this is to get it precisely backwards. Gay rights were secured on the recognition that a minority of the population are same-sex attracted. In dismantling the very notion of sex and substituting it for this nebulous concept of “gender identity”, activists and their disciples in parliament are undoing all of the achievements of previous gay rights movements.
The widespread homophobia of the Eighties, epitomised by Section 28, was based on the notion that homosexuality was unnatural, dangerous and ought to be corrected. Present-day gender identity ideology perceives homosexuality as evidence of misalignment between soul and body. In other words, it seeks to “fix” gay people so that they fit into a heterosexual framework. It is no coincidence that so many detransitioners are gay people who were simply struggling with their sexuality. Gender identity ideology is the true successor to Section 28.
The proponents of this revamped gay conversion therapy dismiss our concerns as “transphobia” and “bigotry”, or as part of a manufactured “culture war”. Worse still, the new homophobia is being cheered on by those it will hurt most. While prominent gay figures continue to feed the beast that wishes to devour them, we are unlikely to see this dire situation improve any time soon. It was bad enough in the Eighties, when gay people were demonised and harassed by the establishment. Who thought we would have to fight these battles all over again?
Google has revealed the top sex questions people asked this year – and it’s made me slightly concerned for everyone who lived before the internet.
Honestly, what the hell did people do before its creation?
You’re telling me they nipped over to the local library and scanned the shelves to find out the answers to their explicit questions?
I don’t think so.
But of course, with the creation of the internet also comes data that can be stored and analysed, allowing Google to come up with the very list we’re reporting on today.
It might be embarrassing to think about how Google probably knows exactly whether you’re among the people asking these questions, but at least you’ll know you’re not alone.
So, let’s get on with it shall we?
10 – How do fish have sex?
I bet that’s not where you thought we’d be starting, is it? But it’s a valid enough question, even if it’s never crossed your mind before.
If you’re curious now, I can tell you that fish apparently aren’t so bothered about having sex as they are with reproducing.
Spawning fish get themselves into what’s known as a ‘nuptial embrace’, where the male wraps his body around the female and releases milt into the water, while the female releases eggs which are then immediately fertilized.
Fish are more bothered about having babies than getting busy.
9 – Why do I have no sex drive female
There are a number of things that can lower your sex drive as a woman, including relationship problems, stress, anxiety or depression, sexual problems, pregnancy, medicines and hormonal contraception.
If you’re worried about low sex drive, you can get in touch with your GP for advice.
8 – What is anal sex?
Loads of you might be clued up on exactly what anal sex is, but clearly there are a lot of people still out there wondering.
To put it simply, anal sex involves penetration of the anus, rather than the vagina.
You wouldn’t want to ask about anal sex in a library.
7 – How long after a miscarriage can you have sex?
As well as dealing with the emotional effects of miscarriage, there are also a number of physical effects which can impact sex.
People may bleed for a period of time following a miscarriage, during which time
the cervix is dilated wider than normal, making it more prone to infection.
To help ensure you can carry out healthy sex, doctors recommend waiting at least two weeks after miscarriage before inserting anything into the vagina.
6 – How many calories do you burn during sex?
Is it possible to really get a good workout from pleasure?
Research indicates that you can at least equate some fun in the bedroom to light exercise – with one study conducted by the University of Quebec at Montreal revealing that men burned an average of 101 calories in 24 minutes, while women burned 69 calories.
No, I’m not making that number up.
Sex can be considered light exercise.
5 – How many dates should you go on before having sex?
Ah, the age-old question. What is the perfect number? Some live by the three-date rule, while others want to wait until they hit four or five.
Ultimately, it comes down to your own preferences; when you’re ready, whether you actually still like the person after a few dates, and whether you actually want to have sex with them.
4 – Why do I bleed after having sex?
The NHS states there are a number of reasons women may bleed after having sex, including an infection, vaginal dryness or damage to the vagina.
In rare instances, bleeding after sex can be a sign of cervical or vaginal cancer.
If you’re concerned, contact your GP for advice.
3 – What is sex positivity?
There are varying definitions of sex positivity, but generally it’s about openness and appreciation of sex, including sexual orientations, interests, identities and expressions.
Embrace and enjoy it!
Sex positivity is about embracing and appreciating sex.
2 – Can you have sex when pregnant?
There have been a few jokes made on TV and in films about whether the baby could be impacted by the sudden appearance of an unexpected guest in the vagina, but I can assure you that, unless you’ve been specifically advised by a doctor or midwife to avoid sex, the baby will be fine.
A penis or toy wouldn’t penetrate beyond the vagina, meaning having sex is perfectly safe.
1 – What is speed bump sex position?
Here we are, at the most Googled sex question of 2023. I’m surprised positions didn’t come up sooner, but everyone’s clearly spent this year focused on one in particular.
So, what is the speed bump?
Popularized by Love Island star Tom Clare after he mentioned it on the show, the speed bump involves one person putting a pillow under their hips before lying face down.
The pillow forms the so-called ‘speed bump’, though I’m not sure how effective it is at getting people to slow down.
So there you have it, you’ve managed to learn the answers to the year’s top sex questions without becoming a Google statistic.
Sexual health is health — and, boy, did we learn a lot about it this year. After spending 2023 diving into studies, surveys and even pop culture moments that focused on all things sex, I’ve concluded that there’s always more to know about the more intimate side of our lives. Sometimes the things we learned may have felt a little TMI — like, say, the role Christmas ornaments have as potential sex toys. Most of the time, however, the stuff we learned about sex was pretty groundbreaking, such as how there are two types of desire, and neither is wrong.
Here’s a wrap-up of the top six things we learned about sex this year — and here’s to many more fun, sexy facts in the new year.
1. Many women keep a ‘sexual toolbox’
You may not find it at Home Depot, but more than half of menopausal women ages 50 and over who were asked about their sex lives in a September Kindra-Harris poll said that they kept a “sexual toolbox” to make intercourse more pleasurable. These products include lubricants, as well as vibrators, both of which can make sex more fun and comfortable, especially as many menopausal women experience vaginal dryness and other pain during sex, medically known as dyspareunia.
And speaking of lubricant — you may want to be careful about what you put in your own toolbox. If you are using condoms, whether that’s with a sex toy or partner, you should never use oil-based lube, as it can “destroy the integrity of latex condoms,” women’s health expert Dr. Jennifer Wider tells Yahoo Life.
You don’t have to be menopausal to benefit from lube either. “A myth surrounding lube is that people only use lube when something is not quite working correctly,” says Dr. Laura Purdy, chief medical officer at Wisp. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. Many people use lube to make things feel more natural, and lube can be your best friend during sex.”
2. There are 2 types of desire — and neither is wrong
In movies (and, of course, porn) all it takes is someone looking at their partner for Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” to start playing. In real life, sexual psychologist Laurie Mintz says that’s not exactly how things work — at least, not most of the time, and especially not for people in long-term relationships. That’s because there are two types of desire: “spontaneous desire,” which is when you feel aroused pretty much immediately, and “responsive desire,” which means you need some kind of stimulation in order to put yourself in a sexy mood.
“With this type of desire, one doesn’t wait to be horny to have sex, but has sex to get horny,” Mintz says, which means that “the desire follows the arousal, versus the reverse.”
Obviously, there are times when sex is completely off the table between two consenting adults — headaches and new episodes of The Golden Bachelor do exist, after all. However, these two kinds of desire may take some of the pressure off people who may feel like they have a lower libido simply because they don’t feel spontaneously sexual.
Instead of making yourself feel bad because you can’t go zero to 60, try engaging in things that make you feel in the mood before you get to your sexual main event, whether that’s masturbating, kissing your partner or even just relaxing and thinking about sex in the hours leading up to a planned encounter.
3. Young people are having less sex than their parents did at their age
Teen rates of sexual intercourse are declining, according to a 2023 published survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The survey found that only 30% of teens in 2021 said they ever had sexual intercourse, down from 38% in 2019. While, yes, the COVID-19 pandemic did likely have something to do with the declining rates (it’s a little hard to socially distance during sex), some experts think there may be other reasons for the decline, such as more teens identifying as LGBTQ and engaging in sex acts that don’t necessarily involve intercourse.
It’s also possible that young people just aren’t growing up as fast as they once did. Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor who reviewed the data for her book Generations, told the Los Angeles Timesthat more young people are living at home longer and delaying things like getting their driver’s license and going to college — which may also affect their sex life.
“In times and places where people live longer and education takes longer, the whole developmental trajectory slows down,” she said. “And so for teens and young adults, one place that you’re going to notice that is in terms of dating and romantic relationships and sexuality.”
4. People are using strange seasonal things as sex toys
TikTokers love to review the holiday items at Target each year, but Dr. Adam Gaston, an internal medicine physician since 2021, went viral on the platform for a different reason: by reminding his followers not to put said Christmas decor any place it “doesn’t belong.” Sure, that Christmas tree ornament may not be shaped all that differently from a dildo, but spending the holidays in an emergency room because glass broke inside your rectum or vagina is ho-ho-horrific.
Of course, it’s not just the holiday season that gets people hot, bothered and making bad decisions about what to use for sexual gratification: A 2013 case study revealed that things like ballpoint pens, a tea glass and even an eggplant were found in the rectum of different men, so really, why wouldn’t a Christmas ornament be on deck too?
Place those ornaments on your tree and add a silicone-based sex toy on your holiday wish list.
5. Libido gummies (probably) don’t work — at least not how you think
Popping a supplement or chewing on a gummy won’t make you instantly hot and bothered, even as more and more companies are selling libido gummies that claim to put women in the mood for love.
The jury is out on these products, says Dr. Tiffany Pham, an ob-gyn and a medical adviser for female health app Flo Health, as there is “a lack of robust research into the claims behind these supplements,” even as some individual ingredients show promise.
But that’s not the only reason they’re unlikely to be the sole solution for low libido for women: Libido involves more than just physical function and can be affected by everything from stress to past trauma to the connection one has with a partner. If you’re really struggling with a lack of desire, talking with a sex therapist will likely do way more than an over-the-counter supplement. And if you are curious about taking something to boost your libido, make sure to talk to your doctor, who can tell you if it’s safe to explore.
6. Dry orgasms are a thing for men
And Just Like That may be lacking the sex part of its predecessor’s name, but there’s still plenty of sex in the city for Carrie Bradshaw and her friends. In a 2023 episode, Charlotte and her husband, Harry, are having sex when Harry orgasms — only for no semen to come out. After consulting with a doctor, the couple learns he experienced a retrograde orgasm, or a dry orgasm, which occurs when semen enters the bladder instead of exiting through the penis, leading to little to no ejaculation. While Harry is instructed to do kegels — leading to Charlotte training him in the famed pelvic floor exercise — urologist Dr. Fenwa Milhouse told Insider that advice won’t help. Dry orgasms are typically a nerve issue and often caused by certain medications, like ones taken for diabetes, as well as pelvic injuries.
“It’s not dangerous. It’s not detrimental to the person’s body, but it can interfere with fertility because the semen isn’t getting where it needs to be, which is being deposited into the partner’s vagina,” Milhouse told Insider.
Bonus: Here’s how you find your G-spot (which may not be a ‘spot,’ after all)
Ah, the G-spot. If you’re a person with a vagina and have always found this famed alleged center of pleasure elusive, Martha Kempner’s breakdown of the G-spot includes where to find it. The G-spot is on the front wall of the vagina, nearly two inches in. Also worth noting? The G-spot may not be a spot at all but more of a zone, as, according to a 2022 article, there are actually “five separate erotogenic tissues that function in a similar way to the G-spot.”
One theory why stimulating the G-spot feels so good is that people are stimulating the clitorourethrovaginal (CUV) complex, which includes interactions between the clitoris, urethra and uterus, says Debby Herbenick, director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and author of Read My Lips. A come-hither motion with two (well-lubed!) fingers should do the trick.
Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in “Fair Play.”
After an awkward MeToo hiatus, ‘May December’ and other films are showing intimacy in messy, complicated ways again.
By Alexandra Kleeman
In Todd Haynes’s newest film, “May December,” Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) is a 30-something man in a marriage with an unconventional back story. He met his wife, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), the summer after seventh grade — but she was 36 at the time. She went to prison, but they stayed together, and the two eventually married and had three children. The couple are being shadowed by a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who will be portraying Gracie in a movie about the first years of their relationship. As Elizabeth enmeshes herself in their world, Joe opens himself up to her, and one evening, after she invites him to her hotel room, Elizabeth initiates a tentative kiss. “You’re so young,” she says. “Believe me, you could start over.” The two have sex, and we watch Joe thrusting briefly from a bird’s-eye view — a position of surveillance rather than intimacy.
It’s an explicit sex scene, but it is not wholly sexy. Elizabeth and Joe have two distinct sets of feelings and perspectives, and the film’s visual approach captures this sense of dissonance. There’s something concrete, even thrilling, about the fleshly realism of Joe’s slight paunch and the texture of their labored breathing, something beautiful and tragic about the way their interlocking fantasies converge and decouple. It’s an encounter thick with layers of lust, pleasure, self-deception and disappointment. Though the sex is consensual, the viewer’s experience of it is uneasy. It slips from steamy to disconcerting to alienating in a way that, though not uncommon in lived experience, has become less familiar on the screen. After it’s over, Elizabeth presses him on his relationship with Gracie. Joe draws back, wounded: For him, the sex was a way of regaining some of the agency he lost in entering a relationship with an adult as a child. In his eyes, Elizabeth is suggesting that he has no agency at all. We’re observing the discordant, syncopated elements a single sexual encounter can encompass.
Over the last several years, the matter of onscreen sex in the movies has been a continuing source of anxiety for audiences, critics and filmmakers who feel that desire has been shunted offscreen in favor of more chaste fare. In a 2021 interview, the director Paul Verhoeven lamented “a movement toward Puritanism” in Hollywood. Over the summer, buzz around Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” hinged in part on the fact that it was the director’s first film to feature either sex or nudity. As some on X dissected the extent to which Florence Pugh appeared naked onscreen, a repost of an anti-porn TikToker’s reaction to those scenes (“Have a plan and talk about it before you go,” she advised potential viewers who might feel “triggered”) caused a stir among some commentators, who saw it as proof that viewing audiences were caught up in an anti-sex fervor. Whether or not there has actually been a widespread puritanical shift, the portrayal of sex has certainly been complicated by heightened scrutiny in the wake of the MeToo movement.
That cultural moment inspired films that, today, read as artifacts of their time: stories of girlbossed Fox News personalities standing up to misogynist superiors, tragic narratives of sexual violence and recovery, journalism procedurals about the birth of the movement itself. These films reinforced a newly prevailing narrative that sex and systemic injustice often go hand in hand and promised just resolutions wherein abusers and harassers were exposed and punished. Emerald Fennell’s 2020 directorial debut, “Promising Young Woman,” crystallized both tendencies: After protagonist Cassie’s (Carey Mulligan) friend Nina is sexually assaulted during medical school, leading her to commit suicide, she feigns intoxication in bars so she can ensnare would-be assailants. She graduates to enacting her revenge on those she holds responsible for Nina’s death, but the film glosses over some of her crueler stunts. Things end tidily with Cassie’s engineering her own murder at the hands of Nina’s rapist and his subsequent arrest. The film had a slick social-justice message but elided the complex public discourse around accountability in favor of crowd-pleasing turns.
“May December” is part of a wave of movies and television shows that cut against this impulse to use sex as a warning or a cudgel and attempts to bring back sex as sex — as something titillating, seductive, gratifying, provocative and, at base, erotic. This year there are raucous throwbacks to raunchy comedies like “Bottoms” and “No Hard Feelings,” sexual bildungsromans like “Poor Things” and HBO’s lurid “The Idol” and a film adaptation of “Cat Person,” a New Yorker short story that went viral in the first months of MeToo, to name just a few. These films want to depict sex in a broadly appealing way while retaining an awareness of recent shifts in the cultural conversation.
“Bottoms,” for example, resituates the teenage sex comedy in the world of queer adolescent girls. “The Idol” utilizes the recent cultural redemption of maligned women celebrities like Britney Spears as the staging ground for the comeback of its own troubled pop star. Fennell’s new film, “Saltburn” and Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” serve up salacious scenes alongside social critique, underlining the role of sex in gender- and class-based power struggles. “May December” examines the long aftermath of sexual abuse and the way it can haunt desire decades later.
Lily-Rose Depp in “The Idol.”
The influence of MeToo, which forced a re-evaluation of sexual mores throughout our culture, is unmistakably present. But these films push beyond, asking what it means to treat sexual relations as a phenomenon that is related to, but distinct from, power. In her book “The Right to Sex,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan asked whether a focus on issues of consent obscured a deeper consideration of the weird forms that sexual desire can take. To Srinivasan, desire itself is shaped by the conditions of power and is potentially complicit in its perpetuation: To prefer thin white bodies over brown or disabled ones, to take one example, can be a matter of intimate personal preference at the same time as it reflects the influence of the societal norms that shape us. Sexual desire encompasses desires for power, belonging, advantage and disruption that we would not typically think of as erotic.
“For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms,” Srinivasan writes. “On its own terms” means sex that matters in multiple senses, that has sensual weight but does not ignore how politics lends it some of that weight. This new crop of movies is wrestling with what that could look like, interrogating inherited desires and struggling to reinvent them for a new moment. They don’t all succeed, but the failures are revealing.
In “Saltburn,” Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a poor Oxford student whose peers make fun of him for his “Oxfam” clothes and awkward affect. When the aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) takes pity on him, Oliver’s fortunes change. Soon he’s spending a summer at Saltburn, the Catton family’s estate. Felix’s sister, Venetia, lusts after him, while his parents approach him as if he is an alien species. Farleigh, Felix’s queer Black American cousin, a fellow dependent, tries unsuccessfully to get Oliver ejected from Saltburn. Oliver has a trump card, though: When he joins the younger family members in a field for nude sunbathing, he reveals his own sizable member, making himself an object of desire and sexual power. The movie brims with erotic excess as Oliver seduces his hosts one by one.
“Saltburn” is a jumbled, cockeyed update of many genres and stories (“The Talented Mr. Ripley” comes readily to mind), but the genre it’s most interested in revising is the 1980s and ’90s erotic thriller. This tendency to adapt older genres is common among this year’s sex-obsessed films — unsurprising, given that genre itself is a way of revisiting and amending inherited ideas. The erotic thriller was practically invented to hold together audiences’s ugly, contradictory feelings about sex, bringing the craving for erotic encounter into conflict with the looming specter of AIDs and the perceived threat of empowered women. This year’s films find their contradictions among contemporary social issues while embracing more inclusive understandings of desire. Thus even though Fennell is again considering sex as domination — this time a queer weapon of class war — she also wants audiences to think of Oliver’s seductions as sexy.
Alison Oliver as Venetia in “Saltburn”
“Saltburn” deprioritizes the social message of “Promising Young Woman” in favor of tantalizing images. At one point, Oliver propositions Venetia after catching her beneath his window in a see-through nightgown. She protests on account of her period, but Oliver goes ahead and sticks his head under her gown. “It’s lucky for you I’m a vampire,” he quips. Oliver’s sexual aggression is treated as a tool that breaks down barriers of breeding and wealth, a sign of personal strength and cunning. Venetia’s period and Oliver’s transgression against her demurral (along with, perhaps, the disingenuous nature of that refusal) also accentuates the act’s erotic charge — a familiar formula for titillation. In another scene, Oliver forces himself onto Farleigh, who protests and then accepts his enemy’s advances. It’s sex as a disturbing assertion of power over a foe, but it’s also meant to be thrilling for each of the characters and, we assume, the audience.
Oliver’s sexual coercions clash with the film’s crude attempts to refashion the erotic thriller as queer, feminist and class-conscious. Fennell doesn’t seem interested in whether these acts are morally acceptable. Instead, by depicting Oliver’s victims as privileged brats, she gives us permission to take pleasure in his misdeeds. In place of any serious engagement with the strange ways that class, consent, violation and the erotic are messily entangled, Fennell turns to the thriller as a kind of escape hatch. Oliver’s schemes allow her and her protagonist to indulge in dark seduction while evading its repercussions.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the erotic thriller, which if anything is obsessed with sex’s consequences and how desire and vulnerability go hand in hand. A similar misunderstanding happens in “Fair Play.” Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich star as Emily and Luke, two financial analysts at a hedge fund who are in a relationship they must hide from their colleagues. Their relationship is robust — they have period sex (there it is again!) in a restroom at a wedding before Luke proposes marriage — but things sour when Emily is promoted to a position of authority over Luke, who grows jealous. Their sex life cools. As Emily embraces her male colleagues’ chauvinistic work culture and flaunts her new wealth, Luke takes on beta male tendencies, like spending his time and money on a business self-help course. Emily’s promotion plays on his gender-related insecurities, uncovering the misogynist assumptions lurking below their relationship’s surface. They never have a real conversation about what’s going on. Instead, straddling a reluctant Luke, Emily insists that they need to have sex. The performance of a healthy heterosexual order seems more urgent to these characters than grappling with the dissonances between them or the confusing presence of sexist gender norms within their relationship.
Though the premiere of “Fair Play” at Sundance earlier this year was heralded by some press and critics as a contemporary take on the erotic thriller, the little sex it features illustrates underlying conditions rather than posing questions that need to be negotiated or explored. The first sequence leaps from an interrupted quickie to a marriage proposal to a shot of the postcoital couple — less an erotic encounter than a relationship-goals checklist. The second happens during a nightmarish engagement party thrown by Emily’s oblivious family. After a furious shouting match, Emily and Luke begin to have angry sex, but when she tells him to stop, he doesn’t. Rather than staying with the choice the characters have made and exploring the frustrated intimacy that might have motivated it, Luke rapes Emily because, the film seems to say, violence is the only domain in which men can still have the upper hand. We find ourselves in familiar territory: Sex cannot be separated from the malignancy of the social structures that surround it.
“Fair Play” is capable of striking more provocative notes. After Luke assaults her, Emily finds a morally discordant way to reconcile her trauma with the demands of the workplace. She goes to her boss and disingenuously explains Luke’s disruptive office behavior as the culmination of a long period of stalking. This scene puts questions of gender-based violence in queasy juxtaposition with professional ambition. Rather than resting there, though, the movie ends on a shallow note of empowerment: When Emily returns to her apartment and finds Luke waiting for her, she picks up a knife and forces him to apologize for raping her. The ending frames Emily as a victim, asking the audience to take satisfaction in a ready-made trope when the outcome is much more fraught.
Julianne Moore and Charles Melton in “May December.”
Fennell and Domont have produced interesting failures that illustrate the inherent difficulty of returning sex to the screen: Older forms can’t always give shape to the strange eddies that sex inserts into the flow of our lives. This problem animates Todd Haynes’s “May December.” Haynes’s approach suggests that rehabbing the erotic will require a formal invention more rigorous — and far weirder — than what Domont and Fennell attempt.
When we meet Joe and Gracie and Elizabeth (the film is set in 2015, a couple years before MeToo), most see Joe as Gracie’s victim, but for her purposes, Elizabeth is more concerned with what motivated Gracie’s choice and how the couple see themselves. Gracie, whose outward presentation of white feminine fragility and naïveté enables the control she exerts over her mixed-race family, fiercely resists Elizabeth’s attempts to understand her. Joe, on the other hand, seems to be an open book. As he re-examines his relationship through an outsider’s gaze, long-suppressed questions and dissatisfactions come to the surface.
Like “Saltburn,” sexual desire saturates “May December,” though not always in the ways we expect. In one scene, we see Gracie teaching Elizabeth how to apply her favorite makeup, patting the lipstick onto Elizabeth’s open mouth with her fingertip while the two discuss their mothers. In another, Joe sits alone in front of the TV at night, watching a videotaped face-wash commercial featuring Elizabeth on a loop. As she splashes water on her face, rivulets drip endlessly from her eyelashes and open mouth. The camera zooms in each time before cutting to Joe’s rapt gaze. The interplay of the two images is like a dialogue between lovers — the formation of a relation, or fantasy of a relation, in real time. We can’t know why Joe has chosen this image at this moment, what is going through his mind, but we feel the emergence of a consequential desire that will encourage him to question all the other desires that his life with Gracie has stunted.
Haynes is interested in the way the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves buckle under the weight of retrospection and how central the erotic is to that process. The title gestures toward one of the grand cultural narratives that Gracie and Joe use to understand their relationship. Seen through the eyes of a public that has rejected that narrative, though, Gracie’s attempts to frame their relationship as a meet-cute story are chilling. “You know Joe’s been with more women than I have men,” she tries to explain to Elizabeth at one point. Joe tries to tell Elizabeth the same story, beginning with how different he was from other kids his age. “She saw me,” he says, insisting, “I wanted it.” But the insistence rings false. He is hunky yet has the hunch of an older man mingled with a boy’s soft, awkward bulk — a body in arrested development indicating a static mind.
The film’s score and script collude to resist psychological revelations about the characters. The score combines original compositions and an adapted score from the 1971 period drama “The Go-Between,” laying melodramatic music over scenes that contradict their emotional sway. As the movie introduces us to Gracie and Joe’s family, we peer in on a seemingly normal family anticipating a celebrity’s arrival. Then Gracie opens the fridge door to retrieve wieners for a barbecue. Ominous chords sound, and the score’s effect is bizarre, almost comic. What does Gracie feel here? What are we meant to feel, and what are these feelings’ objects? It’s a moment of misdirection, an analogue for the complex, prickly reticence of Elizabeth and Gracie, two characters who refuse vulnerability and self-revelation at every step, but also for the way that we, as spectators of the sexual lives of others (and sometimes our own) rely on defunct tropes that have nothing to do with our own direct experience. If, upon opening the fridge door in anticipation of Elizabeth’s invasion, Gracie sees herself as the besieged heroine of a romantic melodrama, the score pushes us into feeling that way as well. Eventually the score comes to seem like a tool of manipulation similar to the ones Gracie wields against Joe and Elizabeth.
Abuse is at the very center of “May December,” but it is not the only force at work: Joe is bound by a genuine love for and attachment to his children and wife, but he grapples with the contradictions of his situation and is not simply their product. Gracie, in turn, is not only an abuser but a complicated, opaque figure of barbed frailty. The film offers up narratives that might unlock her motivations: child sexual abuse and a subsequent early marriage to an older man — but they cannot fully illuminate Gracie’s desire or her behavior. “May December” is more concerned with repercussions, and perhaps its biggest accomplishment is the way it dwells in the afterlife of abuse with keen attention to emotional weather. In one scene, Joe smokes weed with his son — his first time getting high. He gets caught in a spasm of unacknowledged grief. “Bad things, they happen,” he warns. “And we do bad things also. And we have to think about those things. If we try not to think about it, there’s this. …” He trails off.
Where “Saltburn” and “Fair Play” dismiss sex’s complications in spectacular ways, “May December” stays with the difficulty, avoiding the glib treatment of harm as something that can be resolved through either punishment or self-empowerment. For Joe, Gracie and even Elizabeth, desires of the past haunt their presents, trapping them in harmful situations from which they might never recover — the stakes are scarier than anything Fennell and Domont can conceive. But perhaps most important, as we think through what sexual desire means in complicated times, Haynes’s view of sexuality is multidimensional, taking it seriously as a force that unmakes and remakes us. If there is hope for Joe, a chance for him to make a life of his own, then it is due in part to his ability to desire something new, something other than what he has been handed.
— Examining various players in the field, from established dating platforms to innovative sexual wellness startups, reveals the multifaceted ways technology can serve as a bridge to understanding and acceptance.
How can technology assist us in having more open and honest conversations about sex and sexuality? This question strikes at the heart of a major cultural challenge: the taboos and stigmas around discussing sensitive topics like sexual health and pleasure.
Yet avoiding these conversations leads to negative outcomes on individual and societal levels. The good news is that technology is emerging as a powerful tool to enable shame-free dialogues and create social change.
Platforms enable constructive conversations
A number of platforms provide an opportunity to foster open and constructive dialogues that address sexuality and stigma.
Match, one of the trailblazers in online dating, has consistently refined its platform to foster more nuanced and authentic interactions among its users.
Recognizing the importance of sexual well-being as a component of overall compatibility, Match has integrated features that allow users to communicate their needs and desires more transparently. The profile structures, messaging systems, and compatibility algorithms are carefully designed to create a comfortable space for individuals to express their sexual preferences and boundaries without fear of judgment.
Match’s commitment to creating a user-friendly environment goes beyond mere matchmaking; it encapsulates a drive toward cultivating a community where open communication about sexuality is not only possible but encouraged.
Grindr, a platform dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, confronts the intersection of technology and sexuality with a keen awareness of the historical and ongoing stigmatization faced by its users.
Grindr has carved out a space in the digital world where individuals can explore their identities, connect with others on a basis of shared experience, and find solidarity in their journeys of self-discovery. The platform’s approach to anonymity, safety, and community engagement is specifically tailored to reduce the sense of isolation that often accompanies the exploration of one’s sexuality, particularly in less-accepting environments.
Through features that cater to the nuances of LGBTQ+ dating and networking, Grindr plays a critical role in facilitating access to supportive networks and resources, thereby contributing significantly to the destigmatization of LGBTQ+ sexualities.
OMGYes dives into the relatively under-explored territory of women’s sexual pleasure with an educational and research-based approach. It represents a significant technological and cultural shift, leveraging empirical studies and real experiences to enhance understanding and communication around sexual pleasure.
Unlike traditional platforms, OMGYes employs tactile simulations and comprehensive tutorials derived from extensive research, including partnerships with researchers at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute. Users are offered an array of interactive features that teach various techniques to improve sexual satisfaction, presenting this sensitive subject matter with the rigor and detail it deserves.
The platform uses direct user feedback and interactive content to empower individuals to explore and communicate their preferences more confidently, thereby contributing to the larger aim of normalizing conversations around sexual health and pleasure.
Match, Grindr, OMGYes, and others serve as case studies in the creation of digital environments that are respectful, inclusive, and affirming. Their success demonstrates the appetite for platforms that prioritize the complexities of human sexuality and the demand for innovations that transcend traditional limitations on sexual discourse.
Bridging online and offline worlds
Let’s do a deep dive into one specific platform. “Through technology and anonymity, we hope our users are empowered to ask other users anything they want regarding sex and sexuality and not feel judged for both their questions and their replies,” says Mariana Tomé Ribeiro, founder of Quycky, an innovative tech company focused on sexual wellness and education, in our interview.
As Ribeiro explains, Quycky aims to build a bridge between theoretical knowledge and lived experience by “making it easier for users to find toys and other accessories to support their sexual fantasies.” In doing so, it closes the gap between abstract information and embodied wisdom. Integrating mind and body leads to deeper understanding and self-acceptance.
Quycky utilizes gaming features and matching algorithms to connect users based on shared attitudes, interests, and compatibility regarding sex and relationships. This increases the likelihood of forging substantial connections that aren’t limited to physical attraction.
Creating a fun and playful environment through the game also helps users open up. Ribeiro observes that the screen acts as a buffer that allows people to connect more readily. Gaming dynamics make it easier to initiate substantive conversations and share intimate details that many people tend to keep private.
Designing safe community spaces
When tackling sensitive topics like sexuality online, maintaining a respectful environment is crucial. Quycky incorporates community reputation systems where positive behaviors like openness are rewarded through badges and statuses. Users can also block disrespectful individuals.
According to Ribeiro, the goal is to “cultivate respect” because “everyone is different.” Though anonymity sometimes breeds toxicity, consciously fostering inclusive norms can counteract this tendency. Setting communal guidelines, encouraging empathy, and giving users tools to curate their interactions enables healthy discord.
For marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ people, finding spaces to openly discuss sexuality can be especially challenging due to stigma. At Quycky, an adaptive matching system connects users with similarities in sexual orientation and interests, without requiring them to explicitly state a label. The platform “creates a sexual chart that will match you in the future with users alike,” Ribeiro says. This allows organic discovery of one’s desires and preferences.
Of course, bringing sensitive discussions online also poses potential risks around privacy, harassment, and misinformation. But conscious design choices can mitigate these pitfalls. Ribeiro believes that overall, tech will expand access to knowledge and community around sexuality: “I think it can be huge because it’s a way that people feel safe and they can understand more about themselves.”
Countering shame through virtual connections
Religious and cultural conditioning often discourage openness about intimacy. Most people feel some awkwardness discussing sexual details even with close confidantes. Anonymity helps override this hesitancy to share vulnerabilities.
According to Ribeiro, users tend to be more open online. The technology itself acts as a buffer against judgment. This psychological distancing empowers people to voice questions and details they may keep private in their daily lives. Virtual interactions can thus facilitate honesty that for many is much more difficult to achieve in actual relationships.
Some may argue that online platforms foster superficial connections compared to in-person interactions. Ribeiro asserts that by emulating the fluidity of face-to-face conversations, tech can enable meaningful exchanges: “It’s about creating something that is more meaningful and how people connect digitally.”
Elements like games and algorithms to drive interactive narratives counteract the static nature of most online communication. Kinetic energy flows when users respond dynamically to evolving scenarios. The nonlinear spontaneity of natural dialogue gets preserved in virtual environments that are designed to mimic real-world encounters.
Countering biases that perpetuate stigma
Two cognitive biases that likely reinforce stigma around sexuality are confirmation bias and the empathy gap. Confirmation bias leads us to interpret information in ways that fit our preconceptions, making us resistant to changing our minds about taboo topics. The empathy gap makes it hard to relate to experiences outside our own, causing judgment toward sexual practices we don’t share.
Virtual platforms help counteract these biases by exposing users to diverse perspectives and narratives they otherwise may never encounter. The anonymity provided online also bypasses knee-jerk judgments that are often experienced during in-person interactions. Gradually, assumptions get challenged and empathy gets fostered through broadened horizons.
Ultimately, technology platforms like Quycky and others aim to destigmatize sexuality on a societal level by empowering honest personal conversations. Ribeiro explains that “breaking the taboo around sex” begins by helping “people feel comfortable talking about sex in a fun way, and making conversations shame-free.”
Through strategic gamification and adaptive matching, virtual platforms can make users feel at ease opening up about intimate topics. Then the data and insights gained can inform educational content to further reshape public knowledge and attitudes. It is a self-reinforcing cycle where micro-level interaction feeds macro-level progress.
— “After a year during which there has been very little good news about people’s reproductive health, this is the first solid win in a long time,” says BU gynecologist
The FDA’s approval of Opill for over-the-counter use makes it the first hormonal contraceptive available without a prescription in the United States.
The FDA’s approval of the first over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States could be a revolutionary change in birth control and reproductive health, says Katharine O’Connell White, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.
White, who is also vice chair of academics and associate director of the complex family planning fellowship at Boston Medical Center, says she felt “jubilation and glee” at hearing news of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Opill, a hormonal birth control pill, on Thursday.
“After a year during which there has been very little good news about people’s reproductive health, this is the first solid win in a long time,” she says. “And it finally puts the United States on par with most other countries in the world, where people have always had access to pills without a prescription.”
The news was received with support from almost every major reproductive health organization in the country, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the North American Society of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
The FDA’s approval comes amid myriad legal battles over reproductive rights—and almost exactly a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, rescinding the right to abortion nationally.
Perrigo Company, which manufactures the pill, says it will likely be available in stores and from online retailers in the United States in early 2024.
BU Today spoke with White about the safety and effectiveness of Opill, as well as questions that still remain about its rollout and accessibility.
Q&A
with Katharine O’Connell White
BU Today: Based on what you’ve seen or read about Opill, how effective is it compared to other, prescription or nonprescription, birth control options?
White: The pill that got approved for over-the-counter use is a progestin-only pill. There are two types of birth control pills: the vast majority of pills—the ones you think about when you hear “The pill”—have estrogen and progesterone in them. But a few varieties are progestin only, for people who can’t or don’t want to take estrogen. So, this pill looks to be like other progestin pills. And all pills have roughly the same effectiveness rate—that they’re about 97 percent effective when taken perfectly, and about 93 percent effective when taken like a typical human being.
So, it’s a very effective method of contraception. And it’s now the most effective birth control that you can buy at the drugstore without a prescription. When you compare it to condoms and spermicides, or Plan B and other emergency contraception, all of those are effective, but they’re not as effective as a daily birth control pill.
BU Today: It sounds like in terms of effectiveness, it’s not necessarily better to get a prescription birth control pill vs this over-the-counter version. Is that correct?
White: So much of it is about access, which sounds like an advocacy talking point. But access has a real impact on people’s lives.
From the medical perspective, there’s no difference between a pill you take by prescription or a pill that you would then get over the counter. But the best birth control method for any given person is the one they’re most likely to take. And to take consistently. And now, we have a method that is not behind the walls of a doctor’s office. You don’t have to go in for a visit or a pap smear or even just get through on a telephone line in order to access this birth control. You can just walk into a place and get it and take it. That, for a lot of people, is going to be the key to feeling in control of their birth control.
BU Today: Do you see this as a step toward equalizing access to birth control or reproductive healthcare?
White: Hopefully—although I’m hesitant.
What’s really great about this is that it’s finally a highly effective method—a hormonal method—of birth control for which you don’t need medical insurance and you don’t need access to a doctor. This is great news for people who work weekdays and can’t get to a doctor’s office because they can’t take the time off of work. It’s great news for people who don’t have health insurance, or who are underinsured, meaning their insurance doesn’t cover a lot, or any, contraceptive methods. If you are new to this country and don’t have health insurance or if you are in a new job and in a new state and don’t yet have access to your insurance, this is going to help.
I’ll also add that this is birth control that you do not need to persuade [a healthcare provider] that you should take or want to take. It is a completely independent decision that you get to make, and that’s important.
The reason I’m hopeful that this will equalize access, but not certain, is because we don’t know how much it’s going to cost. And so it’s only an equity issue if everyone can actually access it. The company says that it’s committed to widespread access for the pill and that it’s going to have some kind of voucher or savings program for people who don’t have insurance coverage. Along with advocacy groups, it is going to push for coverage by insurance companies so that even though it’s over-the-counter, you can still use your insurance card, like you can in many places for emergency contraception, or until recently, COVID tests. But we need to see what the sticker price is.
BU Today: Besides the price, are there other things that you, or your colleagues in the medical community, are waiting to learn?
White: The implementation of something is always important. For example, when emergency contraception first went over-the-counter, it was actually, in a lot of cases, behind-the-counter. You had to ask a pharmacist for it, which meant that not only did you have to have a conversation, and possibly justify why you wanted something, there was a chance they would say no.
I want to see this product on the shelf, next to Plan B, next to KY jelly. I want it to be as easy as just taking it off the shelf, putting it in your cart, and checking out.
I also wonder: is it going to be behind in a clamshell? Are you going to have to get an employee to unlock it for you? Are you still going to have to deal with people’s judgment? Will mom-and-pop pharmacies refuse to stock it? Will Amazon stock it? Will national pharmacy chains make it available online? Because in that case, I can get it with my ibuprofen when I do an Amazon run. All of this remains to be seen. But I’m hopeful.
BU Today: Are there certain populations who might find an over-the-counter hormonal birth control option especially helpful?
White: Adolescents—you might not want to ask your pediatrician, who’s been seeing you since you were a baby, about the fact that maybe you need birth control. Adolescents are also people who maybe haven’t yet figured out how to get to the doctor on their own. Maybe they don’t have a car or don’t have access or even know how to navigate the system to try to get their own gynecologist. Now, they can just take matters into their own hands and get it.
I also think anyone who is on someone else’s insurance, where an explanation of benefits goes home whenever you have a visit with a provider or get a prescription filled. An over-the-counter option leaves less of a record. So if you are in a situation where you are not wanting your parents to know or not wanting your partner to know, this provides another layer of protection.
For people who have medical problems, whose doctors just tell them not to have sex so you don’t get pregnant—which is actually a thing—and don’t know who to turn to for advice, they can now do their own reading, decide this might be right for them, and then access it on their own. People who just changed jobs and whose new insurance hasn’t kicked in, or who have not yet found a new doctor. People who’ve just moved to a new state.
There are also all these situations during which there can be gaps in birth-control use. Let’s say you are a prescription-pill user or a patch or a ring user, but you find yourself in this position where you’re between insurance providers, between doctors, between homes, you then can just go get a pack [of birth control pills] to bridge that gap.
Or people who travel and forget their pack. You’re crazily packing for the airport, and you realize you’ve forgotten your pills. No worries, you can just go get a pack and take those pills for a week and then resume your birth control back at home.
This means that birth control doesn’t have to be this precious, Hope Diamond–like resource. Now, your birth control pills can be available to you whenever you need them, wherever you are. That is revolutionary. No one should have to fight for birth control. And now you have an option where you can just go get it.
BU Today: What about from a safety viewpoint? Is it safe to take these over-the-counter pills?
White: I think there’s a natural hesitancy to embrace something as safe, especially when, for so long, people have been telling you that it’s not. There’s this idea that, ‘Well, we’ve had birth control pills for 50 years, why hasn’t it been available over the counter until now? Is it actually safe?’
It’s so important for people to know that we have reams of good evidence about how safe the pill is. There are very few people who cannot use this pill, and it is very well labeled for who shouldn’t use it.
There’s a very small group of people who can’t, and everybody else can use it safely. People who have breast cancer or certain kinds of liver disease or certain kinds of benign liver tumors, and some people with lupus, should not use this. But people who have the kinds of conditions on this list are people who are already plugged into a healthcare system where they can get access. The vast majority of healthy people who don’t need to see doctors can all take this.
BU Today: What should people who might use this as their first hormonal birth control know?
White: One of the common side effects of a progesterone-only pill is irregular bleeding. This might be occasional spotting, it might be bleeding more days than not, though not usually as heavy as a period. If people are not prepared for that, it can be very surprising. I’ve had more than one patient who stopped their birth control pills when they were spotting, because they thought that meant either it was making their body sick or that it wasn’t working. My message is that you may have weird bleeding for three months, possibly even a little longer. And that is normal. Weird is normal when it comes to bleeding on this pill. So don’t be alarmed.
— SF State prof sees reasons for rethinking LGBTQ history
San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein holds a copy of his new book, a second edition of “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement.”
by Brian Bromberger
For Marc Stein, professor of history at San Francisco State University, queer history is a calling, realizing he is part of a network and a community of gay intellectuals. Many U.S. college history departments don’t even define queer history as a bona fide field or it’s been ghettoized to a few classes, despite the fact courses in the subject are very popular with students. Even Stein is technically a historian of constitutional law and politics at SF State.
Stein has become an evangelist for the promotion of gay and lesbian history, rooted in his orientation as an activist. His passion for the field is exhibited in his newest book, a totally revised second edition of his 2012 classic, “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement,” (Routledge, $42.95) including a new chapter, “LGBT and Queer Activism Beyond 1990.” When he wrote the first edition his aim was to provide an up-to-date account of the movement that was “national in scope, comprehensive in chronology, and synthetic in ambition,” he noted.
In his book’s introduction, Stein lists the reason why gay and lesbian history needs to be rethought: to help address the widespread lack of knowledge about that history; to serve the needs of today’s gender and sexual dissidents, along with everyone who identifies with the movement’s agendas and aspirations; and to teach people about some of the major political and philosophical questions that have absorbed the U.S., such as what is meant when referring to freedom, liberty, equality, and democracy, especially pertinent in these politically partisan and divisive times.
Stein mentions that studying this history can help readers reflect on why some people become activists, why movements develop when and where they do, why they adopt particular strategies and goals, and why they rise and fall. He notes in the introduction that the book also underscores the historicity and variability of sex, gender, and sexuality, especially how these forces changed the movement and vice versa; shows how people can support those who are working to promote equality, freedom and justice in the 21st century; and finally, to show the interrelationship between political and cultural activism, which has promoted social change.
Stein, 59, discussed the new second edition with the Bay Area Reporter in an email interview, and explained why he decided to add the new chapter.
“As a gay man who was born in the 1960s and came of age in the 1980s, I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the decades that most directly shaped the world I came to know in the 1980s,” Stein wrote. “I don’t think historians are particularly good at analyzing the present or the very recent past. Other types of scholars, including sociologists and political scientists, tend to focus on the present. But many publishers and many members of the public commonly want historians to include a ‘bring the story up to the present’ chapter or conclusion. I often teach my students that those chapters are commonly the weakest in historical studies. As I say in both editions of my ‘Rethinking’ book, that perspective haunted the writing of the book’s final chapter.
“In any case, I was pleased when Routledge informed me that my volume was one of the most successful in its social movements series and commissioned me to write a second edition. Since the original version was published before the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decisions and before the Trump era, the 2012 edition was outdated,” he added, referring to the high court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.
“I originally was only going to substantially revise the final chapter, but because there’s been such great LGBT history scholarship about the pre-1990 era published in the last decade, I ended up revising the whole book. Because the post-1990 period now includes the Trump era, I was able to strengthen my arguments against historical narratives that assume that progress is linear and inevitable,” Stein stated.
Stein writes that the gay and lesbian movement has been replaced or superseded by LGBTQ and other movements in the post-1990s era. There’s even been controversy in the title of his book.
“My book’s title has been misunderstood as implying that I am anti-queer or that I don’t appreciate the broader coalition that we invoke when we refer to the LGBTQ+ movement,” he wrote in the email. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I helped found an early queer activist group, Queer Action, in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. My first book, published in 2000, offers critically queer perspectives on the history of gay and lesbian politics in Philadelphia. I have commonly used LGBT, LGBTQ, and queer as key terms in other projects. But as a historian, I believe it’s important to be true to the historical evidence of the periods we’re studying.”
Stein doesn’t think there was an LGBTQ+ movement before the 1990s, but rather a gay and lesbian movement.
“For most of the period from 1950 to 1990, the gay and lesbian movement functioned largely as just that; it was commonly anti-bisexual and anti-trans, even as bisexuals and trans people argued for the gay and lesbian movement to change,” Stein explained. “Bisexual and trans people were part of the gay and lesbian movement, but that doesn’t mean the movement prioritized their issues. People with disabilities were part of the movement, but we don’t talk about the [lesbian, gay, disabled] movement because the movement did not organize or understand itself that way.”
Stein stated that a largely autonomous trans movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, which he discusses in the book.
“Starting in the 1970s, there was a largely autonomous bisexual movement and I discuss that,” he stated. “We know of key episodes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when bisexual and trans activists pushed the gay and lesbian movement to be more inclusive; they commonly failed in those efforts until the 1990s. ‘Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement’ devotes lots of attention to these issues, in some cases more so than other books that purport to cover LGBTQ+ history, but I try to avoid the problem of projecting today’s favored terms and concepts onto historical periods when they don’t work particularly well.”
People filled the Castro to celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision on June 26, 2015.
Political coalitions
Stein is interested in the ways in which political coalitions come together and fall apart.
“I think the LGBTQ+ political coalition is a remarkable achievement; we should pay attention to how, why, and when it happened (and how, why, and when it did not include other groups that might have become part of the coalition but didn’t),” he wrote in the email. “I’m glad that since the 1990s we’ve developed a stronger LGBTQ+ political coalition; I just don’t believe that we should minimize the efforts that it required to make that happen. As for the future, movements come, go, change, adapt, and reconfigure themselves. It would be arrogant for anyone to assume that today’s language and today’s way of thinking will be embraced by future generations; haven’t we learned enough from the past to know better?”
Queer activism today
In characterizing the new queer activism of today, Stein stated that he resists the tendency to consign the pre-1990 movement to the dustbin of history.
“It shows that much of what queer activism values — celebration of gender and sexual dissidence; rejection of gender and sexual privilege; critiques of racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, and ableism; intersectional multiculturalism — existed in nascent form in the pre-1990 era,” Stein stated. “But something happened in the 1990s, when radically queer tendencies within larger LGBTQ+ worlds became more influential and powerful. This had happened before — in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, for example, and in the second half of the 1980s, when radical AIDS activism emerged — but in the early 1990s there was a more sustained transformation, one that was significant enough that we now find it difficult to talk about the ‘gay and lesbian’ movement when we’re talking about post-1990 developments.”
Stein also talked about the gay and lesbian movement’s biggest success and failure.
“If we’re talking about the period from 1950 to 1990, I would say that the movement’s biggest success was changing mainstream and lesbian/gay ideas about lesbian/gay people,” he wrote in the email. “We could talk about concrete policy successes, including the 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness; the decriminalization of sodomy in half of the states in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the passage of sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws in many local and state jurisdictions in the 1970s and 1980s; and the emergence of lesbian/gay people as an important part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition in the same period. But underlying all of those policy successes was lesbian/gay political mobilization, which transformed mainstream and lesbian/gay consciousness about gender and sexuality.
“As for the biggest failure, I think the movement was more successful at combating anti-homosexual bias, discrimination, and prejudice than it was in challenging heteronormative privilege,” Stein stated. “The movement succeeded to some extent at convincing many straight people to adopt ‘live and let live’ philosophies, but not at forcing straight people to renounce their special rights and privileges or encouraging everyone to come out. More concretely, I think the movement of 1950 to 1990 failed at transforming the country’s educational system, which continues to relentlessly reproduce heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and gender normativity.”
Current backlash
Stein was asked how to interpret the rash of anti-trans legislation sweeping across the country and whether it’s a backlash to the queer movement’s successes.
“I think in part we can see the rise of anti-trans legislation as an example of backlash politics, and the particular type of backlash politics that bullies some of the most vulnerable components of a disenfranchised community,” Stein stated. “Without the trans-affirmative reforms that occurred in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, I don’t think we would be seeing the anti-trans backlash that we are seeing in the 2020s. But, there’s also something else going on that relates to the politics of conservatism, populist conservatism, and fascism, in and beyond the United States.
“In the 1960s and 1970s, key conservative leaders in the United States made critical decisions about the future of their electoral coalition,” he explained. “Faced with the prospects of permanent political marginalization, foreign policy and economic conservatives formed coalitions with religious and social conservatives, most notably in the Christian right. By the Trump era, the culturally reactionary tail was wagging the economically conservative dog. Anti-trans politics, like anti-Black and Brown, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant politics, works by deluding working-class and middle-class white people into thinking that their interests are aligned with corporate America, traditional values, and strong-man authoritarianism rather than with broad-based democratic coalitions of the dispossessed.”
Stein also discussed the current effort on the right to ban books in schools and libraries, including many on LGBTQ topics.
“I think this is all about so-called child protection. For centuries, we’ve seen gender and sexual conservatives weaponize ideas of “child protection” to further their aims,” Stein wrote in the email. “We’ve also seen them instigate ‘moral panics,’ where popular sentiment is mobilized to address problems that are exaggerated far beyond empirically valid foundations.
“In the past, cultural discourses about sexual ‘perverts’ and gender ‘deviants’ played up the innocence of youth, who were seen as vulnerable to enticement, grooming, recruitment, and seduction,” Stein stated. “This led, for example, to the passage of ‘sexual psychopath’ laws in many states in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1970s, similar dynamics led to Anita Bryant’s ‘Save Our Children’ campaign against sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws and to California’s Briggs initiative, which targeted LGBT teachers and their allies.”
Stein talked about work he has done.
“In one of my recent research projects, published this spring in the journal Law and Social Inquiry, I showed that in the 1970s, students at 14 U.S. colleges and universities, including two California State Universities, had to go to court when their institutions denied formal recognition to newly established lesbian/gay student groups; one of the common justifications offered by school administrators was that vulnerable young people might be tempted to try out homosexuality if there were officially recognized lesbian/gay student groups,” he explained.
Parallels
Stein sees many parallels between what is occurring today with what happened in the 1970s.
“In both cases, social and cultural conservatives responded to gender and sexual liberalization by attempting to freak people out with moral panics,” he stated. “Unfortunately, many media outlets play into conservative hands by reporting relentlessly on issues that are framed in reactionary terms. Today, for example, we rarely hear about the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public education [including California]; we rarely hear empowering stories about drag queen story hours; we rarely hear about the joys of athletic competition from the perspectives of young trans people and their allies.
“We also don’t hear about the ways in which social and cultural conservatives want our children to be taught rigid and inflexible ways of thinking about gender and sexuality — we don’t hear, for example, about the ways in which traditional educational practices offer up narrow and propagandistic lessons about gender identities and sexual orientation,” he added. “It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the states that are banning public school lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation actually were true to that notion — imagine a future world in which ‘boys’ were not taught to be ‘boys,’ ‘girls’ were not taught to be ‘girls,’ and children were not taught to be straight!
“As for book banning in particular, this arises in all of the contexts I’ve just mentioned, but it also arises in the context of declining support for public education in the United States, attacks on colleges and universities, and anti-intellectualism in public discourse,” Stein stated. “LGBTQ+ liberals and leftists should be mobilizing to support public education, not just to defend LGBTQ+ interests. Beyond that, I would just add that it’s a little bizarre to be focusing on banning books at this particular historical moment, when information is increasingly shared in forms other than books.”
Effort to silence queer history
Stein is concerned about the silencing of queer history in school curriculums.
“First, I would encourage us not to ignore the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public schools. When’s the last time we read a mainstream media report (or even a queer media report) about how that’s going or how things are going in the next set of states that will do likewise?”
Stein mentioned Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed last year that bans discussion of homosexuality or gender identity in schools through the third grade. Recently, DeSantis signed a law extending the ban through eighth grade — and the Florida Board of Education expanded the limiting of classroom instruction through 12th grade.
“As for what’s going on in more conservative states, I wrote a satirical piece recently for the History News Network that praised “R. DeSantis” for banning lessons about gender and sexuality in public schools. I was trying to get at what I hope will prove to be a legal fatal flaw in these policy initiatives,” Stein wrote. “We commonly refer to these laws as ‘don’t say gay,’ but they’re more than that: they ban lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation, which presumably means that public schools should no longer be teaching boys to be boys, girls to be girls, or all people to be straight. Imagine a second grader who asks which bathroom to use; under Florida’s new laws, the teacher should be prohibited from answering. And the laws have to be framed in theoretically neutral ways, or they would be vulnerable to First and 14th Amendment challenges based on free speech and equal protection. If interpreted literally, these laws ban teaching youth about gender and sexual normativity, just as they ban teaching youth about LGBTQ+ identities and orientations.”
Stein stated that as a college professor, the bans don’t really affect him. But he has other concerns.
“As someone who teaches in the post-secondary education sector in California, I’m not concerned about those types of bans,” he stated. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have ongoing concerns about how we teach LGBTQ+ history in colleges and universities. My university seems to be happy to have a set of specialized courses on LGBTQ+ topics. But do colleges and universities have ways to encourage faculty who teach courses on other topics to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ issues? Do my colleagues who teach introductory history courses incorporate LGBTQ+ history into their classes? I honestly don’t know.”
The future
Stein discussed the future of the queer movement.
“I’ll say that asking a historian to talk about the future is like asking a doctor to draw up architectural plans for a new house,” he stated. “I know this: there’s much more work to be done. My book’s new conclusion references a whole series of recent commentators who contend that the LGBTQ+ movement is finished, having succeeded in accomplishing all of its major goals. And these are not comedians. I’d like to see the movement broaden out, forming effective coalitions with other gender and sexual dissidents. I’d like to see the movement more effectively utilize creative direct action protests and mass grassroots mobilization. I’d like to see the movement focus more on education.”
Last year, Stein authored his “Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism” (University of California Press, $29.95). He defines himself as a queer scholarly activist. He explained that role.
“My ‘Queer Public History’ book reprints more than 30 essays that I’ve written for general rather than scholarly audiences, some for LGBTQ+ newspapers such as the B.A.R.,” he stated. “It also reflects on how queer publics nourished LGBTQ+ history projects, long before there was a place for LGBTQ+ history in college and university history departments. I use the notion of scholarly activism in a few different ways. It refers to the use of research for activist purposes; it refers to the activism that was necessary to make a place for LGBTQ+ studies within higher education, academic disciplines, and scholarly associations. I’ve been engaging in that work for decades and I used ‘Queer Public History’ to reflect on that.”
Accolades
Stein recently has received two accolades recognizing his role and contribution to both academic and public history.
“In January, gay public historian Jonathan Ned Katz selected me to replace him as the director of the OutHistory website,” he stated. “One of my first major exhibits on OutHistory, since becoming its director, is a study I completed with my students that documents more than 600 LGBT direct action protests from 1965 to 1973; we’re now working on expanding the study to cover 1974-76.”
The B.A.R. reported on the direct action history study when it was released in March.
“Then in April, the Organization of American Historians, which represents thousands of U.S. historians, nominated me to become its president in several years,” Stein stated. “If elected this fall (and I’m the only candidate, so I’ll be very embarrassed if I lose!), I’ll be the first president whose work has focused primarily on LGBTQ+ history and the first to come from the California State University system. I see the nomination as a statement about an entire generation of us who succeeded in using scholarly activism to make a place for LGBTQ+ history in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education.”
Ultimately, Stein believes that rethinking the history of the U.S. gay and lesbian and LGBTQ movements should lead to a more general rethinking of U.S. history.
“This will likely only occur if more students, teachers, and scholars engage in political activism to change the ways in which history is learned and taught in primary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions,” Stein stated. “It might mean trying to convince LGBT, queer, gender, and sexuality studies programs to make the history of political activism more central in their courses and curricula. And it might mean developing new ways to promote critical thinking about LGBT and queer history outside the classroom: in libraries and museums, on television and the internet, in film and video, and in various other venues. In other words, we need a new movement to rethink history.”
‘In a cultural moment where liberalised attitudes towards sex and sexuality have destigmatised so many forms of sexual behaviour, younger generations appear to be growing less sexually intimate.’
The allure of digital relationships that can be curated and controlled comes at the expense of mutual vulnerability
The western drift away from seeking moral instruction from the church is understandable; the morality plays staged every day on Reddit’s infamous “Am I the Asshole?” threads are far more entertaining.
A few weeks ago, a post went viral in which the author seeks a public verdict on the question “AITA for asking my roommates to remove their dildos from the bathroom mirror in a way that was not kind?” The young poster had responded to the presence of newly washed sex toys in a shared space with a disgusted hostility and the dildo-owning flatmate complained the poster should have requested the removal more politely.
This brash – and now VERY public – story of objects once unlikely to be mentioned outside (ahem) the most personal of circumstances appears at the same time US magazine the Atlantic has been discussing “America’s intimacy problem”.
Researchers in the US have noticed a decline in secure attachments between individuals. Growing numbers of Americans find themselves either avoiding or incapable of maintaining intimate social relationships, with the consequence being loneliness and isolation. Psychologists report that even when their clients do want the security and comfort of meaningful connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there”.
In a cultural moment where liberalised attitudes towards sex and sexuality have destigmatised so many forms of sexual behaviour, younger generations appear to be growing less sexually intimate.
It’s not an exclusively American problem. In Australia, younger generations have also been in a “sex recession” for years. Figures compiled in 2020 revealed 40% of people in the 18-24 age bracket had never had a sexual partner. Disturbingly, some of those who know sexual contact may not necessarily know it with intimacy, but with coercion.
Sociologists and other researchers have speculated that social media is driving this. From chat to porn, the new networks provide on-demand experiences of connection that resemble in-person interactions without sharing the awkward, human rhythms of the real-world thing. The digital allure is of relationships that can be curated, controlled and contained.
Simultaneously, the portability of image-capture technology has facilitated an era of relentless self-surveillance. Powerful forces incentivise the exploitation of the personal, from the monetisation of the influencer to the desperate social competition for online attention.
The digital paradigm has come to contain us. To admit one is messy, inexperienced, scared, human-shaped or in any way truly vulnerable is an act of trust before another person and we’ve all learned by now to never trust anything pretending to be a person on the internet. Maybe the culture of mistrust fostered on the internet is what’s bleeding into our external lives? The relentless exposure of it renders any revelation of frailty a dangerous prospect.
Meanwhile, experiments such as Arthur Aron’s “36 questions that lead to love” established that it’s the mutual revelation of vulnerability that creates our most intimate bonds.
The terror is valid. The personal cost is incalculable.
Recently I received the sad news that an old theatre friend had passed away, and far too young. We lived on separate continents and had not been in touch for quite some time.
This news of his death, though, has shattered me. The memory that replays itself dates from 19 years ago; we’d stumbled into my apartment to crash after an all-night drunken adventure, and in his besozzlement he found himself unable to remove his contact lenses. He asked for help. My careful fingers peeled the plastic droplets from the eyeballs of my prone-on-the-spare-bed, fully clothed friend and it remains one of the most intimate experiences I’ve had with another human being. It changed the channel of our relationship – not into anything romantic, but into another kind of closeness that remains tricky to explain.
The pain of loss I’m feeling now is the price humans pay for the intensity of these connections.
Restless and raging at the sky in the wake of too many recent deaths, I’m yet to be convinced that the worst flatmate or view-aggregating Tokfluencer doesn’t yearn for the intimacy of a profound friendship, or a loving family, or true romantic love.
For those who may find themselves insecurely attached and sad about it, some gentle guidance: it’s not our social performances that leave an indelible impression behind us – it’s the risk taken to trust someone else when we are in our greatest vulnerability. It’s in these moments we become immortal to each other.
Alfred C. Kinsey is questioned by Hazel Markel, left, president of the Women’s National Press Club, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, actress and writer, in Washington on Sept. 2, 1953.
By Justin R. Garcia
At the entrance to the Kinsey Institute, at Indiana University, there’s a plaque with a famous quote from its founder, Alfred C. Kinsey: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe.”
That ethos is at the heart of all the institute’s research.
For generations, the Kinsey Institute has shined a light on diverse aspects of sex and sexuality, in pursuit of answers that bring us closer to understanding fundamental questions of human existence. In a time of divisive politics and disinformation, it is more imperative than ever to preserve and defend the right of such academic institutions to illuminate the unfolding frontiers of science — even, and especially, research that might challenge us as it advances our understanding of ourselves.
Thus it is tremendously disappointing that Indiana lawmakers voted late last month to approve a budget that specifically blocks Indiana University from using state funding to support the Kinsey Institute, and that last week Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into state law. This is an unprecedented action that takes aim at the very foundation of academic freedom.
The Kinsey Institute, where I serve as the executive director and a senior scientist, is the leading sex research institute in the world. We publish dozens of scientific and academic articles each year, across multiple disciplines. Our faculty are internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists and demographers. We house the world’s largest library and research collection of sexuality-related materials, and scholars from across the globe visit us to study these materials and to train in our research theories and methods.
Our unbiased, apolitical, scientific approach to human sexuality makes the Kinsey Institute unique. It is also what makes the work we do so controversial.
Since its founding in 1947, the institute has been the target of disinformation and attacks. The original “Kinsey reports” (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953) drew data from the most thorough sexological study ever conducted. Both books were instant bestsellers, and Kinsey went from scientist to celebrity.
Yet the reports were also met with shock and moral panic — especially following the second volume, which documented the real sexual lives of America’s wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. So much controversy ensued that the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its sex research funding for the institute in 1954
In 1950, a U.S. customs officer seized a shipment of sexually explicit images and other materials being mailed to the institute’s research collection on the basis of their being “obscene.” The federal court case that followed, United States v. 31 Photographs, resulted in a historic ruling in favor of the institute’s right to collect materials and data for sex research, which has profoundly shaped our understanding of academic freedom from censorship.
Another wave of attacks came in the 1980s, whipped up by conspiracy theories that Kinsey’s research had unleashed the sexual revolution and, with it, a moral decay on America.
As Kinsey wrote in 1956: “It is incomprehensible that we should know so little about such an important subject as sex, unless you realize the multiplicity of forces which have operated to dissuade the scientist, to intimidate the scientist, and to force him to cease research in these areas.”
Yet, Kinsey and his researchers persisted. And three-quarters of a century after the institute’s founding, the contribution of sex research to our understanding of sexuality, relationships and well-being is clear.
We know that one of the biggest predictors of relationship satisfaction is sexual satisfaction, and that one’s sex life affects the trajectory of relationships and marriages. That comprehensive sex education, including understanding consent and identifying interpersonal abuse, is associated with positive psychological and health outcomes — from prevention of unintended pregnancy to protecting against sexually transmitted infections.
We also know many questions still need to be answered. The complex associations between sexual activity and fertility outcomes. The long-term effects of covid-19 on people’s relationships and sexual lives. How the loneliness epidemic is affecting mental health across demographics. How new social technologies are changing the concept of intimacy and redefining sexual behavior. Why 1 in 4 women in the United States still experience attempted or completed rape.
Given these major unknowns, why do attacks on our research continue? The state representative who first proposed this recent legislation parroted false allegations of sexual predation in the institute’s historical research and ongoing work, which the institute, the university and outside experts have repeatedly refuted. Indiana state Rep. Matt Pierce described these conspiracy theories as “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.” The legislature still acted on this disturbing, easily debunked misinformation.
Indiana is not alone. Across the country, legislation is being passed that affects millions of lives, restricting reproductive health care, discussions of gender identity and basic sex education. The people passing this legislation are fundamentally failing to leverage scientific evidence as a guide through these complex issues
I am optimistic that this latest culture war will pass. And the Kinsey Institute will carry on. While this recently passed legislation stings, the majority of the institute’s funding comes from outside the university, from research grants and contracts, as well as philanthropic donations. But I worry what the future will look like, for our institute and others — and for the students and researchers who rely on us — should state legislatures continue to act on misinformation around sexuality.
Some years ago, an Indiana University alum shared with me why the Kinsey Institute was so important to him. He was a gay man in his late 60s, and he recalled how as a student in the 1970s he was struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. At times, he felt so confused and isolated, he wasn’t sure he would ever find his way through that dark time. He was too afraid, he told me, to set foot inside the Kinsey Institute back then, but “just knowing it existed, that someone was out there searching for answers, saved my life.”
His words took on new resonance last week. I think about this story often, and I’m reminded what’s at stake when we limit the right to even ask questions.
— By focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote.
By Robert Reich
The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has become a font of government intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal and family life.
Last Friday, a judge who previously worked for a conservative Republican legal organization and was then nominated to the bench by Trump and pushed through the Senate by Mitch McConnell, invalidated the FDA’s approval of a 23-year-old abortion pill (mifepristone) used in over half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Dobbs case (in which Republican appointees on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade), Republican states are criminalizing abortion. Some are criminalizing the act of helping women obtain an abortion in another state. Texas gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. Idaho just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave Idaho to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. Tennessee Republicans have made it illegal to mail medical abortion pills. In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs.
At the same time, Republican lawmakers want to make it more difficult for couples to buy contraceptives. Sixteen Republican-dominated state legislatures already bar abortion clinics from receiving public contraception funds.
So far, at least 11 Republican states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, even if parents approve. Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has ordered state child welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations into reports of transgender kids receiving such care. Republican lawmakers are also pushing teachers to refer to students by their gender assigned at birth. Many are restricting which bathrooms trans students can use.
Republican states are also limiting discussions of gender and sexuality in classrooms. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill banning public school teachers in kindergarten through third grade from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, calling it an “anti-grooming bill” and accusing opponents of wanting to groom young children for sexual exploitation.
Republican lawmakers are also putting obstacles in the way of same-sex marriage and are considering appeals to the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Texas’s Republican attorney general says he’d “feel comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy” in the wake of Dobbs.
Oh, and Republicans now routinely accuse political opponents of favoring child pornography. In her confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was barraged with questions from Republican senators about her alleged lenient treatment of child pornographers. (In four days of hearings, the phrase “child porn” or “pornography” or “pornographer” was mentioned 165 times, along with 142 mentions of “sex” or related terms like “sexual abuse” or “sex crimes.”)
Three Reasons Why Republican Lawmakers Are Obsessing about Sex
First, by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote (with its loony “Pizzagate” conspiracy claim that Democrats are pedophiles).
Second, by focusing on sex, Republican lawmakers don’t have to talk nonstop about Trump. They don’t have to discuss his indictment or other pending cases against him. They don’t have to say whether they agree with his vitriolic diatribes against other Republicans (DeSantis, McConnell, and any other Republican who criticizes him). They don’t have to defend his bonkers positions (on Ukraine, NATO, George Soros, immigrants, and all else).
Finally, creating a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to address the practical problems faced by most Americans — lack of paid sick leave, unaffordable child care and elder care, stagnant wages, and inadequate housing. And by focusing on sex, they believe they can ignore the sources of populist anger — corporate profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, union busting, soaring CEO pay, and billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than the average worker (courtesy, in part, of the 2017 Republican tax cut for the wealthy).
But the Republican obsession about sex is backfiring on them, as we saw in the 2022 midterms and again in last week’s elections in Wisconsin and Chicago. It’s drawing a contrast between the two parties that pits the GOP against the vast majority of voters.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to Americans that while Democrats want to make life easier for average working people and end corporate abuses of economic power, Republicans want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives.
It feels like sex and dating is more complicated than ever. To find out what’s going on, GQ surveyed you about everything from body counts to porn shame to lying on dating apps
Dating has never been easy; sex has never been simple. Still, right now feels like a particularly tumultuous time when it comes to romance. We’ve had a pandemic that, among other things, was a global mood killer. Before that, the MeToo movement spurred an ongoing confrontation with sexism and misogny at a systemic level and, for many men, an individual reckoning with how they behave towards women. As we’ve spent more time living and working remotely, dating apps and internet pornography have strengthened their grip over our attentions; the former is rewriting the codes of dating etiquette and spilling messily into how we talk to each other, while the latter continues to reshape our expectations of sex and intimacy.
It feels like we’re constantly being told that we’re living in a new age of sexual puritanism and a great sex recession, and yet sex clubs are flourishing and we’re spending £4bn a year on OnlyFans. (So are we horny, or aren’t we?) Meanwhile, birthrates have plummeted, marriage is in decline and, if Twitter is to be believed, dating is dead. Some of this feels like a necessary corrective on the stumbling path to equality and fairness; some of it feels like the dawn of a dystopia. (Not another one!) Put together, it means it can be hard to know what is really going on with sex and love in 2023.
So we thought we’d ask. Earlier this year, GQ surveyed 604 people from a representative range of age, gender, sexualities and backgrounds in Britain to ask about how you feel and think about dating, relationships and sex today. The findings point to men, in particular, being at a crossroads, with increasingly progressive attitudes towards monogamy and parenthood sitting alongside more outdated views and, sometimes, behaviours.
Sex isn’t our top priority
First of all, we asked men how much of a priority sex and relationships are in their lives. Almost half(47%) said they can be happy in a relationship with little to no sex. This bears out in their priorities, too, with men placing spending time with friends & family (35%), working out (25%) and making money (24%) all as more important to them than sex and romance (12%).
This isn’t to say that men aren’t being adventurous. In a sign the post-Covid hedonism many anticipated might be upon us after all, 25% of men claim to have attended a sex party and would do so again. 26% of couples have done so too.
We’re not being honest on dating apps
When it comes to dating, 70% of men admitted they have lied about themselves on dating apps. Of those men, the most common areas in which they’ve misrepresented themselves were in their photos (36%), when describing their age (35%), their career (28%) and their height (27%).
Worse still, 21% of men in monogamous relationships said they were still using dating apps, and the men surveyed were more than three times as likely as women to keep an ex or former love interest’s nudes after a break-up (29% compared to 8%).
Meanwhile, TikTok debates about ‘body count’ – how many previous sexual partners is deemed acceptable in a prospective partner – seems to be playing out in real life, regressive attitudes and all. For many men, body counts count: 61% say it matters to them when choosing a partner (compared to 51% of women).
When is a body count too high? The most popular answer, chosen by 28% of the men who cared at all, was ‘more than ten’. For women, the point where body count became a problem was ‘more than 25’.
Interestingly, Gen Z may be more puritanical on this topic than their elders. Of those GQ surveyed, 71% of 16-24 year olds said that body count mattered to them – higher than for both 25-34 year olds and 35-44 year olds.
We’re living in the age of non-monogamy
Is it possible, or even desirable, to get everything we need from one person? In 2023, it seems the shape of relationships may slowly be being redrawn, from the traditional two to something more bendable.
Much has been written in recent years about the rise of consensual non-monogamy, with increasing numbers of couples looking to renegotiate the terms of sexual exclusivity. The pandemic led many people to reexamine what makes them happy and lean into sexual experimentation, while the steep rise in popularity of kink dating app Feeld suggests a more open-minded approach to sex may be emerging.
In GQ’s survey, nearlyhalf of men (47%) would consider a relationship that isn’t monogamous, and surprising numbers are already: 9% of men said they are in a polyamorous relationship right now, while 12% said they are in a consensually non-monogamous or open relationship.
On the topic of cheating, 60% of men said they have had an affair, compared to only 32% of women. But when asked whether, in 2023, following or interacting with people on social media can constitute cheating, there was greater unanimity – 37% of men and 32% of women agreed it can.
Porn is making us feel worse
The Covid pandemic saw an increase in the use of internet porn, but porn consumption still skews heavily male – our survey results found that nearly three times as many men (61%) watch it regularly than women (22%). For a quarter of men, that means every 2-3 days (compared to 14% who use it every day, and 23% who do so once a week).
Despite how embedded pornography is in their lives, many men reported that porn has a negative impact on their emotional or mental health. Of the men who watch porn, 54% said it makes them feel self-conscious about their sexual performance, more than half (53%) said it makes them feel self-conscious about their bodies and 42% said it left them with feelings of guilt or self-loathing. In addition, 30% said it has left them feeling confused about their sexual preferences. In that sense, porn is becoming like social media: we know it is bad for us, we dislike ourselves for doing it, but we can’t seem to stop.
It’s not all solo viewing, though. Of the men we surveyed, 43% said they have watched porn with their partner, and 25% do so regularly. There was also evidence that good old-fashioned sex with a person isn’t over quite yet: when asked to rank sexual activities in order of how exciting they are, sex with a person was significantly higher (38%) than using pornography (7%).
We’re thinking (and worrying) about kids
It’s not just sex, dating and relationships that feel in flux. With birth rates declining around the world and first-time parents getting older on average than ever before in the west, expectations and attitudes surrounding parenthood are also being rewritten.
Recent research is putting rened weight behind the idea of a male biological clock, and there’s evidence that fertility is a growing concern for men: 40% said it was something they worry about, compared to 39% of women. Responsibilities around childcaring are also changing; 29% of men surveyed said they would consider raising children independently.
All together? It paints a messy picture of modern love. There are signs of progress: 61% of men said that they understood consent better after the cultural conversations post-MeToo (63% of people in total). But that can feel hard to square with the 12% of men said they’d find someone who’d had more than one sexual partner off-putting.
In short: we still have a lot left to figure out, and much more to discuss. Finding ways to acknowledge this and create the space for a better kind of conversation is, perhaps, its own kind of progress. That’s why we’re kicking off our Modern Lovers week with a series of stories about the realities and intricacies of this new landscape, from dating with borderline personality disorder to those battling post-natal depression, the people in love with AI-powered dolls and those trying to overcome their own ‘weaponised incompetence’.
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