Social History is in Your Pants

An attempt at an explanation for the current sexual crisis

In America during the Gilded Age, the Second Industrial Revolution pulled men from family farms and small towns into factories, offices, and cities. During a sudden period of transition, unanchored men spent their days in a world with access to anonymous sex, a metropolis crowded with strangers. Harvey Girls aside, women mostly stayed home, in the women’s sphere, anchored to family. The result was a sudden crisis of infertility, a medical problem caused by a social split. Dad went into the city and sampled the anonymous goods, then brought sexually transmitted diseases home to his sequestered wife, who would carefully avoid mentioning the symptoms of those diseases to her doctor, because, my goodness, what kind of filthy woman gets sexually transmitted diseases?

Pain without description, symptoms patients wouldn’t discuss, unexplained infertility: doctors noticed. In 1904, the physician Prince Morrow published Social Diseases and Marriage, saying what he had been seeing. “The situations created by the introduction of venereal diseases in marriage are many and complicated,” he wrote. “The problems presented are delicate, perplexing, and difficult of solution. In dealing with these situations there is required not only a thorough knowledge of these diseases in all their relations, but also a knowledge of human nature, a professional sagacity and a savoir-faire, which are not taught in the curriculum of our medical schools.” Morrow recommended the delicate introduction of “social hygiene” as a topic of discussion with respectable patients. In the antebellum America of “island communities,” local and isolated, it hadn’t been necessary.

The way you work shows up in bed. Sex happens where you live; the shape of your entire life is interwoven: work, family, politics, travel, culture, paradise by the dashboard light. Sex shapes identity, and identity shapes sex, and cultural norms and social signaling show up in most of the act that involves panting and sighing.¹ Sexual personae are societal Legos, the place where things fit together: “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.”

It’s hard to exaggerate the amount of passing back and forth that happens across the cultural-sexual threshold. The historian Ruth Bloch famously — well, famously in academic circles — found a sharp decline in wifebeating prosecutions in the decades after the American Revolution, an unintended consequence from an emerging political idea of privacy that made a man’s behavior in his own home his own damn business.² The Norwegian-American novelist O.E. Rölvaag depicted the ruin of an immigrant mother, after the death of her husband left her stranded on the harsh Dakota Plains, in the moment when her sturdy Norwegian son wandered by the nearby Irish settlement and laid eyes on one of those horrible Irish girls; soon, her children are openly speaking English at their own dinner table, and Beret Holm finds herself commanded by God to burn down the schoolhouse where Irish and Norwegian teenagers learn to be sexually attracted across the boundaries of cultural difference.

And then suddenly he was speaking English to his own mother

The things outside of sex show up in sex; the things inside of sex show up outside of sex. It’s all connected. Like, what would one compare it to, sex.

So. Take a moment to watch this:

Libs of Tik Tok @libsoftiktok

They demand that we change our language to accommodate their delusions. We should not give in

If you wanted to spend the day on TikTok, and abandon hope, all ye who enter here, you could find an infinite supply of these. Here’s a person whose most-preferred pronouns are fish/fishs/fishself:

Libs of Tik Tok @libsoftiktok

This person identifies as fishgender and uses toy/toyself pronouns. Toy’s parents must be so proud.

As the appearance of these videos on Libs of Tik Tok suggests, the common reaction to this performance from people who live outside of it is disgust and mockery, and it’s not hard to see why. But I think we’re missing some things, here, starting with the extraordinarily obvious appearance of dismal health in young adults.

This is, I think, Great Reset sexuality. In a world that’s falling apart, sex is falling apart. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy about it. Describing the contours of these social and economic realities, Steve Bannon sounds like Chris Hedges. Here, before you click, guess which one of those two men said this: “Millennials, they’re like nineteenth-century serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed, but they don’t own anything. Millennials don’t have a chance.”

I’m hopeful about people, but not hopeful about the world, a split view I recently described here. Despite the widespread presence of hard work and good faith, economic security is declining, social stability is declining, family connections are declining, knowledge is declining, popular culture is a free-floating bucket of subliterate shit, a great deal of news is empty propaganda, politics is a scam more than it’s not, a good number of doctors are half-conscious drug pushers who went sleepwalking into the opioid crisis, institutions flatly are not working — and yet many young adults aren’t experiencing stability and order in their experience of sexual behavior. Weird — wonder why.

Go back and watch that first video: “No one is seeing me,” the speaker says. Specifically, no one is seeing this person’s non-biologically-aligned gender, despite the presence of seven buttons to declare it. But I suspect that, and forgive me for sounding like a hippie for a moment, this young adult feels unseen as a product of being unseen, of being lost and unfulfilled.³ What is this person’s path? What does forty look like?

A world that works makes sexual connection that works; a world of freefloating identity and malformed social meaning makes a broken, empty sexual landscape. Camille Paglia: “Society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression. My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.” At the risk of saying what Camille Paglia means when I’m not Camille Paglia — I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here — my impression is that she doesn’t simply mean that sexual freedom leads to daddy buying leather, but that the fun part goes grim: Unmoored sexual freedom leaves you in a place where empty pain keeps stepping into the place where connected pleasure is supposed to live.

Like Camille Paglia, I describe the painful endstate of a trajectory of sexual freedom as a proponent of sexual freedom. I don’t oppose your sexual autonomy and personal sovereignty, and I’m not ordering you back inside the fence of bourgeois heteronormative monogamy, though human beings have done pretty well with bourgeois norms to give their lives structure. I decline coercion and embrace self-determination; I think you should be who you are, though I decline compelled speech and don’t agree that you can make other people participate in your self-definition if they don’t want to. But it seems increasingly clear that a whole lot of people have walked themselves into a painful corner as a learned response to an endless stream of fashionable nonsense, not as an actual breaking out of a societal prison. I’m increasingly inclined to get off the mockery and disgust train, and try to figure out how to talk to people about a path out of call me by my fish pronouns to a life of stable human connection.

I have no idea how to do that. But my view is that young adults (and old adults, though in different ways) are living in a world that shits on their existence, and that sells them self-harm as empowerment. Whatever the way forward turns out to be, we’d better start groping around in the dark to find the thing.

1. I refer, of course, to push-ups.

2. But see also the social ritual of skimmington, in which a really persistent wifebeater eventually got his from the neighbors.

3. Insert own Jonathan Livingston Seagull reference.