July 2008 Archives

Salon.com has a new piece from Tracy Clark-Flory defending casual sex as a healthy, viable option for young women. She begins by contrasting two "sides" that seem to be shaping up. On the one hand, there's been an onslaught of new books encouraging young women to remain abstinent until marriage (though its now cloaked in hip feminist language, like "empowerment"), versus a "radical" new set of bloggers and feminist activists who enjoy fucking lots of people and refuse to be shamed for it.

She takes a middle ground, obviously in a hope to appeal to folks to whom both sides seem a bit outrageous. She looks to the explosion of books aimed at young women, plying them to keep their legs tightly closed, and shudders. But it seems she's also a bit disconcerted by the "sex blogger" set who seem unafraid to post photos of themselves online covered in cum:

These books add to a loudening cautionary chorus: Young women are hooking up and tuning out emotionally. And, increasingly, young women are being told they are either respecting or exploiting themselves; they're either with the "Girls Gone Wild," sex blogger set or the iron-belted and chaste. A few months back, a New York Times Magazine piece about chastity on Ivy League campuses relied on this false binary: It pitted a prim Harvard abstinence advocate against a campus sex blogger (who recently posted a photo of her face covered in splooge).

Choose a side? No thanks. I'm a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation -- I've had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships -- and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I've found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships. I don't exactly advocate picking up guys at frat parties and screwing atop the keg as the path to marital bliss. It�s just that hookup culture is not the radical extreme it is so frequently mischaracterized as in the media. There is sloppy stranger sex among people my age, sure, but sometimes hooking up is regular sex with a casual acquaintance; sometimes it's innocent making out or casually dating or cuddling, and, oftentimes, it involves just one person at a time. In a sense it's all very old-fashioned -- there's just a lot more unattached sex involved.

Indeed, casual sex can be a healthy activity that lets young folks explore what turns their buttons -- and, perhaps as well, what turns them decidedly off.

I've found myself having to walk a strange middle ground recently with gay men's sexual cultures. I certainly have benefited from the numerous late night hookups in my past, facilitated by websites like Manhunt, Adam4Adam, and Craigslist. But here in San Francisco, I notice a pervasive phenomenon among the ads posted on Craigslist: guys aren't just looking for sex, they're looking to be used, denigrated, and treated generally like an object of derision. Now, let me be very clear: I support people's rights to have the kind of sex they want, and to explore their fantasies and complex desires. But I sense that a lot of guys are stuck in a rut, posting ads looking to be used, being used, and thus feeling used afterward -- which only makes you want to be used again. And so you post again. And get used again again. And feel used again. And post again. And so on and so forth.

To me, this cyclic pattern of subjugation / humiliation doesn't seem to look a lot like sexual liberation. Talking with guys who seek out and regularly have this kind of sex, I can't help but to feel that they're not having great sex. They're generally not even having *good* sex -- in fact, a lot of guys talk about the majority of their encounters as being pretty lousy. I can't speak for all gay men, obviously, but as an active participant in SF's sex culture, I feel like my finger is pretty close to the pulse (so to speak).

So like Clark-Flory, I respect everyone's right to fuck who they want, when they want. But I also want to find ways for gay men to have great sex. Lots of it. And despite the fact that somewhere in San Francisco, men are fucking each other silly every minute of every day, I don't get the sense that all the sex they're having is that great -- or even par for the course, really.

I hope I'm wrong here. I hope that, below my radar, the majority of gay men here are as sexually satisfied as humanly possible. But at least for now, I think my suspicion is fairly accurate for many guys here in SF.