Make sex useful again

There is one peculiar contradiction in modern society:

1. People are freer to have sex the way they like, with whom they like than ever before. 

2. People have less sex than ever measured in modern times, as far as researchers can tell: Gen Z Is Having Less Sex Than Previous Generations, Why Is Gen Z So Sex-Negative?, People Have Been Having Less Sex—whether They’re Teenagers or 40-Somethings.

It is not just that people are free according to the law. Traditional religion is on the decline, freeing people from religious inhibitions that still somewhat limited their parents. Relationships are becoming more fluid. While polyamory was more or less unknown to most people a generation ago, it is now something widely discussed. "Friends with benefits" has become an established way to have sex regularly without calling it a relationship. People are more open than ever to different sexual practices. Sexual minorities are not merely tolerated, but actively appreciated.

We really have a sexual smorgasbord to choose from. And still, more and more people abstain for long periods. Why don't we use our freedoms to have more sex? 

A lack of oxygen

Some say computer games distract people from each other. Some say pornography makes people worse at real-world sex. Some say young people stay away from sex because they are afraid of being choked. The latter is indeed a spectacular explanation: Young women are supposed to have sex with men they don't know. Those men can, at any given moment, be expected to choke them, as a kind of sexual kink. Such practices scare a large number of women off, so people have less sex altogether.

In other words, according to that explanation, people started to have less and less sex with each other because sex is free, not in spite of it. Our culture allows people to have sex exactly the way they feel like, as long as they can find a consenting partner. If choking is what turns them on, they are entirely free to choke each other. So that is what they do. People just follow their own desires, with the result that a significant share of all people are put off by the danger and brutality of other people's desires.

This choking thing has developed very rapidly. When I was young, 15-20 years ago, choking sex was more or less unheard of. If people talked about it by then, I would have heard of it, because I always held my ears wide open to anyone who wanted to talk about their sexual lives. Now, the share of college women reporting to have been choked during sex range from 20 to 58 percent. And is there any mainstream lifestyle magazine that doesn't have a guide to sexual choking? The sexual revolution seems to have finally taken off. Those who are bold see no limit to their desires. Those who are less bold opt out altogether.

How did we end up here? Let's take a look at the anatomy of the sexual revolution. 

Sex is free because it is useless

All traditional societies repressed sexuality much more than modern Western society. They did so for two reasons:

1. Sex was dangerous. It created deep and violent conflicts and it resulted in children who needed to be taken care of. Pregnancies were also risky. 

2. Sex was useful. It created new families and new families meant new alliances or the reinforcement of existing alliances. 

In clan-based societies, sex is essential, because that is what ultimately creates and maintains a clan: A clan is literally the product of sexual relations. A clan maintains and reinforces itself through the establishment of new, carefully chosen sexual relations.

There are several types of such carefully chosen sexual relations. The most dramatic is the hostage-marriage. When the leaders of two groups agree to enter a military alliance, they seal the deal through exchanging females. Preferably female relatives of those leaders. When a female relative of group A's leader is married into group B, group A's leader can no longer attack group B without risking killing a female relative and her descendants. That is no absolute guarantee against assault. But it is better than everything else in a world where a raid can always be expected. This custom prevailed for the vast majority of human history. Peoples living on a stone age level in technological terms, for example the Yanomamö of the Amazon, exchange females between allied groups. As late as in the 18th century princesses were sent across Europe to seal large-scale alliances. Being a hostage is one of the oldest and most persistent female occupations. 

Another kind of carefully chosen sexual relationship is the property merger marriage, where a male with an inheritance and a female with a dowry form a new unit. The opposite, the cousin marriage, was and still is very common: Marriages are arranged between first cousins so no wealth has to be shared outside the extended family. No new alliances are created, but the extended family preserves its resources and continues accumulating wealth and power.

However different those types of marriages are, they all de-prioritize the interests of the individual. Individuals are supposed to prioritize the group's interests over their own. There is little room to consider personal compatibility between individuals. People expect the system to work decently because of one important force: Sexual attraction. 

Sexual attraction is supposed to be the force that brings men and women together, even if they would not have chosen each other if given a choice. In that kind of system sexual desire needs to be both uniform and strong, without disturbing perversions. There needs to be an illusion that every man and every woman has the same sexual desire and can therefore marry each other if the circumstances force them to. Every kind of sexual minority position makes sex less useful as a unifying force in arranged marriages.

The end of clans

Sexuality is essential for a clan-based society. Perversion of sexuality means the same as perversion of society. 

When clan-based society was replaced by more modern institutions, sex slowly became both less dangerous and less important. Less dangerous because a fling between the wrong people could no longer destabilize the politics of a country. Less important, because a marriage between the right people could no longer prevent a long and bloody war. 

In the first half of the 20th century, sexuality was not as important as it once had been. But it still had one important task: To create families, the building blocks of society. People were supposed to be attracted to each other, get married and form families. Good citizens acted on the sexual urges that promoted family life and suppressed the rest.

This rhetoric continued throughout the 1950s. However, under the surface, mighty forces were operating. The market economy and the welfare state were rapidly making the family less and less relevant. Already in the 19th century, people in general started working outside the family. In the 20th century, welfare states started providing a lot of the social security that families had previously been responsible for. By the middle of the 20th century, the family was becoming increasingly irrelevant for society. 

Family no more

In the early 1960's, two things happened:

1. New forms of contraception were launched, decoupling sex from reproduction. 

2. People started to acknowledge the irrelevance of the family. 

That way, sex at once became both less threatening and less useful. Less threatening because its consequences seemed possible to handle. Less useful because the family, the institution it was supposed to serve, became less useful in itself.

Together this allowed a small copernican revolution to take place. Until the 1960s, it had always been self-evident that sexuality should serve the interests of more important things than itself: Society, the clan, the family. The useful parts of sexuality were supposed to be promoted, the socially unsuitable parts were supposed to be suppressed. 

The sexual revolution turned that order upside down. Instead of pressing sexuality into society and people's lives, society and people's lives were instead supposed to bend under sexuality. Homosexuals were supposed to lead homosexual lives, heterosexuals heterosexual lives. Libertines were supposed to lead libertine lives. When the old norms around sexual relations unraveled, they were not supposed to be replaced with new norms. Instead sexual desire itself was made the norm to follow. Sexual desire was supposed to serve as every individual's personal guide to life.

A desire among others

While I am not against liberalism in itself, including sexual liberalism, I think the sexual revolution was a great mistake. Not because it gave too much importance to sex but rather that it gave too little. The sexual revolution degrades sexuality into a sensational stimuli and disregards its social aspects. And the social aspects of life are what most people deeply care about. That way, the sexual revolution actually underrates sexuality - it degrades it to something useless for what most people find important in life. 

Most people like to eat delicious food. Good food gives us a physical stimuli that is very enjoyable. But few would welcome a gastronomic revolution exhorting us to eat whatever we want, how we want and when we want. We all know that eating is more than a physical stimuli, it is the fuel for our bodies and as such vital for our health and, indirectly, for our social relations. 

Sex is not that different from food in this respect. While good sex can be instantly gratifing it is much more than that. It is still the preferred venue for human reproduction. It is imperative in many forms of human bonding, both directly between two humans and indirectly between family groups of humans joined in reproductive partnership (also known as marriage). 

Basically, the ability to overcome impulses for instant gratification is what makes us human. For a human being, it is essential to prioritize more important, long-term goals over less important, short-term goals. The sexual revolution wants us to exempt sexual desire from this general rule: It tells us to prioritize sexual feelings over almost everything else. We are supposed to negotiate with our lust to eat, to rest, to socialize. But we are supposed to avoid negotiating with our sexual impulses, except when they threaten other people's sexual boundaries. 

Why would sexual desire deserve such special treatment, when other impulses clearly do not? Proponents of the sexual revolution imply that our sexual desires tell us important truths about ourselves, and for that reason we need to do our best to listen to them. A relevant question is: Do they? Do our sexual desires really say more about us as persons than any other desire we have? Or are they as unimportant to our personalities as our taste for certain kinds of food? Psychoanalysts 100 years ago believed that the sexual desire of individuals was of outstanding psychological importance. But except for their opinions, where is the evidence that it actually is?

Until someone can explain why sexual desire is more important than any other desire, I think we should at least experiment with seeing it like other desires: Good for some things, less good for others. Then the question is: What purpose can sexual desire serve in our lives?

Relationship support

I think the answer is: Sexual desire helps people creating relationships. 

The sexual revolution told us that it should be the other way round: We should seek out relationships to accommodate our sexual desire. Since sexual desire is unnegotiable, it can't bend to other priorities. That is obviously not true. We can't engineer our sexual desires, just like we can't engineer our taste for food. But we can negotiate with our sexual desire just like we can negotiate with other desires. 

Sexual preferences have fluctuated over time. This is not due to our innate sexual desires fluctuating wildly between generations or even within generations. Rather, it is a proof that sexuality is actually quite malleable. There is no other way to explain the current choking epidemic. 20 years ago, young women didn't even know that they liked to be choked.

What we should do is negotiate with our desires so we can use them as much as possible to create the relations we want. Do you most of all want to spend the rest of your life dressed as a dog? Then try to find the desire to play dog deep inside you. Do you think a man who enjoys choking you is the ideal boyfriend? Then search for your most dangerously submissive desires. 

If you rather want a stable and trusting relationship, then instead search for the desires that will connect you with a loving and caring partner. 

Want what the other wants

What are those desires, then? They are what your partner, or prospective partner, likes. Being nice to each other is a classical way to build a good relationship. So those desires that your partner likes, and that makes you like your partner, are good for relationships. Those desires that feel degrading for you or your partner, or which your partner doesn't like, is no good for relationship building.

If we all are going to focus on our own deepest desires, we will naturally disagree with each other, unless we are naturally completely compatible. And what are the chances of that? It is no secret that the average woman and the average man reports partially conflicting sexual preferences. Logically, there is nothing strange at all if people start to resent each other when no one tries to compromise. And that was exactly what the sexual revolution told us: To replace our attempts to compromise with the expressions of our own deepest desires. 

The sexual revolution taught us to feel guilty if we don't do our utmost to follow our sexual desires towards consenting adults. It taught us to question ourselves whenever we prioritized anything in our lives higher than our sexual longings. Once and for all, we need to free ourselves from that guilt. We are free to use our sexuality however we want. Even if the thing we want is something as mundane as getting along well with each other.

60 years after the sexual revolution, I think it is time for a new revolution. What if we stopped worshipping sex and instead let sex serve us? By placing sex above social relations we risk not only our social relations but also, in the long run, sex itself. Sex today is at a use-it-or-lose-it stage. Either we make sex useful again or we risk turning increasingly asexual.