The Future of Sex and Intimacy
Are relationships on their way out?
This is a tricky topic, but it’s something I’ve been wanting to tackle for a while. Firstly though, I want to acknowledge that I can only represent my own thoughts on this subject and they are influenced by generational, social, and cultural biases — which I now declare. White. Female. 60s. Agnostic.
So, disclaimers aired….here we go…
Social media is drowning me in sexuality. Not the real kind — the hyper-unreal, heavily-curated, money and fame-making kind. I can’t blink without an eyeful of something. Not to say that I don’t enjoy the beauty and physicality of the human form as much as the next person. But this is something else…
We’re in an overwhelm of sexual currency that is trading our reality for fantasy and possibly setting us up for the disintegration of deep and long-term relationships. Couple this with the freely available, now-socially-acceptable-tsumani of porn and we’re straddling a fractured reality. On one side of the chasm is what it’s really like to be intimate with someone; on the other side is what our bloated arousal palate thinks it should look like.
You see, here’s the thing: real, deep, relational sexual intimacy is not always sexy. It has to make room for awkward timing, physical imperfections, outside pressures, internal disputes, and the greatest of enemies and strongest of allies… familiarity.
On the plus side, this kind of intimacy can be deeply soothing. We already know a lot about how partners regulate each other’s wellbeing. It can also cement hope, spark creativity, and fun and trust. It can be a safe and beautiful place in an inclement and often unkind world. It can be the most important thing in our life.
Our sexual and relational fantasies on the other hand — though the product of a benign, natural instinct — have fallen into the hands of those who would commodify and profit from them. They are now fed by businesses that specialise in titilating our already gorged appetities, to make sure we want more and more. They want us to gourmandise — to guzzle and gobble (excuse the pun), and never be sated. Ask the Porn Hub people. They’ve permitted sex trafficking on their sites, to feed the fantasy monster.
They want us to think that just one more XXX porn video, breastilicious Instagram pic, Facebook sex group, or Only Fans account will give us satisfaction.
They lie. Because after the high comes the low and the scrabble/climb back up to feel good again. There’s a word for the hamster-wheel that so many people are caught on. But that’s a whole other conversation…
Today, I’m thinking about the orchestra’s conductor not the cello player in the second row. Personally, I resent the manipulation of the most important thing in my life. I am depressed by the greed, and genuinely concerned about how it’s affecting the future of how humans closely connect with each other.
There’s a question coming up for me, and it’s this… is it possible we’ve reached an intersection in the function of sexual intimacy in our society? A blue pill, red pill moment?
At point of origin, it could be argued that sex was the function of a basic drive to reproduce, and that early human’s experienced its urge compulsively and impulsively. But over time, sexual intimacy became synonymous with (mostly) strengthening (and sometimes disrupting) the social fabric of society by nourishing relational intimacy. It was also seen as a moral duty within the institution of marriage. Mythology blossomed around sex and purity that was — at once — spiritual and coveted. That set it up to fall victim to unhealthy power relations. Men (largely) used it to dominate women and other men. And sometimes, it was the women who were the abusers. Sex became a symbol of all that was healthy and unhealthy about human existence.
Then the Internet and social media arrived. What had previously been somewhat modulated through proximity, imagination, and local justice, suddenly became all-accessible, stunningly explicit, and hard to locate. You could see and interact with any variation of sex anywhere, anytime. And then some. Some saw this as handing the power back to the people, especially the sex workers.
But the shadow side of greater personal and economic agency around sex was a new and apocrophyl language: sexploitation, revenge porn, image-based abuse, intimate partner violence, and virtual sex trafficking.
This poisonous ooze now fills the murky swamp beneath the already shaky quagmire of our notions of sexual beauty and desirability, and their ties to self-esteem and self-worth. Websites collate ratings of women as sex objects. Sexual objectification (though not new) has swollen to feed an epidemic of domestic violence. A generation of young people are learning how to be sexually intimate through hentai porn and (now) AI porn. The disconnection between these fantastical sex education classrooms, and what humans actually feel and are capable of performing, is almost complete.
Conspiracists have been on this bandwagon for a while. But their stance is heavily informed by a rejection of women, who they perceive as temptresses and the root of all evil. It’s a biblical idea, and one that isn’t in society’s best interests.
Nonetheless, we’re experiencing an insidious, effective, and weirdly passive takeover of our sexuality by economic predators, who are influencing what it means to be human. So effective that we haven’t even really noticed it. And that could be because many of us are opting to take the little blue pill.
But lame erection jokes aside… with this huge disconnect between real sexual intimacy and the make-believe industry, the relational glue that sticks us all together is dissolving. And when it’s gone, what will be left?
