Not Being “Left Behind”
Published at 08:22 on 3 August 2016
In a recent Guardian article about changing (in the direction of less of it) sexual behavior, we find the following:
“The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of the generation than first thought.”
“Left behind?” Really?
Wasn’t the Sexual Revolution about liberating people from socially repressive restrictions that interfered with them following their desires? Haven’t such restrictions continued to vanish in the past decade or so? Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. LGBTQ people can now serve openly in the military. And so on.
Just because some individuals choose to abstain from sexual activity is no evidence of their being repressed. Maybe those abstainers simply don’t want to be sexually active? If the Sexual Revolution isn’t about their right to remain celibate by choice, then it’s a revolution I want absolutely no part of. You don’t sexually liberate people by replacing an obligation to not have sex with an obligation to have it.
This cuts close to home for me because I’m less sexually driven than the norm, and the (by my standards) hypersexualized youth culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the (again by my standards) hypersexualized gay male subculture always left me feeling out in the cold.
It took a long time for me to disentangle my internalized homophobia from my desire to not be steamrolled into conforming to a culture of casual sex that is simply not the sort of sex I desire. It’s why I identify as queer but not as a gay man; I fit in with the gay male subculture about as little as I fit in with the straight male one. Neither are geared to who I really am.
I’ve found the Millennials’ attitudes about sexual orientation to be much more in line with what I view as true liberation, in fact. They are much more likely to see sexual orientation as a multi-dimensional thing, not a simplistic one-dimensional gay/straight/bi axis.
So color me skeptical about the premise that less sexual activity automatically implies more sexual repression. It sounds like precisely the sort of thing an aging Baby Boomer who is clueless about what liberation really means would come up with.