Why is it that even liberated commentators such as Ross Douthat refer to masturbation as "self-abuse"? How gross is that? Most of the women I know indulge quite happily in "self-pleasuring," not necessarily as a substitute for intercourse but because it is more reliably orgasmic. And for many women, porn is a downer; we can create more fulfilling fantasies on our own.
Interested in a very good read? Check out Elisabeth Lloyd's 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm for some fascinating insights into what she calls "Bias in the Science of Evolution."
27
I loved online porn until I met my wife, who is hot beyond belief. Now I am addicted to her! Mercy!
10
Not a great article but when read in conjunction with the Atlantic article (which has a lot of evidence), it makes sense. I just wish that there was a little more focus on male sexuality. In the Atlantic article, 95% of the interviews are with women and men are only brought up as a source of the frustration, watching too much porn, or worrying about penis size, etc. As long as male sexuality (and the difficulties that men face) continues to be stereotyped in this narrow way, nobody gains anything
4
This is a wonderful development. Sex is stupid. It always has been. This makes a mockery of it, puts it in its place, shows it up for the cartoonish animal drive that it is, an act of excretion to be performed in order to calm a distracting itch. All we need to do is recognize this, and build on it. To do that we must make sure not to take what we are doing too seriously, and we must go beyond merely declaring our independence from this ancient oppressor; freed, at last we must know to build something new and beautiful in its place.
7
Mr. Douthat might be surprised to discover someday that there are entire passages in his beloved New Testament, and entire streams of Christian thought and practice, that have absolutely NOTHING to do with obsessive regulation of what other people do with their genitalia.
16
“Self-abuse” but without quotation marks? Ross, your Catholic is showing. Perhaps if masterbation was a sacrament of the “one true faith,” there would be fewer victims of priestly abuse.
24
Mr Doubthat, what made you write this column.? Lighten up
6
Why does Ross, or anyone for that matter, care how much sex other people have? What possible difference does it make to anyone other than the people involved (or not getting involved, as it were)?
For Ross, it seems to be that he thinks people are engaging in too much "self-abuse." Duly noted, Ross. Thanks for the feedback. I'll take it with all the seriousness deserved considering the source is a regular defender of the sexually depraved Catholic hierarchy.
Why people are having fewer children is a different topic, and one that is far more interesting. But resolving that societal problem (and failing to meet replacement levels is a real problem) would require policy solutions that go beyond "masturbation is bad." And our small government conservative friends, like Ross, would rather tut-tut about silicone eggs than talk about wages, hours and child care.
23
The notion of reading Ross Douthat on masturbation is equal measures creepy and hilarious.
24
To date this column has been my favorite Douthat piece. The headline was masturbating hilarious. And in the midst of reading it, I was reminded of those great ogasmatrons in Woody Allen's Sleeper.
Thanks, Ross. This made my day.
6
Self-abuse? Really? Onanism? Masturbation? Are you stuck in 1950? I’ll bet you believe it leads to hairy palms, too! Sheesh.
It’s called “self-pleasuring,” Ross. Get with the 21st century already. Enough with the derogatory terms for natural, harmless human behavior.
No wonder the Catholic Church is such a mess. Endless moralizing and shaming. Almost as bad as the evangelicals. I’ll bet Mother won’t let him read this article because there’s a “bad word” in the title.
Grow up, America.
23
Goodness me Ross. Why is it that you and your ilk spend so much time and thought and, in your case, ink, on sex? It's puzzling and depressing and this column is both of those.
8
Can repressed Catholic, Ross Douthat, please never write about the evils of masturbation ever again? Describing masturbation as 'self-abuse' says it all.
16
I’m surprised the Times published this. It shouldn’t have.
5
The assumption on the part of the sex suppressors has always been exposure to sex will simply be incendiary.
The truth is probably found in the experience of male medical students who found that their libido's plummeted during their gynecology rotations, when they were examining vaginas and female pelvic organs constantly.
Look at the wide variety of porn on the internet and what eventually strikes you is the sameness of it; you can only have sex in so many ways and then it repeats.
So, the solution to sexual avidity turns out to be complete sexual permissiveness.
What a surprise!
2
" Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse ".
Self abuse, really? That sounds like a term from a 1950's Scout Handbook. In first world countries such as ours, this could be a natural slowing down of population growth. Perhaps on some small scale were giving the environment a bit of a break. Masturbation sounds too clinical. Try using a term like " auto eroticism ". At least one doesn't have to look their best for it.
6
First of all, I guess someone has to tell Ross Douthat that couples watch porn together too. And that people in great and fulfilling relationships masturbate. All of these things are not contradictory. Masturbation is normal. What’s not as normal? Using the term “self abuse.” Then there is this elf business. Linking Lord of the Rings to masturbation provides some insight into what creatures might live in Ross’s Mirkwood, if you catch my drift.
Kate Julian’s article in the Atlantic which Ross D. references is an elf-reference-free indictment of how apps and internet based social media technologies have failed as a substitute for actual real life interactions, especially for the heteronormative. His assertion that the article is about how physical sex is “out of fashion” is wrong. It's about how meeting people is hard, especially for the overworked and aspirational single middle classes, especially those who have been conditioned during their adolescent years not to waste time on stuff that might fail. Apps promise an end run around the messiness, but then many people end up having no connections at all, because it turns out apps can’t engineer the risk of failure out of social interactions.
Her article is a powerful indictment of certain trends in contemporary society and culture … but masturbation ain’t one. Perhaps fortunately for Ross Douthat, elf related cosplay ain’t one either. The future doesn’t have to be all bad when it comes to finding your community.
13
The author is out of touch. Fist of all J.R.R. Tolkien did not write about elves. And why does he refer to Flogging the Bishop as "self-abuse"? Any authoritative medical textbook will say it is a normal, healthy activity. Social convention tells him and greater society it is a shameful sin and should be avoided. But there is another factor not much realized that masturbation in males increases the circulating levels of testosterone. High testosterone levels has the effect of closing the epiphyseal plate in growing adolescents. Teen boys who don't masturbate grow taller. Also not much considered, thanks to the invention of the miniature vibrator, women do it more than males in today's "dystopian" world.
If he says masturbation has the effect of desocializing interaction between the sexes, or lovers, then why does he ignore other more profound anti-social effects of hugely successful companies like Amazon which eliminate the socialization that occurs between people who simply go shopping in a store or shopping mall, where people used to go to pick up hook ups.
I could go on but the NYT is not stable enough for such a mature discussion. I'll be surprised if the censors even allow this comment. They usually censor any mention of such matters.
1
As somebody once said "Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone you love."
8
At one point, Mr. Douthat actually refers to masturbation as self abuse. Sort of a return to Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, where "Every sperm is sacred; every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate."
At age 73, I do not wish for the Orwellian future, but neither do I long for inquisitions of the past.
There are certainly some huge problems in our society, but I wouldn't list "people getting off" in the top 50. Oh, and about porn--I find it boring and don't watch it--freedom of choice.
5
"Onanism" - self-abuse? I thought that phrase went out with my grandpa's dusty old Dictionary. Looked up "masturbation" when I was twelve and thought I must be very, very sick, to be "abusing" myself like that. Luckily, I had a wise father. He caught me looking downcast. "What's wrong? he inquired, never looking up from his paper. "I think I'm sick, I said." Then, proving that parents can read your mind, he said, "Is this about masturbation?" He raised his newspaper so I couldn't see his face, but there was a lot of Boston Globe-rattling and coughing, so I'm pretty sure he was laughing. "I kind of thought so," he said, in response to my shocked silence. "You aren't sick and there is nothing for you to feel ashamed about. Everybody does it. Even your Mom does it! Now, stop your mopin' and go have a good time." My father probably saved me from a life of being in any way ashamed of my sexuality, made me trust myself completely in these matters, ahem, and made grateful for pornography as well. Online porn is the best thing that has happened to women. We get to have our fantasies with bad (or romantic) men who are always ready to satisfy us, one way or another. You know, it's not porn stars who bother women, its "real life" men we...don't...get...to...choose who violate us. Fantasies kind of take the edge of that. Viva porn!
6
Don't you mean 'self-pleasure'? I know you are catholic, as I once was, and I was taught by the priests that 'spilling the seed' was a sin. I went to the library where I learned that ALL men masturbate. So I continued...
6
If masturbation is self-abuse, then what is sex with other people?
5
I’ll take a great orgasm over a trip to the dispensary any day.
3
I think you read a different Brave New World than I did. There was no masturbating in that book at all.
1
Hilarious! Now the conservatives are afraid sex is going out of style. The healthy, open but respectful sexuality of the younger generation is beautiful. I am 67 and I welcome it whole heartedly. Enjoy yourself kids!
6
Here we go again. This reminds one of the arguments made by the Catholic League of Decency back in the 1930’s to censor movies and media. Once again the argument that media is ruining healthy, moral relationships. Where have we heard the arguments that masturbation is “self-abuse?” We need to be careful how far we extend this critique lest it end up stifling artistic expression. To couch this argument in some kind of faux-feminist critique seems a bit disingenuous.
4
What really caused the change between the attitudes of the 1960's and 70's and those of the 1990's was AIDS.
3
I have much more hope than Mr. Douthat. We are in the midst of a vast experiment in techno-eroticism. Through porn I’ve learned a lot about the role and nature of fantasy in sex, and my wife and I have integrated porn into our sex life in fun ways. I have a much more sanguine take on the whole vast uncontrolled social experiment. I think we’re going to learn to understand and control our sexual lives in unprecedented and interesting ways that ultimately will deepen both our humanity and our erotic lives. Douthat’s conservative Catholic vision lacks the openness to new experience and the faith in humanity needed to affirm these developments as just the stumbling and halting progress of the human spirit. I say to Douthat, lighten up, and listen to old Cole Porter
The apple on the top of the tree
Is never too high to achieve,
So take an example from Eve,
Experiment.
2
Fellow readers, logon to Google and look up onanism. Then click on the sound icon and listen to the voice and intonation used in the pronunciation. It will make you laugh.
Ross, maybe you watched too much TV in your youth. Could that be the reason? My mom always criticized me for having my nose in a book. It probably had some effect.
It was a fun article even if it was a little bit of an elf.
1
I just don't get it. Are there a lot of people masturbating instead of having regular 'ole intercourse? If that's the point of this Opinion by Mr. Douthat, it's same o same o, right? And, boy, does Mr. Douthat have a great vocabulary or what?
For the love of God Ross, get a life!
6
"This isn’t the sex-positive utopia prophesied by Wilhelm Reich and Alex Comfort and eventually embraced by third-wave feminists."
In fact Reich was a big advocate of masturbation. So he's not so irrelevant as Douthat imply.
1
I think I have a pretty decent IQ, but I always have a hard time figuring out what this guy is talking about.
4
My problem with Douthat is his constant desire to paint a personal issue that an individual can easily address on his or her own (if they choose to do so) into a classic "major social ill needs state/church intervention STAT!" piece. I'm surprised he managed to make it through this entire op-ed without blaming the gays and proscribing an end to anti-discrimination statutes so that the straights can get it on again.
When I was growing up sex was illegal, porn was expensive, grindr didn't exist, and the government actively ignored a fatal epidemic that destroyed thousands of innocent lives just because Douthat's church felt that sickness, death, and criminal convictions were necessary correctives to a "major social ill." That was barely more than a decade and a half ago. Now I'm supposed to feel sorry for straights who aren't getting laid... because they choose not to?! No, Douthat, not another [expletive] elf story!
4
Welcome to the United Handmaids Tale of America!
Give us your tired, your poor, and your Third-World-child-bearing-aged immigrant women to have babies for us.
2
I always thought sex was just fun. Now that I read this column I realize it's destroying everything! I proclaim never to think about or have sex ever again.
Honestly, this column is a joke. Over analyze this ludicrous column's premise anyway you like. But if you want to vilify anything about sex it should be sexual repression and portraying sex as being evil. The bottom line is too much of anything, good or bad, will have the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve.
3
The thing to understand about porn and the deluge of other images that flood our consciences is that they fascinate us.
That's right, they hook us. We have lost a lot of screening capacity when we let these images in from the get-go. They lead us to an insular world where we can get only "safe satisfaction". There is no opposition. We only have willing compliant partners who obey our every whim.
Sex has gone the way of the drug wars; illegal makes it worth more. "Self abuse" you say? "Real world interaction"......really real?
Having represented various serial rapists, I can tell you that almost all of them worked themselves up with porn viewing and/or watching pole dancers or strippers before they went out to score.
Now because of the net and formula sex behavior depicted online there is no beautiful discovery, no finding a personal way thru to erotic paradise, no romance of the sexual spirit, nor any innocence lost because we know just how we are expected to do it. We've seen it all.
But that's not true. A brave new world awaits those who would set themselves free to find the transcendent experience of sex we are all called to.
Searching for sexual bliss in the culture, forget it. The Jewish old testament admonitions warned us of the idolatry in which we are now imersed. It is now common for the human head to be inclined at the neck over a small screen in hand.
A safer path, right, Otherwise you might fall in love or see someone you really think you want to talk to.
1
Ross, does your column say "the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse"?
Sorry, I can't quite make out the words. Do you think I'm going blind?
Sign me...
Single and Worried
4
If porn is such a calming social anesthetic, why is there this new politics-of-grievance group called “incels”? (Involuntary Celibates) They’re all hot and bothered over on Reddit, and two even became mass murderers. Sounds like porn has room to work a lot better. Or maybe we’re looking at a socio-economic problem that is way more complicated than where we get our pleasures from.
2
I worry about the younger generation getting a distorted view of sexual behavior when watching stories about our President, Supreme Court judges, priests, conservative politicians, and, yes, Anthony Weiner. The porn industry has more standards than most of those men.
3
Many people have been lousy at sex and relationships for thousands of years. Why should today be any different?
2
Check out Ira Levin's This Perfect Day for another take on how a future government arrogates sexual activity for its own purposes.
Note: Ross Douthat's Catholicism infuses his ideas as thoroughly as Islam with any imam. He makes great points in this column but who, except a follower of what seems like a 1950s-styled American Catholicism, would write this today of masturbation: it's "the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse"?
4
Yes yes - a world where women fake orgasms to please their husband and predatory priests and bishops can keep life destroying intercourse alive with youth. Douthat attacks perhaps the one thing that may save humanity from itself - a potential means to reduce our species over population. Make porn even more reality like and perhaps that evolutionary seed planted in us to procreate like no tomorrow will be sated - and families can stay small and resources recover.
3
The definition of "self-abuse": forcing oneself to read yet another Victorian column by Ross Douthat.
7
The pendulum swings....
"...with no social collapse looming on the horizon." Really? You must not get out much...the social collapse happened already..."
Self-abuse?
3
Abuse it or lose it as Gramma said
5
I wonder how many readers know the word onanism definition. It comes from holy scriptures from one and a half millennium ago, from a Christian culture.
Yes, this is an example of monomania. Again, when women make personal decisions, the result is BAD for social order, humanity, and world peace. We don’t need this in a national paper.
2
Allen Bloom was certainly one of those who, 30 years ago, expressed concern over the demise of eros in a liberal sexually liberated modern America. Eros is a primal attachment to someone/ or something beyond the individual, mortal self. It is an attachment which exceeds the manipulations suggested by calculative reason in the service of self. As such it is an essential component of our relationship with others. Rousseau, in the "Emile" recognizes this bonding power, and it is for that reason that he identifies "masterbation" as the worst possible "sin" for the young Emile. It is precisely this lack of eros which characterizes both the calculative manipulations of Trump and the worst excesses of the me-too movement.
1
Ross, Please simplify for us plain folk - is sex good, or bad? Thank you.
2
“Self abuse”— oh, Ross!
3
"self abuse"? really?
3
As always, I think you are smug and self-righteous Ross (and for the most part love you for it), but you made my day...I'm so happy to read something that is not about the election and Donald Trump.
Perhaps the ingredients of perversion mentioned here, onanism and pornography, might find a positive use in satisfying clerical sexual needs with the Catholic and other churches so that third parties might not be afflicted for life with the consequences of clerical asuse of power?
2
Let's work rather on big problems: find love for ourselves, define and maintain our emotional boundaries, communicate honestly, ask for what we need, give others the support we can give, and all the little things will fall into place.
Porn is a symptom, not a vice.
2
Douthat started this piece at the tender age of 40, with full use of his mental faculties. When we finished, he was 85 and had the character and demeanor of Jeff Sessions.
Come on, Ross. I'm a usual reader but you really jumped the shark on this one. Why is sex that doesn't make babies so bad?
4
How can we take seriously the arguments of Mr Douthat when he calls masturbation, "self abuse"?
3
Self-abuse. (!)
Love your style, Ross.
2
Three cheers for onanism!
3
What a strange topic to write about.
5
In the current climate, of accusations of inappropriate behavior, what else can we expect for some people, other than gravitate towards porn.
It's the risk of being vulnerable that contributes to people migrating to porn. The sharing of vulnerabilities leads to intimacy.
Everyone in the last few decades has been taught at a very young age they are special and that there is one special person for them. If you want to find out why people are disconnecting, I'd start there...
I think of porn as more of a symptom and less of a cause.
1
We have updated the Roman prescription for pacifying the masses from 'bread and circuses' to 'drugs and porn'.
Maybe the way to calm down the extremists in the Middle East is to do the same.
1
Onanism? Self abuse? I'm very surprised that Mr. Douthat uses these antiquated (biblical in the case of onanism) and moralistic terms. Does he actually disapprove of masturbation? I don't think this article makes any clear point, and I must say, just the use of those ridiculous terms completely without irony makes me think that Mr Douthat has not ridden his tricycle into town in a long, long time.
3
And not a word about "incels," those men furious that women will not have sex with them, so murder them instead.
5
As someone who was on the bleeding edge of the sexual revolution, I discovered early-on that sex was both amazing and over-rated. This contradiction, unfortunately, is very possible. People who will disagree with the later are wedded to the recent notion that sex is palliative. Per the former, you need to have a poet’s soul to truly appreciate sex —and there are way too few of those. Mostly, Americans are very bad at it. Kundalini control is unknown. Circumcision is rife. It is not surprising that virtual sex would be accepted, since actual sex in the U.S. is so dismally shallow.
I am concerned for young women these days. I can’t imagine that their sex lives are any better because or the porn invasion. But the silver lining is that it makes feminism stronger. They have so much less to lose.
The spread of the internet has coincided with use of DNA evidence, better security technology, and better treatment of rape victims. Porn isn't somehow the solution to violent crime, but it isn't necessarily the cause of it either.
2
Bravo chez bravo brother Socrates. The real danger is not hairy palms but a very hairy future. Keep fiddling you fiddlers. Douthat knows the tune.
I've read Kate Julian's article in The Atlantic, and I highly recommend it. Mr. Douthat missed much of its point. Ms. Julian concludes that the blame for what she dubs the sexual recession is multifactorial.
It ranges from intense pressure to succeed scholastically and economically that crowds out unstructured social playtime (including romance), to economic factors that keep young people living with their parents long after graduation (definitely not conducive to sexual relationships), to sleep deprivation (also bad for libido), to fears of coming across as a creep, to depression and the medications for it which can lower sex drive, to the healthy refusal to settle for bad sex. Technology definitely plays a strong role, as does porn, but those are hardly the only issues.
Morality will not solve the problems of underemployment, depression, or trauma. Ironically, one of the things that could help, which the Atlantic article highlights, is frank, realistic education about sex and relationships. Teaching people how to have healthy, sexually active intimate relationships can help get past anxiety, uncertainty, and unrealistic expectations. But of course, that's exactly what Mr. Douthat and his fellow conservatives don't want to see. You wanted abstinence? You got it. Now you're not happy with that either? Maybe you shouldn't have nixed sex ed.
4
Are you confusing cause and effect? How do we know that instant and ubiquitous availability of porn and social media cause increased isolation and not the reverse?
Also, since when did the availability of porn create its own demand? Archaeologists have found porn on ancient cave walls. Are these authors trying to say that humans weren't interested in porn before Hugh Hefner and then the internet age?
Finally, why is it that social conservatives seem to universally settle on porn and libertinism as the biggest threats to modern civilization? After reading "The Reactionary Mind" by Corey Robin, I've come to realize that the real agenda here is the pursuit of personal power through control of other human beings' personal lives. Robin makes a good case that the power that matters is almost always experienced in personal, intimate settings.
This might explain why reactionary evangelicals have been so quick to forget about their faux moral concerns over sexual behavior and personal choice in relationships and pregnancy in order to embrace the uber-libertine Trump. The stooge Trump offers them a short-cut to "dominion", their term for power over other human beings. There is no aphrodisiac like power.
4
Improving the sex lives of people will require that both liberals and conservatives try something new which is actually talking about sex honestly, openly and intelligently. Pornography is not the danger people imagined. However, ignorance is always dangerous.
4
Unhappy about it?
Nothing is stopping couples enjoying e-fantasies together.
Spark and sometimes instruction and/or new ideals.
Adapt and adopt.
The new age is moving fast.
Quit yelling at clouds and the neighbor kids on the lawn.
Your idealism of the past is just that, fantastical.
It wasn't all that and chips.
Heck, the internet brings a whole new meaning to date night.
2
Umm, I'm pretty sure he was using the terms "self-abuse" in way that seemed to go over some reactionary heads of reactionary readers. Actually it is self-abuse if it is disruptive to your life and has a negative impact -- like being an impediment or substitute for healthy human relationships. And by the way, it can be since we all know that a young person's sex drive is partly what drives them out into the socializing/dating world. Nothing wrong with that as it creates the necessary conditions for developing relationships with others!
And since "sex addiction" is among our more fashionable labels for "I can't help it" problems these days, I think the "Sex Addict" community and all it's allied industry supporters would not find the term inappropriate in certain circumstances.
So weird how the internet political correctness police are always so hyper-alert they often miss the point, oversimplify and outright fake outrage. What ever happened to freedom of speech? How about DIVERSITY of opinion, not just diversity in "sex acts"? SMH.
2
Forgive Douthat the written miscue on "self-abuse" -- he's writing 80,000 words a year at least, and some of them will be poorly chosen. Self-pleasure would have been a better choice. But stick to the substance, which is the law of unintended consequences. Those who built the Internet did not intend for it to wreck the sexual expectations of teens, and provide people a no-muss-no-fuss-no-interaction incentive to self-pleasure at the expense of actual relationships. Yet that's what happened. Those who focus on identity and consent do not intend to have young people lose sight of pleasure, yet that's what happened. Those who invented SSRIs didn't intend them to interfere with libido, but that's what happened. Those who created Snapchat technology didn't intend to make it harder for teens to have actual conversations in real time, but that's what happened. The moral of the story is: Beware what you don't intend.
1
"... trying to find their way back to a worldview that takes moral virtue and human flourishing seriously again"
There may be excellent reasons that the rise of Internet pornography has some serious downsides.
But when the word "morality" is trotted out as a self-evident virtue, that makes any such argument seem like phoning it in.
*Why* should a change in behavior such as this columnist advocates be a boon to individuals and/or society as a whole?
This needs to be explained.
1
Isaac Newton disdained speculative hypotheses with neither mathematical or empirical foundation. Hence, Newton wrote, “Hypotheses non fingo”, or “I feign no hypotheses”.
Both Ross Douthat and David Brooks are guilty of extending inferences beyond any existing theory or observational fact. As Stephen Jay Gould alluded to, Douthat's hypotheses are "Just So" stories by Rudyard Kipling.
Douthat proposes two hypotheses for the fact that Western Culture did not slide into hedonism following the sexual revolution of the 1960s with the advent of the pill. First, the internet made moot any attempt to restrict pornography and the resulting ubiquitous nature of pornography did not lead to social chaos, as social conservatives (Douthat et al.) had predicted (Hypothesis 1).
The sexual revolution appears to have, in fact, been tamed. And modern culture seems to be having less sex than in the past.
Liberals predicted, erroneously according to Douthat, a rise in egalitarian sex and better sexual relationships. Instead, he proposes the availability of pornography made it easy for males to satisfy themselves without having to go looking for real sex with someone else (Hypothesis 2).
I have a problem with Hypothesis 2. I can think of 2 reasons for the decline of 'legitimate' sex. First, modern life is so busy, there is no time for sex. 2nd, population growth tends to slow down the bigger the population. Both are speculative, but equally plausible. Furthermore, Europe used egalitarian sex.
What tamed the sexual revolution was the loss of a distinction between public and private life. When everything is everyone else's business, like much of what is discussed in this article, people eventually withdraw. People need a private life.
1
I'm thinking of the people stuck in the Matrix; the zombielike people in Predestination, and all things virtual reality that keep us numb. Only, which machine is trying to keep us in check in real life, right now?
Rather than tut- tut, I would say, "yawn." Maybe people stopped exaggerating their sexual activity quite as much as they used to; Maybe self-reporting (e.g. voting exit polls) just no longer works. Maybe as women have finally clawed their way up from salaries of 70 cents on the dollar to 85 cents, there is less pressure for them to submit. Maybe as living standards have declined, people have less disposable cash with which to bar-hop. Maybe if you're hooked on oxy, your odds at the local bar went from bad to zero. Maybe you just can't find the bar.
While the desire to write about something besides Trump is highly laudable, I don't think a mash-up of Politico and Atlantic fills the bill.
Everybody gets a Mulligan every once in a while, so I would say, o.k., just take another swing.
1
The reported decline in sexual activity is a symptom of the overall decline in real, face-to-face communication between flesh-and-blood humans, in favor of artificial interaction with others through the medium of computers and smartphones.
There is nothing sadder than walking into a crowded pub at happy hour and seeing everyone buried in their smartphones when they could be having a real conversation with any number of the real human beings surrounding them.
Like Narcissus, they apparently prefer looking at their own extended image in the smartphone to taking the uncertain, uncontrolled risk of engaging the real world outside them.
Put down the phone and take a look at the world around you! Who knows, you might like it.
You miss the biggest influence on the decline in personal interactions, whether it's getting together over coffee with friends or having sex: the younger generations (X and Y) spend most of their free waking time online. They date less, go out less, have sex less, are home more and the birth rate has been dropping.
This is chronicled with abundant data in a recent book -- iGen, by Jean Twenge, Ph.D.
http://www.jeantwenge.com/igen-book-by-dr-jean-twenge/
She draws data from four major public databases. Monitoring the Future (MtF), asks 8th, 10th and 12th graders more than a thousand questions every year. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS, administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has surveyed high school students since 1991. The American Freshman (AF) Survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institute, has questioned students entering four-year colleges and universities since 1966. The General Social Survey (GSS) has examined adults 18 and over since 1972.
Here is a link to the Appendices which have data from four public sources and charts that show the rapid drop off in personal interactions following the introduction of the smart phone in 2012 and increase in daily hours online, which is frightening in creating socially inept generations. https://goo.gl/UDgU9k
1
With any luck, this trend will become pervasive enough to reverse population growth for a while so we can get back in balance with the rest of the planet's inhabitants. I don't worry about the species ending so much with this scenario as I would if we carry on procreating as usual.
Ross Douthat, your decadence is thinking you are more catholic than the Pope.
Please inform yourself about climate change.
Coming to a place near you.
If you want progress, provide women with control over their own lives: ready access to birth control and jobs.
Women don't waste their funds on liquor, drugs, prostitutes, or other ego boosters.
Time to wake up!
7
The argument that one side lost the culture war seems misplaced. That Huxley’s novel talked about class and pleasure was no surprise. His novel was published two years after Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, which suggested that human behavior was constrained by societal rules. Marx also argued economics constrained choices as well.
Perhaps Mr. Douthat you should consider how much free will or morality truly exists. Robert Saplosky’s, “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” suggests that bad behavior may not be the result of choice as much was one would want to believe, that behavior may be determined more by biology than we want to admit.
Perhaps the pornography you complain of is the result of humans’ inability to cope with stress that has been created by our political, judicial, and economic systems.
Perhaps the pleasure principle Freud talked about is nothing more than the pacifier one needs when one’s nervous system is shot and one cannot find a means to cope with fear, insecurity, anxiety, and nervousness.
If pornography is a moral issue, then why not seek a means to eliminate the source of stress?
Perhaps stress is the result of those falling into the have not camp reaching record highs.
Of course, conservatives would have us believe the one percent deserve everything they get because they are moral.
5
It's hard to evaluate this argument without percentages of people involved in these trends.
@Peter
Ah, yes, the high school years. 1971-1975 were pretty good for a high school kid who was following sports in northern California.
Five division championships and three World Series for the A's, spearheaded by future Hall of Famers Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Rollie Fingers; an NBA championship led by future Hall of Famer Rick Barry; and a would-be championship by the Raiders but for a referee's infamously bad call on the last play of the game.
The 1972 Immaculate Reception game was the very first time in my life that I began to understand that virginity was but a matter of opinion.
1
It should be considered that, while the frequency of the sex act has decreased, the population has gotten fatter. This may not be entirely due to changes in processed food or livestock raised on antibiotics--people have lost the will to monitor their eating. It is my hypothesis that the sexual "revolution" caused so much unhappiness, was ultimately so demeaning, that people have layered themselves in fat to make themselves less approachable--a way of saying "no" in this so-passive and fearful culture. This does not have to be a conscience decision, but often it is. Tell someone on a diet that they are looking good, and the fear this causes in their heart of hearts leads to ice cream for supper and through the night.
2
As a 62 year old father of 2 grown women, I had to spend my last 3 years in IT working in an IT support environment with 25-35 year old men. All they talked about was video gaming, and none seemed to have the slightest interest in meeting women, dating, or of course marriage/kids. They made less adjusted for inflation than I did at their age, none owned a home(despite making maybe 55k so they could have had a low end condo), and none made any effort to have good hygiene or good physical fitness. It was depressing and I know every one of them has a female equivalent who is kind the same way(we probably had 10% women and they were tattooed, nose ringed typed). No analysis except the lower wages but totally depressing
10
I'm a 28 year old woman (with a tattoo and nose ring) who's been happily married for 6 years. My husband and I bought our house 3 years ago. I fail to see what your female co-workers' body modifications have to do with their relationship/home owner status.
7
It's very difficult to generalize about romantic/sexual relationships between people. They're all different.
There is one thing, though, on which there is likely agreement. Quality time with the right person cannot be matched by any amount of time in front of a screen.
10
No time for sex does not apply to those addicted spending hours online.
Ross, you say "fleeting private pleasures" like it's a bad thing. I worry about you sometimes.
17
Really good porn is hard to come by.
10
@JSK
Bravo!
A columnist sufficiently far gone into self-righteousness will lose even the language to describe clearly why, say, “self-abuse” (an ancient expression of disapproval for a thing everyone does) might not be a positive.
Did you even notice that you left out any actual articulation of harms (besides a plangent plethora of florid adjectives)?
Do you have any actual evidence that people are interacting less, or that their interactions are less meaningful than in decades or centuries past? Any reason to blame it on masturbation, beyond your own icky feelings about your own or others' practices?
To quote Updike's Roger's Version: "Ni pudendis pudendum" [I am not ashamed of my crotch]. If you are, that's your problem.
7
Anyone who refers to masturbation as "self-abuse" is too uptight (or too religious) to write a thoughtful essay about sex.
24
There are women who like porn also. It is not a man cave thing. And online porn, or at least the revenue from it, has fueled online tech through trying to make better delivery software, picture and movie quality. And many have said that it represses the urge to go out and commit sexual crimes through masturbation with the side effect of becoming numb to it's excitement seeking out different interests or fetishes for that next rush. like drugs, abortion, and guns, you can ret to prohibit it but it will always be available. Mass media online making it more so now than ever. Good luck trying to outlaw it. Let's just concentrate on keeping kids and violence out of it. That may be more doable.
1
If masturbation is “self abuse”, you’re doing it incorrectly.
35
This article assumes that intercourse is the end all be all of sexual expression, over "self-abuse" (just that phrase indicates Mr. Douthat's opinion on that activity). But those activities are different and fulfill different needs for each person. I remember as a teen listening to Dr. Ruth enthusiastically encourage self pleasuring, and I took her advice! I enjoy both activities, why choose between them?
152
@Diva I'm astonished that an adult would still use the term "self-abuse" in 2018.
45
@Lynn Exactly. Hel-lo! It's kind of...sad.
10
@Lynn I'm uncomfortable with any term other than self-pleasuring or solo sex. The "M" word is simply an ugly word. Or perhaps my vintage age is showing!
4
"Onanism"? "Self abuse"? Glad to see you can be so open minded about the normal and natural act of masturbation, Mr. Douthat;)
11
I'm finding the comments here lovelier than the article, no surprise there. That said, I have to note that many of my fellow commenters here seem to ascribe to the "auteur" view - e.g. judging any given article by its author. I prefer to view each article based on the content therein, and here I find myself, (one of those terrible feminists, but not a sexual killjoy) congruent with Douthat's conclusion, as I understand it. (e.g., we are unhappy and ergo can change that) I don't agree with how he gets there, however.
I appreciate the references to the Atlantic and Politico articles; very enlightening if unsatisfying in their dreary conclusions, vice versa of Douthat's.
Here's my take: 1) re: porn - the horse escaped the barn when we invented photography and isn't coming back 2) to each, his or her own - at least the internet reduces the killing of trees and finding icky mags under the bed 3) I object more to ubiquitous sexual images repeatedly forced into my view by my paid subscription to the NYTimes - e.g. today's "leggings" ad - skintight rose-colored pants over a shapely female butt - than I do to any prolific porn, which I can readily avoid by not seeking it 4) no discussion of erotica, nor chemistry, nor positive, playful fun in this dissection of "sex" - I would argue that talking about porn and/or sex as exclusively a sensory experience negates my own observation that much sexual gratification happens between the ears, and I'm not talking about anything acrobatic!
7
Great comments responding to this essay. I must add I haven’t seen masturbation called self abuse since Catholic school in the ‘50s and, sitting in my dr’s office, it made me laugh out loud.
Golly Ross. Thanks for the laugh but I’m a bit concerned about your focus on people’s sex lives.
12
Honestly Mr. Douthat, don’t you ever tire of being so pruriently focused on other people’s intimate lives? How about taking a twelve month vacation from fretting about what others are doing in the bedroom? As your own column acknowledges, the world will not implode if you do.
18
Look at what has been happening in Japan. A gigantic percentage of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in their 30's have literally zero dating experience with a recent study reporting that some 43% of men and women between the ages of 18 and 34 are virgins, and a huge percent have no interest in dating. In place of dating there are a series of "flirtation services" that are supposed to take the place, not of intercourse, but of intimate interaction with another human being (e.g., a service exists whereby a woman will gaze lovingly into your eyes for a period of time). As a consequence, Japanese population is expected to drop by 24% by 2050, and there are now more sales of adult diapers than baby diapers! I think the US is only a couple decades behind Japan based on what I'm seeing. We can argue about whether population needs to decline for the sake of sweet mother earth, and I don't know the right answer there, but it strikes me as self-evident that "getting it on" and the instinct to do so is a clear sign of health. And while it's not left to me to tell others how to find fulfillment in their lives, my opinion is that the lack of a strong "get it on" instinct, particularly where it applies to a large segment of a population, is pretty clearly pathological. The drive towards sex is one of the most basic human instincts that exists. To discover that something is happening to us that causes that instinct to wither and die with increasing frequency is extremely concerning.
3
I could not read through the comments so I do not if anyone else mentioned this item. Porn is ubiquitous mainly because it is almost always free. I watched an German documentary on one of the streaming services created by an Italian woman that a decade ago won prizes for her work on sex trade. She did a follow up and to her surprise, found one company, under hundreds of names, supplies 95% of internet porn. It rarely charges for product and consequently, compensation for porn actors, the group she tracked, has dropped to nothing. She wondered why and found the firm. She could not figure out how it makes money. She could not find any government interested in investigating because , if it is defrauding someone or using info illegally, no one has found evidence it occurred.
1
Please see para. 10 out of the whole 16. Did Mr. Douthat really use, without irony or in jest, the archaic and pejorative term "self-abuse" or am I merely dreaming that this is 2018? Talk about puritanism ! I detect more than a little stuffiness.
16
Stepping back for a moment...
We are living in a modern society that place minimal value on human work... it costs too much and technology can do it better. Small businesses are more often than not franchises today, and even farming has been corporatized,
Our government continues to be in the thrall of special interests and dedicated to creating to a class society that has no middle class and few rich oligarchs who are not bound by a rule of law.
We don't broadly subsidize college or even medical schools education. People with degrees are working 2 or 3 jobs to pay off student loans that make banks high profits. And many aren't finding meaningful work. The message being sent by our behavior is that we don't need or want an educated society.
What we do encourage is greater dependence on sports entertainment and social networking as distractions.
And Ross it talking about recovering societal aspiration by making masturbation a sin again! Laughable in its 'religious' solipsism. I doubt this would have been the New Testament plan endorsed by Jesus. As I recall he started his career attacking the Pharisees...
10
Masturbation is not self-abuse, it is self-gratification. It is no substitute for the real thing and harms no one. Still some religions cast it as a sin. It is really hilarious to read this column. A lot of gobbledygook in a vain attempt to recreate those days gone by of sexual repression. Sorry, that genie is long gone from the bottle and no one, except religious zealots who likely do it secretly, wants to return our mores to those atavistic beliefs.
12
I wouldn't normally make a comment like this, but since Mr. Douthat obviously has a bee in his bonnet about everyone else's forms of sexual gratification, the question arises that he has been married eleven years and has but two children. Since he is a devout Catholic I assume he does not use birth control, so do he and his wife spend most nights on their knees in prayer? I do think we deserve the right to comment on his "habits" since he has taken it upon himself to tell us how we should be living.
26
Remember the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper" and the orgasmatron. He was ahead of his time.
7
@Gary Edelman
Damn you! You beat me to the punch with this! Oh well, if my comment is ever posted, I did not mean to "copy" you.
I thought of the Sleeper about two paragraphs into the column, btw.
For me, Ross Douthat's analyses of contemporary sexuality--one of his favorite topics--is always undermined by his not so thinly veiled fear, distrust, and loathing of the body in general and sex in particular. Please note the reference to masturbation as "self-abuse." Really, in 2018? Mr. Douthat's takedown of Hugh Heffner following Heffner's death, published in this paper, mixes a well-deserved critique of Heffner's denigration of women with a seething rage. At certain points, for example, he seems to criticize Heffner for remaining sexual into old age. Heffner is a "leering grotesque" who has fallen into "sleazy decrepitude." In short, Douthat turns Heffner into a symbol of everything he despises in contemporary society--an intellectually dishonest and emotionally immature impulse. No thanks.
7
First, I take exception with the notion of self-abuse. Have we not moved beyond that old, tired trope to the notion of self-pleasuring?
Second, the casual use of pornography described here is nauseating. Pornography is not a victimless crime, especially if children are involved.
For older adults, one problem is that growing social isolation prevents sexual contact between singles in a healthy manner, i.e., within a relationship.
4
Rates of teen pregnancy are down. People are having few babies. Rates of rape are down. Access to pornography is up.
I'm sorry. Did somebody say that there was a problem?
11
I read both those articles and it makes me understand my children better. My daughter and her friends (with the exception of one) travel in packs, of boys and girls but "just friends." It's rather nice to see-- they have a lot of fun -- but I wonder if any of them is going "to date" (they are all 22 years old). It's so different from when I was that age.
3
"Self-abuse"!?!
Mr. Douthat speaks as a member of a religion that essentially denies sex, except as a mean of procreation, and forbids it to those supposed to guide their followers.
Yes, there are over a billion Roman Catholics, but this religion is losing ground quickly, for obvious reasons, as humankind becomes more educated. The sickening phrase used by Mr. Douthat should be confined to the large number of ill people in the world who intentionally injure or kill themselves. That is self abuse. Masturbation is not.
Dan Kravitz
8
I would disagree that our culture is so sexually permissive. A new Puritanism has taken hold, congruent with a self-centered, anti-social ethos. In this day and age where striking up a conversation with a stranger is considered awkward or intimidating, flirting can be considered harassment or worse, traditional gender roles and courting rituals have been turned on their head, and oblivious phone gazing in public is the new norm, it's very very hard to make romantic connections. Add to that the increasing insularity of people, where eveyone wants instant gratification, on their own terms without having to compromise, without having to understand the perspective of a different person, and it makes the patient give and take of a healthy relationship much harder to achieve. On a broader scale I think the breakdown of romantic relationships is part of the pattern of the breakdown of relationships in general, among friends, families, neighbors and colleagues. We're much more likely to sit home alone over takeout than to invite a friend from work over for dinner, or to visit Mom for some home cooking. Internet porn is less a cause of this and more a symptom, since sociability in all forms seems to be more and more of a struggle for Americans. I urge everyone to leave thier apartments, turn off their phones, and dare to talk to that attractive stranger at the other end of the bar. Put yourself out of your comfort zone and live a little, before it's too late.
172
@Samuel Russell
While encouraged by your recommendation that we all go out and live it up, this reader remembered 'Dressed to Kill', and 'Mr. Good Bar', the latter base on a true story and made the news at the beginning of a New Year, long ago, leaving some of us chilled and sober.
2
@Samuel Russell
Intellos ignore it as embarrassing, yet the European and South and North Americas are still profoundly Judeo-Christian. If not, Douthat would not write that kind of columns.
Aldous Huxley might have written about "the way that libertinism, once a radically disruptive force, could be tamed, domesticated and used to stabilize society." But the rulers of autocratic nation-states have known about and actually used such tactics forever. For example, the rulers of Edo era Japan pursued precisely such policies for hundreds of years. Yes, Huxley made narrative use of technology and drugs, but Japan, for instance, didn't need either one. I believe what is happening now has nothing to do with what Huxley describes and feudal Japan did. Ross is passing on something that is very much like a conspiracy theory: somebody is controlling society with this stuff. Far more likely is that this is just another unhappy and unexpected outcome of Facebook, Google, YouTube and the rest of them. They accidentally but very recklessly gave us Trump and now they're also inadvertently and very sadly ruining sex and intimacy.
1
Mr. Doughthat's thesis here is way off. Here's what's happening: The world has gotten so difficult and complex--just think about the miserable tasks of dealing with the billing for your health care plan, your health care expenses, your internet service, your phone services and your cable TV service, "luxuries" that are effectively essentials where prices are a moving target; dealing with transportation (in most places, that means buying and maintaining a car), commutes and traffic; dealing with the educational system and job market; dealing with office politics and jobs that demand a lot of training and a high level of intelligence and then are incredibly frustrating because they offer almost no autonomy--almost NOTHING is in our control any longer.
Add those daunting and soul-killing daily logistics to the real work of finding someone you want to spend time with and building that relationship.
Multiply that 100 times if you decide to marry that person, buy and house and have children.
So some people opt out, choosing a virtual existance where life is considerably less compalication. That's incredibly sad, but it also makes total sense.
7
Huxley was prophetic in his understanding of the where technology would be taking us, yet there are still many people in our times who know how to love, and whose sex lives are joyous, creative and intimate - an inner sanctum to which no one but two people have access.
I pray that the mystery and mastery of sex that can bring us well-being will eventually prevail over the extremes of hedonism and celibacy that were the inevitable outcomes of the sexual revolution.
3
According to the FBI, rape is one of the violent crimes that have actually been *increasing* over the past decade or so.
2
"Conservatives didn’t expect it...they believed that sexual liberation would inevitably lead to social chaos."
Yes, the "liberal" paradise is yet to arrive. But liberals were not demanding behaviors, trying to legislate forced promiscuity, random hook-ups to break down the "inhibitions man", to make society less Puritanical, and bring about some vague notion of sexual paradise.
BUT - Conservatives have long been involved in the business of trying to force behavioral change, legislating sexual behaviors, preventing simple education of people in sexuality and basic human biology. For no reason but to stave off their obsession with chaos (Armageddon) as the end result of any sort of personal liberties. Especially those of the female persuasion.
You'd be hard pressed to find any but the most zealot and fringe-living of liberals who really believed any sort of sexual paradise was gonna arrive, and cure all our sexual, gender related issues. Most of us are simple live and let live types. As long as no one is truly getting hurt, is willing and able to make conscious decisions as to their involvement. Whatever. Its about the individual/s, not me. I don't force you, you don't force me.
But its a light scratch to find loads of Conservatives who truly hold strong beliefs that sexual liberation of the individual, especially females, is a certain means to ushering in a complete breakdown of society.
They're obsessed. Convinced there's a direct link between sex and Armageddon.
6
Anyone who still uses the term "self-abuse" has lost me.
8
Certainly the availability of porn has a role to play in the trends described in this op-ed but I believe that the driving force behind the trend is the sad realization that the pursuit of emotionally satisfying sex is mostly unattainable. Studies have shown that it is possible to measure how much time a society spends working by the time it spends watching TV. Japan and the US top the list. Overworked societies spend the least amount of time in active leisure time pursuits, such as sex. The deterioration of loving sexual relationships is not a measure of hedonistic overload so much as it is a deterioration of the opportunity to pursue our happiness.
2
I am so sick of people who feel they need to have an opinion about other people’s sex lives.
Beyond laws necessary to prevent unconsensual sex and the education necessary to engage with our bodies and sexual partners in an ethical and healthy way, what we do behind closed doors is no one’s business but our own.
Sex isn’t the problem - shame is the problem. The shame heaped on those who engage in healthy biological activities because it doesn’t ascribe to the current religion or regime’s personal beliefs (whose own beliefs usually come out of their own vicious cycle of shame).
Just stop.
6
@Liza
The subject matter here, that people are not having sex is clearly a matter of great public importance. Sex is how humanity procreates as well as how a lot of us find satisfaction and fulfillment. The fact that people are losing interest in it is deeply concerning. And while I certainly agree that what goes on behind closed doors ought to be respected as a private interaction, I don't think that evaluating trends about sexual behavior in the US is uninteresting, unimportant or an excessive intrusion into people's private affairs.
1
@Bill
I appreciate that in a larger sense, but that's not what's going on here. Evaluating and quantifying in a scientific sense, without passing judgment, is different than coming to a bizarre conclusion that masturbation and pornography are the downfall of healthy sex (and let us remember that "healthy" and "acceptable for one group's religious or cultural norms" are not synonymous). If the author was truly only interested in evaluating a lack of sexual interest between couples (assumedly heterosexual married couples), he would have consulted scientific resources that also evaluated the work-life balance of modern families, the empowerment of women to say no to forced copulation, and the acceptance of healthy, ethical sexual activity that falls outside his version of the traditional. For example, his notion that masturbation *discourages* people from having sex? I believe there have been Kinsey studies that prove the opposite, though I'd have to check to make sure.
At any rate, my issue is when intrusion becomes judgment. Too often, it does, and this article is right there with the rest of them.
1
A bit of news, young scribe: the vast majority will choose the trap. And those of us who do not will be counted, listed, and eventually dealt with.
1
When this is all over, what are we going to do with all the blind people?
4
Left out of article and comments is the effect of rampant obesity in the first world. Excess fat has numerous hormonal effects, and given the increasing rates of childhood obesity it is not surprising that 'sexual drive' may be decreasing in aggregate. This has nothing to do with attractiveness (although that again is up for debate), but only with testosterone and estrogen ratios' effects on libido.
Combined with technological isolation and the inability of young adults to have a conversation without looking at their cell phone every minute, no wonder less people are making a love connection. Look around at a restaurant at young couples and see if any can not look at their phone for 10 solid minutes! Sad!
It is a sad commentary on modern relationships when young, attractive professionals use serial Tinder "dates" in place of a rewarding and enriching social life.
5
When was the last time you heard the expression "making love"?
A romantic sexual relationship has always been considered the glue that binds long-term couples and, indeed, back in the stone age (before the World Wide WEB we are all trapped in) it was. Romantic love making was a salve in relationships, it expressed the intimacy and tenderness people in love felt for one another. I could go on but either no one will even know what I mean or they have traded in their natural instincts for being culturally progressive . . .
Human sexuality has always been an act of intimacy, trust and the creation and sharing of a private world between lovers.
People used to have private thoughts and private parts and private feelings and being invited to share in them was an invitation to be honored and valued.
Before the internet told me differently, I always considered making love the ultimate expression of the intersection of the spiritual and the mundane.
Healthy, loving human sexual intimacy is one of the greatest gifts granted to human beings and it has been reduced, by the media and the marketplace, to animal activities dressed up in various fashionable forms of psychological illness and narcissism.
Fifty shades of grey, indeed -- and they are all dingy, squalid and low.
And there is no rebellion, just a few sensitive souls who cannot stomach the current sexual zeitgeist and they are left behind, shunned and bullied into silence or submission if they don't go along. Truth.
7
Nicely explicated, Ross. Certainly more than enough food for thought. A little self examination (and less self abuse) is certainly called for.
1
The fall in frequency in stable heteronormative marriage to the introduction of photography in National Geographic and the extension of social insurance. Thankfully, with the coming end of socialized medicine for the middle class, the only means for insuring oneself from the random challenges of life will be once again large families.
1
Perhaps what we're seeing is a growing realization that marriage doesn't make sense unless/until you want children. It's really quite difficult to be emotionally and financially inter-dependent on someone in a relationship that's supposed to span a lifetime.
Perhaps... Return to top and repeat.
3
The impact of the cyber world on our sexual habits are a microcosm of the larger problem of how it is affecting our civic life. Just as people are seemingly more inclined to avoid the messiness of dating, they seem less inclined to more generally engage in activities which require direct human interaction. While social connections of a sort can be made on the internet, they will never substitute for real person-to-person interactions, the need for which, is hardwired into our DNA.
4
This was a great read and a very interesting topic.
I recall reading somewhere that 25% of millenials are expected to never marry compared to 8% of gen xers. I cant recall where these numbers came from (nor confirm their accuracy) but it certainly seemed to me that finding quality relationships had become harder in the last 15 years (across generations) with more milestones and relationship litmus tests and longer and longer wait times with more apprehension toward commitment of nearly any sort even when a person had no other alternatives lined up.
At the same time, rather than feeling more empowered, both my female and male friends seemed more frustrated and lonely in their dating experiences.
I’ve been wondering how this could be happening when we have never had more freedom.
5
A very thoughtful article. One of your better ones : )
4
In 1983, a young male friend of one of my teen-age kids asked if he could talk with me. He said that he wondered if the proliferation of sexy air-brushed women he saw everywhere in advertising/guy's magazine had numbed him to "ordinary" women. He told me that he and his friends had little interest in their perfectly ordinarily attractive girl classmates. "How will I ever have a long-term relationship?"
And now? See Trilby's comment.
7
Would that this message include and prevail among Catholic clergy.
3
Yes. Add the mandate of having sexual relations only for the purpose of procreation and we have madness in spades!
"Rates of rape and sexual violence actually fell with the spread of internet access, suggesting that the pleasures of the online realm were either a kind of substitute for sexual predation, a kind of sexual tranquilizer, or both. And that tranquilizing effect seems to extend beyond predation to the normal pursuit of sexual relationships"
That's a whole lot of assumptions.
3
Did he really use the term "self abuse" as a euphemism for masturbation?
23
@Startzesq
I've been asking myself that, also. I think he did, indeed, twice.
6
Yes, he surely did, but he did not explain why it is "abuse"? Abuse of the spilled seed? Abuse of male orgasm? I have not heard the term since I was in Catholic grade school in the early 60's-and I didn't understand it then either.
Desmond Morris would be proud of the current situation you describe. He argued for the beneficial effects of pornography. Otherwise we now have the problem of the angry white male incel shooting up collections of young innocents.
4
“Self-abuse”. Really?
I wish I could believe that Ross was being ironic is this reference...
16
Ross, this calamitous problem actually started with cave drawings.
10
Finally, Ross weighs in on a subject in which he has hands-on training.
28
@Lord Melonhead
Bravo!
I agree that, at best, sex without love is without virtue and barren of all but libidinal relief. However, referring to masturbation by its 15th century euphemism, self-abuse, tells one all that is needed about Douthat's inability to even imagine the actual nature of sexuality; another victim of the epistemological fallacy of argument from (divine) authority, he is.
9
I think there are some simpler ways to view these trends:
1. the individuals who initially leapt into the whole Tinder hook-up mileau have come to feel the sordidness, loneliness and sheer messiness of that type of sexual lifestyle.
2. while Douthat still uses loaded words like "self abuse", people have moved beyond that sort of negative implication. I agree the internet has made access to sexual excitement sort of like turning on a tap. Its there, its easy, and while many might decry the solitary, anti social aspects of it, there is a sense that its more dignified and certainly less messy psychologically, medically, emotionally, than the Tinder/ hook up lifestyle.
2
@nub
Well, here's concrete evidence that Ross is right about some sector of the revolution having been tamed. But it's kinda hard for me to view sanitary, safe "tap" dances on the internet as anything dignified. Commodified is more like it.
OK, rape is down but I worry about young women now who are now even more objectified and expected to perform like porn actresses for the satisfaction of jaded young men who have seen it all. It's sad. Not good for women.
And you know what? Men think that porn is ubiquitous but it almost never crosses my woman-mind. We live in different worlds, men and women.
182
@Trilby men are objectified as well. 6 pack abs and ripped muscles. Check out any magazine directed at men. We all suffer through unrealistic expectations of the opposite sex.
20
@Trilby
Arent young women being jaded, and having their performance expectations (of males, or females) being skewed at the same time?
I would think anyone who grows up on a diet of porn before they begin even being slightly sexual active is gonna have some serious performance expectations that will not ever be fulfilled. The "first-time" genre alone is enough to screw young peoples heads all up...
8
@Trilby Yes, maybe you don't see much porn. That's not typically how those clips seem to go. The women come in all shapes, sizes, ages, and other varieties, accessed with the right term in the search box. On the other hand, the men all must have the one essential requirement of being suitably "equipped", as well the mandatory ability to perform on a super-athletic level.
Studies also show that young women watch porn about as much as young men, and both receive unrealistic impressions and expectations about sex.
22
My reaction to this essay was not so much “not another [expletive] elf” (loved that quote!) as “what on earth is he going on about?”
Sometimes I feel like the brains of “conservatives” (in the sense the word is used by Mr Douthat to mean people who are like him except less smart - though I have yet to meet someone like that in real life and suspect there are precious few such people) are simply wired differently than mine. I usually don’t understand why they care about the things they say they care about, and sometimes - like today - don’t even understand very well what those things are.
6
@Math Professor
One feels that Mr Douthat is rather overexercised by a very first world problem that affects a particular subset of society, usually in urban areas. In my limited esxperience of the world (70 years and three continents) I can only generalize from an N of 1, but in my own family and circle of friends there are few unpartnered who want to be partnered, and that applies to all those currently of age. Those who are single appear to enjoy that status. I had four elderly great aunts who faced no real possibility of marriage in 1918 but that never stopped them from having exciting and fulfilling lives.
As far as “self abuse” is concerned (what a precious, or guilt ridden use of language) I would infinitely prefer to be an owner operator than to rely on the vagaries of tindr mediated one night stands.
2
This article is hard to read because it uses words that are not found on Tindr or my regular porn sites. Can you dumb this down, please? This is why you make your Tindr profile short and sweet. Like. Duh.
3
Don't forget the AIDS crisis
3
Oh my god, this guy is SO OBSESSED WITH SEX.
18
It still comes down to the fact that authoritarian/conservative types like Douhat are still uncomfortable with what he calls hedonism, but is really just the basic human/animal pleasure of sex and lovemaking. That even someone as erudite as he cannot see that he is a victim of his religious and cultural conditioning serves only to cripple his argument. Sexual repression and fundamentalist religion are the biggest drivers of violence in our species. Anything that combats these regressive forces is fine with me. Consenting adults singly, dually or in groups are welcome to enjoy any gender combinations, body parts or orifices that make them happy. For me the ethical rules are honesty, respect and no deliberate infliction of physical or emotional pain. For the record my conditioning is as an old Northern California hippie and happy veteran of the Love Generation.
16
Another conservative hung up on "the evils of sex." I guess he'd prefer sex in the US to only happen in a Donna Reed, June Cleaver 1950's TV style marriage. I would think there are much bigger and scarier issues that are causing trouble in the US and around the world. I once saw Ross on Real Time with Bill Maher where blamed Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine (you heard that right) for destroying meaningful human relationships and contributing to many other problems we are having currently. I was surprised he didn't mention the Sears catalog too. I thought we were way past this but apparently some of us are not.
Lastly, NetFlix does not show pornography. Maybe a somewhat racy but more or less tame movie, but not actual pornography.
8
The more others tell us how to behave, the less interested people will be in behaving with them at all.
Tell businesses was they must pay, the way they must schedule, the benefits they must supply, the unemployment insurance, who we can hire, etc., the less interest there is in hiring people.
Tell people they are racists, and they hate your type more, not become less racist.
Tell men they are rapists and the world id #metoo (despite the reality of sex crimes going down), don't be surprised that alternatives that don't nag and judge are preferred.
4
Maybe the decline in intercourse is the consequence of the inevitable realization that it doesn’t work for most women. And that men who can’t go beyond being missionaries are, in both the physical and emotional realms, dull. Yawn.
Maybe men who aren’t that sophisticated or skilled in the arts of lovemaking (physical and emotional) are those now consigned to having sex with their computers. Seems a fitting punishment for sexual and emotional narcissism.
Women are finding partners (male or female) who understand the glorious female anatomy and care about how it works. More important, women have decided not to settle for men who can’t understand that women come first. And yes, the pun is intended.
It’s not all about you, guys. The sexual revolution allowed women to understand our own bodies. You’ve just fallen about 40 years behind. Seems to parallel the complaint a lot of angry white men have about being left behind ... you have to keep your skills up to date or you’ll get no dates.
Many comments here are a testament to that obnoxious, entitled attitude. If you’re not getting a date, maybe it’s time for a bit of self-examination.
13
@Incredulous
Thank you.
@Incredulous
Thank you.
I would add to that that any doctor who attempts to diagnose and treat a woman with a spouse or partner for low libido, or lack of desire, should first take a good look at said spouse or partner. The slob on the sofa is perhaps not the handsome young buck she married some twenty years ago.
"By the cold and religious we were taken in hand
Shown how to feel good and told to feel bad" Pink Floyd
Maybe the message here, Ross, is that the sexually obsessed/repressed (R)eligionists would do well to get their noses out of other people's personal lives and focus on their own "sins"?
Why are you folks so atwitter with what I do in my own bedroom?
7
@Miss Anne Thrope
Pierre Elliot Trudeau had it right; There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
like Al Jolsen use to say: You aint seen nothing yet. In the future robotics will combine with A.I. to create perfect companions. Hooks ups without hang ups. Why deal with the dating scene, one of the worst times in a persons life, striving to find the right one and instead meeting one crazy after another. After awhile it's not worth the effort. Love is the most inexplicable thing in the universe, things were much better when there were professional matchmakers.
Also, One of the worst problems of modern life, is what happens when a women gives birth and begins to lose interest in their spouse. How many married couples live sexless lives.
Prostitution as much as it is shunned by society is a necessary part of life, and sex is healthy for you, but society says that prostitution is illegal.
Add the Incel movement ( involuntarily celibate ) and you have all of the ingredients that lead to a sexless life. the amount of the population in America that is having sex is the true minority.
Humans are giving up on each other, in place of single, but stressless lives. Even the young would rather stay at home on a Friday night relaxing with a video game.
The robots are coming, so too is invitro fertilization and single, spouseless parents. The future is a solitary existence, with robot companions. It sounds wonderful and quite peaceful.
3
@artfuldodger
Women have been giving birth for millennia, but it’s now a modern problem?
There is a very wise saying all partnered men should heed:
A man who cooks is attractive, a man who does dishes is irresistible.
This is both literally and metaphorically true.
1
Wow. I thought that as an R&B musician in my youth that I was on the cutting edge of sexual gratification ("that's what she said"). I might have a bit of exploratory catching up. yeah yeah yeah ..... good once as I ever was.
We can stipulate to the ubiquity of porn on the internet, and how it has adversely affected relationships. But that still begs the question of "why."
Our late capitalist, commodified culture is built on giving customers what they want, when they want, and the internet is a perfect medium for that. One can indulge any dark impulse - from extreme sex to extreme political views - with a mouse click.
Addiction is a predictable result. In fact, addiction is built into much of what the internet has become. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites are structured to keep people viewing them as long as possible, because the information people give them while using the sites is how those companies make money. Here in the pages of the NY Times not so long ago, there was an article about how Silicon Valley executives are trying to limit their children from using smartphones and the internet. That speaks volumes.
The rise of internet porn and its impact on society is but one symptom of a deeper societal addiction problem, propagated by software companies that compete and profit from your attention. And as virtual reality and "deep fakes" are developed further, it will only get worse.
5
Bring on the porn if it cuts down on human reproduction. Mother Earth can’t handle this many humans. Hail, self-abuse!
10
@Female: amen, sister.
This is not the first time that Mr. Douthat has frowned upon masturbation as anti-Catholic and morally offensive. That’s too bad. If you have tried it and did not like it, let others who enjoy it do so without feeling guilt.
9
We may be just beginning to examine, far less understand, the results of social media, including pornography. But it may be that what pornography does for some is to satisfy the curiosity about sex that stimulates much early sexual "exploration" with others. And after curiosity about sexual connection is satisfied, examination enters, and the individual may respond in certain ways, including revulsion, distaste or indifference. It seems unlikely that even the most attractive Japanese eggs and all the virtual reality orgasms to come will lead to anything more than weariness with the whole sexual process. Where then will we be?
Another conservative hung up on "the evils of sex." I guess he'd prefer sex in the US to only happen in a Donna Reed, June Cleaver 1950's TV style marriage. I would think there are much bigger and scarier issues that are causing trouble in the US and around the world. I once saw Ross on Real Time with Bill Maher where blamed Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine (you heard that right) for destroying meaningful human relationships and contributing to many other problems we are having currently. I was surprised he didn't mention the Sears catalog too. I thought we were way past this but apparently some of us are not.
Lastly, NetFlix does not show pornography. Maybe a somewhat racy but more or less tame movie, but not actual pornography.
I would place the blame a lot more on overworked, overwhelmed people.
Simple fact, the wife comes home from work about 10 pm, and I leave at 7 am. In between we find some time to cuddle and talk about whatever, maybe even find an off night to watch Netflix.
But getting it on? That’s out of the question. First off who has the time? If I have to be up in 6 hours I rather sleep. If she just worked 10-12 hours, she’d rather take a shower and cuddle to sleep.
It’s now to the point where we look at calendars to schedule a date. It’s funny, but for reals.
Porn is there, has been there since I was a kid, readily available and all. But it has not affected our intimacy at all.
Working odd schedules and long hours, that did kill the mood.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re madly in love, just we rather hug to sleep than spend precious sleep hours on otherwise fun activities late at night.
192
@AutumLeaff - this sounds ao familiar and we dont even work crazy hours.
After doing an hour of puzzles and an hour of watching Frozen, bathing the kid, putting the kid to bed and making everyones lunch for the next day, my husband and I would rather just have a few minutes to do nothing and feel like at least 30 minutes of our day is unscheduled...that is of course if neither of us has to jump online and work after the kid goes to bed..
21
@AutumLeaff
I get the sleep thing. Oh boy do I/we.
But we came to the conclusion that once a week we can short-change our sleep an hour for the intimacy. After all how much time do we really need? We just dont get into a routine with it and it seems to work.
Another factor is neither of us is the primary instigator like we hear goes on with so many other couples. We split it pretty much 50/50. Kinda like taking turns, but that too has to be watched so not to lapse into a routine.
13
@Boregard
How do you even sleep when you're racked with unfulfilled desire? That's what I don't get. How do you cuddle up to someone every night and constant resist letting biology take over?
16
"The only good news, and the best evidence that we might yet escape Huxley’s trap, is that we retain enough genuinely-human aspiration to be unhappy with it."
look into that one, "genuinely-human aspiration" is what's being overwhelmed making our "escape" from huxley far less likely than our continued confinement, a life sentence. if you will.
we make decisions based on influences that deny our genuine humanity which, it says here is, is an openness and need for interconnection among us, intercourse being only one aspect,
that protects us from habits of classification, generalization and stereotype, that compartmentalize thought and alienate us one from another, each from all.
1
I’ve been ‘abusing’ myself for 60 years. It’s great!
And yes, I’m married with grown children.
14
@David G Careful, you’ll go blind lol
Sexual activity is a reasonable proxy for many societal social indicators. Black or white, rich or poor, we are all spending too much time in front of screens. Alone.
2
There may also be a correlation between higher use of self-abuse and the amount of screen time that an average individual spends - on mobile devices, TV, internet and such. Stickiness to digital device impacts ability as well as desire to connect with others socially. And similar to responses to other basic needs - e.g. ordering food on mobile - humans are resorting to a 'digital' way of taking care of their other basic need: sex.
The social isolationist that has been created by the internet, it seems that the digitally fueled onanism is a natural next step in this new being's evolution.
PS: interesting, may be even scary thing is, what would the use of Artificial Intelligence do to porn? And what would the social patterns look like after such 'internet onanists' are able to pass on their genetic footprint to the next generation. An Orwellian 2094 may be in order.
@Vsh Saxena
If doubt internet Onanists will be passing on vey much at all to the next generation. It takes two to make a zygote
We desperately need to slow down our reproductive rate for the sake of fighting climate change. What once might have appeared as pure selfishness in the past needs to be recast as a socially-approved choice of self-sacrifice for the human future.
2
I think Mr. Douthat's commentary highlights the real need in this country for actual honest sex education. Not just the formalities of the act, but its place in social interactions, personal relationships, notions of courtship; all of that. If the Internet is both the source and salvation of our sexual desires and impulses, then the results he notes as products of the sexual revolution deserve more than the cursory lectures they typically get now.
And the need for sex-ed includes parents as well.
2
This piece is amusing, but I could not help but think how much Republicans love social engineering. (And used to love free markets.)
3
Well, this article made my day better. I thought I was in the minority.
Now to solve the mystery of how my almost 80 year old male friend can brag about having sex a few of times a day (with another person).
Could it be that the elderly, with the combo of poor internet skills, blue pills and too much time on their hands are causing the rise in STDs?
4
I have chosen long-term celibacy. I live with my best friend. We were a "couple" starting 12 years ago. But that has naturally morphed into something that is better and more authentic.
True friendship and equality may be easier to attain if all of the complex emotions surrounding sex are removed from the equation.
My best friend has truly blossomed now that she knows for certain that I am with her because of our unbreakable bond and not because of sex. We have become family in the truest sense.
5
@David
Trust me, any couple who has been together 12 years isn't hanging around just for the sex. But it sure is nice to have.
1
@David
Sounds rather one sided to me. “I have chosen”. “She has blossomed”
If she is really “blossoming” I suggest there might be a bit of gardening going on on the side.
1
Has anyone done a solid comparison between the current American status quo and Japan in the post-bubble era? Because it feels like the parallels are notable and likely informative.
1
If what you say is true, only the poor, who can't go to bed with a laptop, will have babies? But it was good not to think about Donald Trump for a moment or two.
5
This is really a first-rate essay about one of the less discussed sources of the decline of marriage, birthrates, intimacy, and social relationships in general. Great comparison to Huxley--whose relevance, alas, seems to grow daily. Douthat and Brooks are two of the most sociologically informed pundits. I'm not sure how they find the energy and insight to write so many top-flight pieces. They keep it balanced--so many other commentators have developed Trump Derangement Syndrome.
6
@FrederickRLynch
Surely this is satire, right?
Huh, again.
Has Douthat heard of Tinder/Grindr?
2
Your argument falls apart when you equate rape and sex. Rape is an act of violence. It’s not about sex. It’s about control and domination, and in many cases, it’s an instrument of war. Go to countries where civil wars are raging and see if you find rape on the decline. Can pornography end war? I’d like to see some stats on that.
8
@Incredulous
Rape is very often is about power and control.
But to always remove it from the sex act is silly and a political construct. I do not for a moment, for instance, believe the average college data rapist hates women or is driven by any other urge than raw lust, as despicable at that act remains. Lust, horniness, whatever you want to call it is a very, very powerful thing.
1
As mentioned in other comments, porn consumption is about repression. Frankly, porn gets stale pretty quickly. It only holds its allure when you're frustrated. Just another conservative bogeyman to project on and to froth about.
4
As usual, Ross is barking up the wrong tree--The Judeo-Christian and even more extreme in Islam idea that pleasure=sin has been destructive to human flourishing. Agreed, the pursuit of pleasure in extreme can be damaging but saddling normal desires with perdition can be far worse. Our patriarchal society, with its distrust of sexuality, yokes normal human desire with guilt whereas matriarchal societies tend to celebrate it. What we need to do is teach how to achieve more intimacy and less about anatomy and technique. As a devotee of Tantric sex, where the sex act can last for hours instead of minutes, I have discovered that the goals of both pleasure and intimacy can be maximized. What we need to re-learn is how to connect, not just copulate
7
Just wait until there's a sexbot in every home, which there will be. As "Ex Machina" director Alex Garland acknowledges, we’re closer than ever to making our perfect person come true: "The thing we desire and think we can’t have we can now shape exactly to the specification of how we want it. There’s something incredibly scary about how unstoppable it feels.”
5
@OMGchronicles
There won't be one in my home! No freakin way.
My major complaint is that nobody seems to know any new "dirty" jokes any more. I guess what we used to laugh about is no longer funny. It is now considered normal.
7
@Penseur - Actually telling dirty jokes can get you fired, ruin your career and leave you socially ostracized. Nobody tells them any more.
Haha. Very good. And I agree that all those universally available sex clips are better than none. But my internet and technology worries go beyond easy access to pornography. Selfies! And the need to post everything you do or eat in order to find meaning in life. That trend is worrisome to this old man.
6
What died off was romance, passion, yearning, seduction, wooing, courtship, delayed gratification accompanied by heartache and fantasy. Once guys can have their own silicone egg, a porn video on their phone, VR, blah, blah, blah, they don't even come near real-life women. Sadly, I think that many men are intimidated by dating, romance and courtship these days. I know some nice men who are, nonetheless, slackers: guys who spend far too much time playing video games, watching porn and drinking with their buddies while watching sports. They are not interested in dating, sex with women, marriage or parenthood. I know men who are 45 or 50 and act like teenagers or frat boys in their social lives.
17
@Sorka
I couldn't agree more. The thing is that when "sex" in various forms is so available, there is no incentive to put oneself at emotional risk to engage in the intimacy of the real thing with another human partner.
4
Can you blame them?
Social mores, especially between the sexes, seem to change everyday. If I were a teenager again, I’d probably think video games and virtual sex were a better bet as well!
4
@Sorka - If you read the Atlantic article, there is a stat that almost 20% of women in their twenties say that being invited for drink by a guy, constitutes sexual harassment. That's just the invitation...What's a guy to do?
3
"Self abuse". Really? What a judgmental, ignorant phrase for a perfectly normal behavior.
32
@Teresa Fischer
He was being tongue-in-cheek.
Religion, like fire, can be a useful servant, but a terrible master.
12
A master baiter, even.
7
"Teen pregnancy rates and abortion rates rising together, a pornography-abetted spike in rape and sexual violence, higher crime rates among fatherless young men"
So, after conservatives fever dreams fail to come true, Douthat shifts to some new version of "the world is doomed" based on some short term trends. Hey, maybe altering millennia old olsexual behavior might be slightly more difficult and take a bit longer than 50 years?
6
I think Ross has the wrong reason for the decline of the war against porn. Child porn is fought pretty strenuously and successfully despite technology. The cause is the highly divided political climate. Pornography always cut across the liberal-conservative divide and still does. Many liberals oppose porn because it objectifies women and leads to sexual violence. The libertarian wing and business wing of conservatives of course object to any kind of regulation of any market. Conservative christians don't care enough about pornography to work with women's rights groups and vice versa. And neither group is willing to strain their relationship with their allies in what they consider more important fights over abortion and gay rights.
1
It would seem humans have a hard time making planetary conditions improved after their over procreating, even when birth control exists, and addiction to burning fossil fuels have made living conditions worse for a good part of our species.
If as Ross says, there is less intercourse, it's not enough to stop too many babies.
Overpopulation has only been addressed by China, and they have relented a bit. Too many people for the food supply, the water supply, job supply, land supply. When the land now called the US was barely populated, opportunity galore made the 'New World" a vision of paradise and new land to develop a civilization on. Keep procreating, Malthus may end up being right. I'd say there's a lot of "dismal" already.
5
Stolen land that had been full of people not long before but experienced a dramatic and devastating population drop thanks to widespread epidemics, actually.
1
Great piece .. as I was reading, Dick's "Do Androids etc" came to mind .. maybe we are living in Mercer's world where the internet has become our empathy box.
1
Expectations of sex/relationships are the real problem here. Because you can go on a dating app and dismiss a hundred men or women with the flick of a finger, simply because they aren't drop dead beautiful has removed dating from reality. Regular guys, with regular jobs, expect to date Ms. America, and for Ms. America to be exactly what they want. Working or not working, great cook, etc. Men who used to fall in love with regular women (the kind that have bad hair days, gain weight after pregnancy, and have opinions), now are waiting for the perfect woman. Unfortunately, the perfect woman has hundreds of men chasing her, and the average guy hasn't got a chance. Oh, and women are just as bad.
If singles can achieve a relationship, our society makes it almost impossible for young people to wed and have families. Low pay, student loans, little upward mobility, and wage thief that uses a worker's talents but refuses to pay them for this expertise, is the norm now. We are becoming like Japan because our working society is becoming like Japan.
7
I believe that in the past, women and particularly men got married primarily due to a desire for sex instead of true love. Once the lust wore off, marriage often ended in divorce. So one advantage I can see with the advent of easy access to porn and masturbation is that, since sexual urges can now be easily satisfied, marriage can be put off until one meets someone they can actually love. So maybe this 'isolation' that Ross writes about is actually an opportunity stop, and take one's time to find love, instead of just trying to get laid.
5
It turns out that Bob Mankoff, in a cartoon in The New Yorker in 1980 - he later became its cartoon editor - got here first, in a one-panel with two men who have just passed each other on a city sidewalk - the one now heading left is a young dude with a blaring boombox whose huge speech balloon reads, seven times over, "♪♪ WANT YOUR BODY, DISCO DOLL! ♪♪"
Heading off in symmetry stage right is a weary middle-aged gent with a briefcase and a lyrical thought balloon after George and Ira Gershwin: "♪♪ They're writing songs of love, but not for me. ♪♪"
6
The idea that sex is merely a matter of "bodies and pleasures," as Michel Foucault put it, is at least one factor in the confusion about consent. People are taught that sex with persons isn't really personal; it's just a matter of mutual consent to the stimulation of various body parts. Later on they realize that there's something wrong with treating people (including oneself) as mere means to ends, and they feel bad about what happened, but they don't have the concepts or vocabulary to understand why. And so, of course, someone must have done something to them without their consent – which was indeed the case, because no one truly, sincerely consents to being used.
3
Across the spectrum of animals, hormones called "pheromones" mediate sexual congress. Humans have relatively poor sense of smell and are presumed to be relatively unmoved by pheromonic-level compatibilities, and incompatibilities. I think this is naïve. Across the whole animal world, lifetime pair-bonds form between couples who smell and taste good to each other. That first kiss can make or break a bond in humans too.
1
Liked your column. As a 74 year old sexually active man - with my rather gorgeous 63 year old wife - without a drug to help and obviously not as much as my salad days, I was stimulated to wonder whether how much my early repression and sexual confusion has made libidinal life easier now. I think the "hero" of Brave New World ended up choosing the Falklands as his enislement, with Mond's approval and understanding. So the fifties were the Falklands?
3
Some of this has to do with the way online dating has reshaped mating. I'm endowed (this matters in this conversation), and women say I am amazing in bed, but I am 5' 7", which means I get almost entirely ignored online (I even get filtered out by height filters). I had much more sex before online dating (but I was younger too). I know it's my height, because I once listed my height as 5' 11" and I was swamped with messages from women. As soon as I set it at 5' 8", I became invisible again.
Based on my own experience and everything I read, men under 5' 10" fare very badly online. This means more women are competing for a smaller group of men (the men they deem dateable). It also means fewer men are representing the sexual experience. It also means that men at the top of the dating food chain (tall, handsome, successful), probably feel like they can just it back and have women pleasure them.
To my mind, women have CREATED a problem of scarcity of eligible men (guys over six feet, not bald, not unemployed, etc.). Dating is very public now (instagram, facebook, twitter). The shame of dating a short man outweighs the discontent of a sexless relationship. Couples document everything online. 20 years ago, relationships were less public and mating was more about connection than about public image.
10
@richguy
Rich AND "endowed"?! Wow, I can't understand how that's not working out better. Have you tried posting your height in centimeters? There's nothing like going metric to boost the numbers (though I don't recommend going that route when stating one's age). Or, if you don't really find women attractive (as seems the case, given some of your remarks), I'm sure there are plenty of men out there who'd find a rich, endowed guy very attractive.
4
And when I was online dating, the number of responses I got drastically declined after I turned 36. Cuts both ways.
2
Why not add the 9 inches you told us about up front, and say you're 6'4"? Explain the details in the text description. Problem solved!
4
Interesting points, particularly about the oversaturation of porn making regulation impossible - I'd suggest the gun lobby in the USA have done precisely this by flooding the culture with firearms making it extremely difficult to put in place any kind of sensible gun safety controls.
7
One aspect that is never addressed is what might be happening on a deeper unconscious biological level. The world is overpopulated and environmental degradation is causing angst. The desire to have sex and children is waning because we feel threatened and not in control. In the animal world, there is population control. Wars might even serve this purpose (according to Carl Jung). We are still very much driven by our biological impulses (just look at our mating and other rituals), and often forget that we are not necessarily that intelligent and conscious of our inner workings.
7
What I liked most about this column is Ross Douthat's self-awareness that he's about to play his same old song. What I like least is that he then plays it.
Ultimately, the subtext (or, often enough, the text) of all Douthat columns is, why can't we go back the sacred 'Fifties, when men were men, and women (and "inferior" peoples) knew their place, and all priests were trustworthy, and the Mass was in Latin, and pregnant teens were sent to "special" homes where they could bear their babies so virtuous barren Christian couples could adopt them.
Of course, Douthat's imaginary 'Fifties is just as much a fantasy as Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and it's no wonder conservatives love them both.
25
Ross,
It is not the sexual revolution and liberals who are at fault here, but rather capitalism, which seeks to put a price on every aspect of human life. So young people approach relationships with the attitude of a merger between two businesses rather than as an opportunity to fall in love and discover the possibility of a lifetime partnership. When the ROI doesn't pan out quickly enough, they drop the relationship. They are trained for this from the time they are young, through their parents shuttling them around to activities so they can enhance their resume for university, through universities saddling them with enormous debt that they have to work years to resolve, and, yes, through on line porn sites where they can get their sexual needs met through a credit card charge. The commodification of sex and love is the final fruit of the "Reagan Revolution", which you and your like-minded fellow travelers greeted with open arms and hosannas in the 1980's.
5
Much of our culture's obsession with repressing sexuality has its roots in religious fundamentalism, and if pornography was a useful tool in killing off yet another tenet of leading by God-driven (or so they say) dogma, then so be it.
7
Temptation is eternal, though its mechanics may change over time.
Pleasure has always come with a price: the need to self-regulate. One must constrain one’s experience of pleasure in order to have a truly enjoyable life, not because pleasure itself is corrosive, but because real meaning in life centers around some form of productivity and getting “things” accomplished. “Things,” in this sense, can be almost any accomplishment as long as it requires some degree of self-discipline. Ordering one’s life around pleasure ultimately feels empty because it lacks this sense of having completed something useful, which is central to true satisfaction. Perhaps this is a biological adaptation that drives humans to find purpose in tasks that augment the survival of one’s “tribe.”
Decadence tends to be somewhat self-regulating because it doesn’t deliver long lasting satisfaction and because those who succumb to it tend to fade into irrelevance resulting directly from their lack of meaningful social interaction.
I’ve always felt that moral crusading is simply another form of decadence; a self-indulgent slide into narrowly focused endeavors that provide a false sense of gratification. Unfortunately it also creates a socially corrosive sense of superiority that motivates a desire to acquire the power to enforce narrowly defined “norms.” These norms ignore human nature and thus actively result in blatant hypocrisy.
1
A whole generation of young people have been financially disadvantaged or bypassed by the financial impacts of the great recession. These young people cannot afford to move away from their parents homes and therefore do not establish a family unit. What do you think these young people without money are doing in the parents basements and bedrooms when they leave college without a job.
If you make $7 an hour and live with your parents whilst trying to pay off $50,000 of college debt, there is not much else to do. Lets face it. A whole generation of young families have not been started.
4
I'm admittedly confused by all the confusion on these comments. Douthat seems to me to be stating, and stating well, that the recent sexual-technological revolution didn't turn out the way that either liberals or conservatives though it would. No hellfire and societal collapse, but no utopia either.
In stating this he forces us to examine our own values. Though the younger generation has shed the stifling traditionalist sexual practices of the past, have we really replaced it with anything better, or just created new problems for ourselves in our current state? Have we broken down old barriers only to put up new ones in their places?
8
My millenial daughter would call this a first-world problem.
11
The more conservative a state, the more pornography use (and plastic surgery) it has. This would seem to derail Douthat's argument of the "pornified, permissive post-sexual revolution" as a liberal plot.
Liberals, rather, can be recognized by angry womenfolk: "I’m 33, I’ve been dating forever, and, you know, women are better..”
None of these coping strategies seem to be healthy.
2
Anyone who has worked on a college campus would find this article totally unsurprising.
If you're older than 35, don't have regular contact with people age 15-25, and your reflex is to dismiss this article, you're out of touch, simple as that.
8
@Anonymous Sorry. I can't do anything but dismiss an article that refers to masturbation, a normal function, as "self-abuse" and "onanism". Sometimes sex is an expression of love, sometimes done for procreation, sometimes merely to derive bodily pleasure.
2
Pretty much anything that comes out of the mouths of "conservatives" is wrong. What a surprise. Nothing is ever "fact based." If they use "facts" they're always manipulated to serve ignorance and bias; often arrived at from spending too much time in Sunday school.
2
Mr. Douthat, you do not mention the link between porn and the social degradation/low social status of women. Many feminists view porn as misogynistic hate speech. Instead, you imply that porn is somehow all about sexual liberation and gender equality, when it's really all about patriarchy. If we understand porn in this light, maybe it is the increased financial independence of American women that has made us less willing to enter into and put up with porn-fueled, unequal relationships with men. This is also happening in Japan and China, where a newly financially independent class of women are refusing to marry and be put upon drudges.
11
Woo hoo! The availability of porn on the internet "led" to reduction in the number of rapes!!!!
Ross Douthat is the master of misdiagnosing societal problems, and it seems to be wedded to two overriding concerns: (1) he wants to live in a Catholic theocracy; and (2) he fears human sexuality.
I'm just glad he decided not to go into the priesthood.
6
@MichaelA: You're right about Douthat. In this column, he offered no evidence whatsoever of a causal relationship between increased availability of porn and reduction in the number of rapes. A friend of mine who is a psychotherapist believes that violent porn inspires and instructs men who commit sexual assault rather than substituting for it.
Sometimes I can’t even finish the Ross columns before turning to the commenters to eviscerate them. Thank you commenters, I have had several laugh out-louds :)
8
One reason for the current ethical mess that we're all having to live through is that people like Ross -- the sexually terrified, religious prudes -- have devoted all of their "values" based energy to a concern about what others are doing with their genitalia. "Moral virtue" (Ross's term) is important to them only to the extent it bears on sexual behavior. How people are treated, whether they are honest or not, what sacrifices one should be expected to make for the common good . . . These are treated as mere political matters, having nothing to do with morality. How about a little less fretting as to what people do with their private, sexual interests, and a little more worrying about the decay of our national compassion?
4
Poor Ross. Sociologists have a variety of explanations linking the conditions of modern life to behavioral changes relating to sex and relationships. All he has to rely on are Catholic guilt and a longing for the good old days when women knew their place. Use of "self abuse" to describe masturbation is a tell. Check for hair on your palms.
6
Ross: When you have grown up enough to stop referring to masturbation as "Self-Abuse", then maybe I'll bother to read the rest of your column.
14
"Self-abuse"?!?!?!?! It is called self-pleasure. Get a life. And stop wearing your passions and biases on your sleeve.
15
This is the third article I've read by Mr. Douthat that mentions masturbation. What's going on with you, Ross?
12
I stopped reading this article as soon as I saw the author refer to masturbation as "self-abuse". What century is he from...
11
Why is masturbation "self-abuse"? Certainly one must be doing it poorly with that mindset. Ross: you are correct about the changes and effects, but there are people making connections. Investigate the ASMR and subreddit internet communities and you'll see the matter is much more complex than this article investigates.
7
When you refer to masturbation as "self-abuse" you're stacking the deck, or begging the question, and forfeiting the semblance of an objective discussion.
8
Ross, if you would bother to examine the statistics of pornography views by state, you'd find that your beloved conservative, Christian states are the ones with a much larger per capita use of online per capita. I would love to see what the average catholic priest is viewing.
Your obsession with other people's sex lives is a sexual perversion as well.
7
....well, post Huxley but still 45 years ago was the Orgasmatron. Thank you Woody.
2
I can’t wait to buy one of those!!
1
Item #4 in the Atlantic article, bad sex, is right on. Having to wade through the cesspool of online dating, in hopes of finding a decent guy who isn’t a man-child, then finding out he’s learned everything about sex from porn — it’s no surprise women find it easier to take care of their own physical business and get their emotional needs met through friends.
5
The sexual revolution predates the internet by three decades, and I grew up masturbating to the widely available porn in Playboy, Penthouse and like. Two indications that the illusory correlations utilized by Alberta, Julian, Douthat et al. are props for risible fiction.
Remember: the digital era began in the 1990's, and back then (at the internet giant where I worked) "sex" was far away the most popular search term. Back then, many internet domains were free to university students, and most AOL chat rooms were rife with sexual play.
Perhaps out of kindness to his security detail, Douthat does not raise the specter of sexuality vs. sexual equality, or the inhibiting male dilemma of an attractive female boss who likes sexually suggestive attire, or the many #MeToo male sacrificial victims, or the intricacies of "mutual consent," all contra the meme of male dominance that runs through the porn set pieces that involve maids, stepchildren, waifs, farmer's daughters and other submissive female sexual targets.
And then ... there's AIDS.
I'm a big fan of fear of the modern era. But, biologically speaking, reproduction is a heavy burden, and any "drive" is a cost to the organism. So if masturbation is your solution, then ... rock on, digital selfie person.
Who can complain about anything that slows the pace of increase in the human population?
Anyone who opines about humanity without including the words "climate change" is just pulling their foreskin over their eyes.
2
The author surprisingly refers to masturbation as "self abuse". While masturbation, like everything, can be abused, it is itself not abusive. I don't see room for such a derogatory attitude in the NYT.........
9
Ross; I remember well a recent column of yours, "Let's Ban Porn" and sighed to myself. "Another damn elf?"
It never ceases to amaze me the tortuous twists of logic and cognitive dissonance sexual prudes will go to in their quest to convey that their personal revulsion with other people's sexual practices is always reflected in scientific, or at least pseudoscientific evidence of societal decline. You latest foray does not disappoint. You are indeed the Legolas of repressed Catholicism.
I do have to thank you, though, for a great morning of reading the two articles in questions, as well as side trips into history to look at Renaissance pornography, a Teen Vogue article on anal sex, and a superficial education in the latest development of Japanese sex toys. Thank Jah for hyperlinks!
I'm still not convinced my, or anyone else's sex life or lack thereof is any of your business.
9
Ross, I'd venture to suggest that intellectual masturbation is much more likely to be a form of "self abuse" than physical masturbation.
8
Now with the Me Too movement, personal romantic interactions are now subject to the real possibility that if they are not reciprocated , or insincere, could be considered harassment or lead to legal consequences. The risks of socialization are too great for the delicate egos of people today.
2
@Heidi Ng
the delicate egos of people today
______
Spoken by a woman, presumably mocking men who have decided that the conflicting messages sent by women these days (that still expect men to be initiators but suffer alone the risk of legal repercussions), well warrant a distancing act from them.
2
Not another [expletive] article based on armchair psychology and armchair sociology. There is so little actual science being done on sex and porn that these philosophical treatises are being passed off as science.
Does it ever occur to one that maybe a reduction in sexual intercourse, an increase in celibacy (albeit with masturbatory help) might in fact be a good thing?
And the easy availability of online porn -- to the extent that it helps people masturbate -- therefore might be a good thing?
A lot of porn is pretty gross and hard to defend, but what if porn overall is beneficial? I suspect it is good that teenage boys and girls generally know how sex (and contraception) works before they put themselves in a position to get pregnant.
It's probably good that people who are not in relationships are increasingly comfortable giving themselves relief instead of feeling impelled toward sex with strangers. And I'm positive it's a good thing for happily married couples to have ready access to instructional videos on how to be happy in the bedroom.
I have no actual scientific basis for this -- but that puts me on equal footing with Ross, and the Politico author and the Atlantic author who yearn for the days of hoop skirts and an obsession with protecting a lady's honor. They have no scientific basis for this either.
4
Thank you, as both a Christian believer and age of reason democrat I agree with your points, the Bible is not not prescriptive and subject to interpretation; we have been given our minds, reason and logic to use for the common good. We need to deal with population limits and not stigmatize non reproductive pleasure-
6
@Bob D I try to follow the teachings of the Buddha which are not greatly dissimilar to those of Jesus Christ. As you are a modern thinker, I am guessing that you view the Bible as a guide to your ethical and moral conduct, not as an impossible fount of infallible truth. If not, the dissonance would appear to be greatly troubling.
Please see today's related Science-section article: "Male Insect Fertility Plummets in the Wake of Heat Waves"
8
Gosh. I still remember "make love, not war."
8
The hedonism has always been there, Douthat. NYC was practically the capitol of American prostitution through the 19th century. Right here in rural Oregon, a nearby town had several bordellos through the 1950s.
You're never going to run out of targets Mr. Douthat. From real flesh to lifelike robots, there will always be a threat to the cherished moral order of your cherry-picked good old days.
Are you really sure you're the anti-Trump you'd like us to believe?
2
Still have legal bordellos in Nevada. One deceased owner just got elected for some state office. Sex pays; I just wish it paid me. And so it goes.
1
How on earth do people know how much sex other people are having or not? By asking them?
Sure.
5
@George Dietz
If done anonymously, sure, by asking them.
Did Douthat really use the term "self-abuse"? Is that the level of lack-of-coherent-argument that he has fallen to? Or is that just par for the course for him?
2
Uh, Ross....the economy might have something to do with it. Wage stagnation and job insecurity (especially in a gig economy) are sexual buzzkills.
2
Perhaps you'd like to add a third dimension to your analysis: involuntary celibates or "incels" -- those who lament the fact that they can't (or don't know how) to connect sexually with others.
Some of these blue-balled men find their release in mass violence: Umqua Community College, the sidewalks of Toronto, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, and just this month at Hot Yoga in Tallahassee.
Be careful what your wish for:".... that we retain enough genuinely-human aspiration to be unhappy with it." The outcome may not be what you expect.
2
I'll give Mr. Douthat credit for one thing: He knows how to change the national conversation.
1
I would check with my Catholic priest about this very serious matter if he weren’t in prison for sexual misconduct.
4
"self-abuse"--really?
5
Yes, Ross Douthat is, as he admits, predictable, but also provocative and intellectually challenging to a self-identified liberal, who also wonders "Where Did the Love Go?" in: https://theamericanscholar.org/where-did-the-love-go-half-century-reflections-on-1968/
"Self abuse", no way, self gratification equals a good night's sleep!
4
I don't know how to read that. Whatever you call it, it puts me to sleep every time. 99 percent of men masturbate; the other one percent are liars.
The problem lies with religion and its warped views on sexuality. Because of religion, women are still shunned if they breast feed in public. Because of religion, LGBT teens still commit suicide. One can go on and on, onanistically.
1
Was this written for college students and perpetual post-grads?
I understand from my younger cohort it is hard to meet men who want to do anything but hookup. The shallowness of our culture has been helped to disseminate via ubiquitous porn, streaming on demand, reality tv programming and smart phones. It has reduced our attention spans for anything but immediate gratification and unattainable physical perfection. It is just too much trouble to date and get to know someone.
1
A few things that you might consider.
-Feminism and economic necessity means that both members of a couple work, so people are tired.
-Women’s enhanced understanding of their own sexual needs and responses might not result in more intercourse. This is especially true when considering the heterosexual “orgasm gap” in which men have substantially more orgasms than their female partners during coupled sex. Same sex couples have not been found to have the same orgasm gap.
-Males are less educated than females (fewer graduate from high school, college) and often the female member of a heterosexual couple works full time, supporting children and the male spouse.
-In sum, the problem with less sexual satisfaction for males, who may supplement their needs with porn, is not that the “culture wars” succeeded. It is that women changed and many men did not.
Mr. Douthat is right. This is a tiring column, and his Puritanism is boring.
6
Ross Douthat's column reminded me of a scene in Bladerunner 2049. Ryan Gosling's character found himself being seduced by his virtual love interest and an authentic woman. Maybe that's what it will take to reconnect with one another? The virtual will provide a bridge to the actual. We most certainly have lost our way.
A lot of readers will no doubt tut-tut this opinion piece, but I think Mr. Douthat is on-point. For a glimpse at where we could be heading, take a look at Japan, with a bizarrely asexual subculture of 40 year old virgins who never intend to even date. Ultimately, this isn’t about sex. It’s about technologically-driven isolation replacing normal human social interaction. It’s an ominous trend.
245
@Jim: Perhaps it is a subliminal response to perception of overpopulation.
28
@Jim
In Japan it's also about steep social hierarchy that demotivates many who aren't at the top, economic stagnation that especially effects younger people, women opting out of being house servants for husbands and in-laws, a highly risk-averse culture and an overall combination of stoicism and fear of shame about speaking up to say you've got a problem with anything. And of course there's also major resistance to immigration (statistically just about the only reason Japan's national population is trending downward more than most other G20 countries).
So you're not wrong in what you note, but in living several years in Japan I noticed there's much more to this and those other factors tend to be older and/or broader than the nexus of technology and masturbation. If anything, the latter is more a symptom than a cause--perhaps that being the real lesson we can apply to ourselves when viewing Japan in this light. Therefore, I think you've parsed this more accurately than Mr. Douthat has, who's taking way too narrow a view along with getting some things backwards.
28
@Jim
Why??? Overpopulation is the driver of nearly every problem we HAVE. Personally, I’d like to see a limit on the number of Children people can birth. But that’s just me. And for the Record, the Husband and I had ONE child.
16
Tax it, no big deal. Use the funds for internet addiction and public education.
1
You lost me at "self-abuse". Is this term being market tested by the Family Research Council? Jeez.
8
No. But it feels good. Try it sometime.
“Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse, the crowding-out of real-world interactions by virtual entertainment, and the growing alienation of the sexes from one another.”
Self abuse.
Old lessons abide, right Mr. Douthat?
4
They sure do. And it feels soooo good. Ask Frank B for a truthful answer.
As the planet fills with new humans in all habitable and uninhabitable areas, the idea that people find outlets for the sexual urge which don't lead to procreation seems like a really good one.
What's the complaint?
6
On youtube- the Aldous Huxley interview with Mike Wallace in 1960 (8 minutes long) predicts how someone like Trump will become president - chilling and brilliantly said by Huxley
4
I see Ross Douthat continues to try and describe everything in terms of Catholic morality while pretending he’s not relying on any specific religious view, and then blithely skimming by the minor technical detail that what this stuff is really all about is the commodification of sex and sexuality in an advanced capitalist society.
One in which economic necessities consistently reorganize the “nuclear family,” that Douthat’d like to resurrect, furthermore.
Follow the money, Ross.
How do children learn about sex now? Not from their friends, not in school, but from watching pornography on the net. They see the acts performed as normal, to be expected by both parties or they're doing something wrong.
The age of learning through personal fumbling followed by anxious research is long gone. You're either the abused or the abuser. Great choice. So glad to be old.
2
I read and discussed The Atlantic article yesterday, and my take away was that the decline in the frequency of sex wasn’t really about sex at all.
In a society where current college students (and more broadly people under about 30) have grown up where they spent huge chunks of time being anonymous on the internet and never having to face the real world consequences for their actions — ‘real people’ are disappointing.
On the internet you can always indulge in the perception that somebody loves you, no matter how you act. In real life, well, your mother might love you no matter what but it’s harder to pretend that other people who you viserally see reacting with revulsion love you.
So young men — and it’s mostly men — get caught loops where they have antisocial behavior reinforced anonymously growing up and then don’t understand why real women are put off.
Men, I think, need to understand that the the “women” they meet online who say they like choking, rape, or whatever hellish dark sexual torture fantasy they bring up are not representative. They might be real females. I’m not denying some women are into that.
But when two-hundred guys all point at /one/ forum post by /one/ person — who again may not being a woman they could as the meme says be a dog — and say “but /women/ like that” well, there’s the root of the issue.
4
The Atlantic cover story article is lengthy but well worth reading. But rather than blaming porn and hedonism, I would assert that zero-sum plunder capitalism-- which "necessarily" destroys opportunity for the many so the richest few can further concentrate wealth-- is the root cause of young people turning inward for gratification.
Today's parents feel they must structure and supervise every minute of their children's lives to give them an advantage in a hyper-competitive shrinking job market. It's to the point where letting a child play outside unsupervised risks sanctions from the child protective bureaucracy. (And the Atlantic article notes that some parents specifically prohibit dating or otherwise getting involved in relationships for fear of distraction.) The same economic conditions lead to young adults continuing to live in their childhood bedrooms, with neither the hope nor the ambition for independence. That's hardly conducive to forming romantic or sexual relationships. The use of porn and what Mr Douthat so quaintly calls "self-abuse" is an effect rather than a cause.
(I also suspect that young people consigned to the bottom of the economic ladder are not forgoing sex like their more affluent peers.)
That said, I have trouble understanding Mr Douthat's complaint. Is he upset that he can't pontificate about liberal sexual immorality? Or is he offended that so many people are indulging in what his Universal Church calls an "inherently disordered act"?
3
Well, I just read the lengthy article on the Tuam home for unwed mothers. Everyone should read it. I consider it a monument to the alternative to our modern "libertine" ways: a rigid, traditionalist, conservative culture that just couldn't stand the consequences of relentless human desire. The Christian culture that imposed ruthless deprivation and despair upon the audacious transgressors and neglected hundreds of infants to death. I read your column, Ross, immediately afterwards and I am almost aghast at how glibly you suggest that progressive and tolerant sexual values put us on a dangerous course that might have bad consequences. You mean, even, possibly, worse that the Tuam home and the culture that established it? Resolutely Catholic and Christian? Just the word "self-abuse"-- used as if indulgence in a simple physical pleasure should terrify you. Whatever the future our progressive and more enlightened social values provide, it can hardly do worse, particularly since there is a lot of evidence that, in spite of overt expressions of faith and religiousity, the behavior of most young people whatever their beliefs is strikingly similar.
2
As is true of all conservatives (David Brooks is another example), Douthat's real complaint seems to be that people don't behave the way they used to. But how could they? Sexual customs can't be the same in a society in which women and LGBT persons are denied the right to make their own sexual choices as in a society in which those persons do have the right to make their own choices. So his solution is what - to go back to the way things used to be? Margaret Atwood wrote 'The Handmaid's Tale' about an alternate history in which America did exactly that. Is that what Douthat wants to see? Probably not. So he'll have to accept that one can't have a huge change in the way gender groups relate to each other and expect nothing else to change.
Not long ago I heard a man at my gym complaining to another man that he can't find a 'girl' with whom to have a relationship. He blamed Internet porn - his idea was that many women can now obtain sexual stimulation without men, and that makes them less open to the advances of men (like himself). I think that guy and Ross Douthat should get together. They seem to have a lot in common.
2
Please don't worry about being too much yourself. I have actually become quite fond of you, as a person and as a writer, despite disagreeing completely with your worldview. I always read your column. Many of your observations are quite insightful, although, in my view, you draw twisted conclusions from those insightful observations. I think I benefit from trying to imagine how you, an educated, very intelligent person, can possibly believe the precepts you espouse; I find them bewildering.
5
I am not really sure what Douthat is trying to say here. But with Douthat I am never really sure what hes is trying to say. Sometimes his big words just get in the way.
There is one thing so called conservatives miss about pornography, but should be celebrating: It is hugely profitable. I was surprised to learn quite a few successful pornographers are registered republicans. Tax cuts I bet.
I would suggest that Ross read "Island" for a better idea of what Huxley was really writing about. Or "Doors of Perception".
He warns not of obsessive hedonism but of overwhelming autocracies.
1
You attribute the decline in rape and sexual violence rates in the 1990s to porn on the internet. But all kinds of crime also declined starting in the early 1990s — everywhere in the U.S., starting years before everyone had internet.
A much better explanation, I think, is the ban on lead-based paint that happened in the mid-1970s. By the early 90s, the cohort of kids coming of age had far less exposure to lead. Given that the consequences of lead exposure include out-of-control, sometimes violent, behavior, I think the lead ban is a far more likely explanation for the decline in most kinds of crime.
1
Along with a lessening of unwanted children because abortion had been legal for awhile.
@Joe Buchwald Gelles
Maybe the drop in crime is because the hordes of baby boomers aged out of punk crime and settled down.
Didn't they know this in Rome? Aren't the walls of Pompeii painted with graphic images?
We know how well-adjusted the Roman aristocracy was.
2
Does evolution play a role? The planet may simply have enough people, and so for stability, humanity has achieved sexual activity without procreation. Along with a downward trend in male fertility, this may point to a natural correction to sustain life on Earth. Perhaps we have reached "peak human life," and so sexual feeling is redirected away from reproduction, while life and existence is still valued. This redirection is better than eliminating ourselves through widespread violence and war.
2
Don't forget the ubiquitousness of dating sites/apps. Finding a sexual partner has never been easier because all the small talk (if any) and vetting is done before two people (or more) meet in person. So when the need arises, anyone has access to an unlimited number of partners in any large populated area. So a lot of people are wonder why they should get married, or why stay married, when repeated sexual satisfaction is at one's fingertips. Of course, there's all kids of risk involved in meeting strangers, but how different is it than blind dates/pickups from pre-Internet times?
Think of the Victorian era, when a man's sexual imagination could live for years on the image of a woman's bare ankle, or an "indecent" sepia-toned photograph of a partially nude woman standing in classical pose.
Fast-forward to our hyper-frank, sex-soaked culture, and pornography as imaginative as a gynecological exam, and it's no wonder that we have "lost the charge" needed for real, sustaining passion, as Camille Paglia puts it. There is nothing to transgress, no need to use one's imagination.
"Courtship" - that old-fashioned ritual which was really a form of slow-motion foreplay - has been replaced by the "hook-up," a liaison as romantic and mysterious as a sailor's shore leave visit to a prostitute. Sadly, the need to put oneself in emotional risk to achieve intimacy through sex goes away, as well.
4
Upon nearing the final paragraph, my first thought was "That's it?!" Followed quickly by my second thought: "What's his point"? And, finally, my third - "There's 5 minutes I won't get back".
4
What about the widespread use of (overprescribed) antidepressants, which almost always depress the taker’s libido? (It’s the most well known and lamented side effect.) Tens of millions of Americans take these, most during their sexual prime. Why is that phenomenon of the past 30 years not even mentioned in this article? Instead Douthat refers to Soma only to say we have nothing like it. Yet we are an increasingly medicated society.
3
Ross took the time to express himself without calling down hellfire and I sincerely respect that, even while being skeptical of certain implications of his article.
Ross does himself a favor by not bothering to suggest that the many theocratic laws seeking to govern sexual relationships between fully consenting adults provided fulfillment; kudos for intellectual honesty. Yet merely saying liberals were wrong "too," implies a sort of cultural and moral stalemate between the "puritan" and "permissive" eras.
In my opinion, if outcomes are balanced, permissiveness wins by default. Taking Ross' stance at face value, if sexual permissiveness has not brought about the societal apocalypse, it failure to bring about fulfillment for any given person (again, working within Ross' premise) is forgivable because people are supposed to be able to "pursue happiness" if they are not a serious societal danger. By contrast, the imposed sanctions of the pre-sexual revolution must provide good cause and it cannot.
Throughout history, a great many lives have been ruined or even ended over interfaith, interracial, same-sex, etc. relationships. Ditto for fornication, adultery, unwed parents, "illegitimate" children and all the rest. Even traditional couples could not decide how they would be intimate with each other in their own homes. ALL, ostensibly, to prevent societal collapse. But if, as Ross admits, that excuse is taken away it means millions have been persecuted... over NONSENSE.
Trying to make sense of sexuality through the violently distorted lens of patriarchal Catholicism, without accounting for the distortion, is folly.
Ross, move on; you've been crippled and have nothing to offer on this topic.
Don't worry about it, man.
Like the parish laundry and the funeral lunches, like running the hospices and teaching the kids, let the women handle it.
If it's worthwhile and done by Catholics, that's pretty much how it's always been done.
1
If you seriously fall in love with a girl as a teen. and it does not work out because you both were too young, in my case at least, there will never be another real love.
“Self abuse”????
It’s really hard to get past that phrase. I can’t tell if its use here is supposed to be ironic, or whether there are still people on the world who think it qualifies as abuse.
If the intended use was ironic, quotation marks would have helped. Otherwise it makes it difficult to seriously consider anything the author has to say on the subject.
5
So conservatives lost the culture war (against pornography, at least) and rates of intercourse have declined. And Douthat wants to conflate those two outcomes, along with making the horrible, but common, mistake that men often make by looking at rape as a sexual act rather than one of violence: "Rates of rape and sexual violence actually fell with the spread of internet access, suggesting that the pleasures of the online realm were either a kind of substitute for sexual predation, a kind of sexual tranquilizer, or both." Rape is an act of violence. Again: rape is an act of violence. If rates have gone down, look for data on why acts of violence generallly have fallen, which they have steadily done over the last decade. Please stop talking about rape as if it has anything to do with sexual pleasure.
3
Self abuse? How quaint.
In the words of the inimitable Mose Allison:
My message this evenin'
Is simple indeed
Wherever you wander
Whatever your creed
There's just one thing baby
That comes from above
When push comes to shove
Thank God for self love
1
"...the growing alienation of the sexes from one another ('I'm 33, I've been dating forever and, you know, women are better,' one straight woman in Julian's story says. 'They're just better.'" Almost all the implicit and explicit flaws in this essay/opinion piece are here present. First, there is no mention of liberation or greater societal acceptance for same-sex desire or public declartion in the story--at all. Secondly, if the "straight" woman has decided that women are "better' then, sorry, she's not so straight. Third, no matter how short the essay, using this kind of throwaway quote to make a generalization about relationships between the sexes--sexual or otherwise--is irresponsible.
When I saw your headline the first thought that crossed my mind was indeed "there you go again, Ross," and so I appreciate that this time you at least launched in with the reference to Tolkien.
What most annoys me about your columns is not just your pathological obsession with reducing women's control over our own bodies and reproductive decisions, and, as a corollary, your bizarre pro-natalism in the face of existing world over-population and environmental disaster, but the fact that you continually use coded language while refusing to take a clear stand on the nature of the policy positions and laws you are actually advocating for.
In this column, for example, at one point your refer to "social peace purchased through sterility," which I assume you intend to conjure not just the capitalist marketplace of sex substitutes discussed in the Atlantic essay but also access to birth control and the ever-shrinking right women have under Roe v. Wade to secure a legal abortion. But, of course, you don't come right out and say so.
I think the column you need to write is actually a whole series: clearly spell out your policy proposals related to sexual practices, contraception, reproduction, pornography, workplace discrimination against women, family and medical leave, and so on and so forth, and take responsibility for them.
Otherwise, one is left facing the impossible task of trying to engage in a substantive debate with somebody who specializes in penning jeremiads.
2
Well, we know we don’t have a nation of blind men with hairy palms, thus long-term evidence repudiates the old warnings.
3
Who could resist an editorial with the word “mastrubation” in the subhead? This piece strikes me as a sign of the times (and, regrettably, a sign of The Times): *Everything* is whipped up into some sort of menacing trend. We know that the Media Overlords need clickbait — again, who could resist? — and we also know that our media landscape allows even the most speculative, picayune trends to be leveraged into “content.” It’s getting very boring.
1
This is Douthat's most important line: "Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse...."
"self abuse??" Good grief, Ross! It's long past time for you to get out of that creaky old confessional and live a little. People today are having wonderful sex all over the place. Heterosexual, homosexual, you name it. Best of all is the new sexual liberation of women.
If you and your fellow Catholics manage to see this as a good thing, maybe you wouldn't obsess about it so much.
5
I took a pass on reading yet another "The Wit and Wisdom of Ross Douthat" column that would explain how and when and with whom we should have sex, but the comments are wonderful!
3
Notice that Ross Douthat offers no real solutions. But that's probably OK, since there is no real problem either.
5
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” - Aldous Huxley
3
Sexual frustration and loneliness existed long before porn and modern society. Genetic research shows that historically most men left no descendants, and sexual frustration is a major theme in many works of classical literature going as far back as the Iliad. Modern technology is a good thing because it gives people who would have had nothing in an earlier time at least some kind of substitute.
3
Somewhere along the way I noticed that a lot of wealthy celebrities, good looking people with money, had been married a few times in the 80s and 90s, and have kids, from these failed marriages, and are now living, pretty much, alone, in their their beautiful beachfront home in Malibu, CA.
Sounds like a good life to me.
Here in the reader comments I saw some smart person say:
3 of 7, in divorce.
3 of 7, still married, but not in love.
And 1 of 7, the lucky ones.
I agree with those numbers.
"Self abuse"? Puleeze, Douthat. Huxley moved beyond the dystopian BRAVE NEW WORLD, largely through the influence of Vedanta (aka Hinduism) and psychedelics. You need to read Huxley's final novel, ISLAND, which gives his most mature and final description of a utopian society. He found a way out of the trap, and so may we all.
3
It is not entirely true that this was an occurrence of Huxley. He was strongly influenced by Freud and the German intellectual zenith of the early twentieth century. However, there is an inexhaustible and current source about the issue that concerns him: Trump.
1
Why is it that conservatives, especially those inclined to theocracy like Mr. Douthat always fault liberals for pornography’s ubiquity? I do not recall liberals marching to increase access to pornography, and given how widespread the consumption of pornography in the internet, it is a good bet that it’s appeal crosses political and ideological boundaries.
As to why young people are having less sex, maybe the answer lies on the fact that while they are more connected than any prior generations, their connections are virtual. For God’s sake, they do not even talk to each other as now all interactions appear to be via texts! They boast of having thousands of friends in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, yet they may not even know how those friends look (fake photos?) or sound (texts have no voice). And unfortunately this is no longer limited to the young. How many times have we seen young and older couples alike at restaurants looking down at their screens rather than at each other? The “spark” leading two people to romance and sex cannot arise from smart phone screens.
But let’s look at the upside of this sad situation. Mr. Douthat and the rest of anti choice zealots may have finally found a way to drastically reduce abortions, if not eliminate them completely, without even trying: distribute free smart phones and free subscriptions to streaming porn sites. No morning after pill necessary!
4
“Self-abuse”? Really?
7
@Amelia
He was being ironic. Lord.
I don't think so.
@Peggy Bussell
Most commenters don't. They're uncomfortable with the notion that conservatives actually do employ irony and humor. Accepting that might require a profound change in their weltanschauung.
Ross, you should try reading your own paper – no center-folds, but the articles are very informative...
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/23/science/essay-in-the-history-of-gynecology-a-surprising-chapter.html
PS
For folks too – relaxed or satisfied – to follow the link...
Harkens to the last era when we looked to high-tech electronics and the health-care industry for our recreational pleasure...
But you may find the 5th paragraph interesting – if not downright naughty...
PPS
NYT’s words – not mine...
One of the misconceptions that Ross Douthat repeats again and again is that ones sexual attitudes follow ones political point of view. This is clearly not the case and Ross, needs to rethink it.
3
Good lord, not another elf
5
The problem you describe goes beyond sex, or onanism (if that's sex).
You now have the "incels," young men who resent not having a sexual partner but who are unable to woo a young woman, because they are "losers."
Also part of the problem are video game apps. There are millions of young men who, instead of socializing and meeting single women, prefer to spend endless hours on their "smartphones" battling imaginary villians in cyberspace. Maybe 19th century farming wasn't such a bad lifestyle after all...
3
Are you suggesting that people at one time actually had sex with....each other?
2
As a liberal who embraced the idea of sexual liberty to a certain point, I don't disagree with the hypothesis that an unfettered internet with unlimited resources for the varied sexual imaginations is not helping.
The one mistaken assumption of the author is that all liberals have been pro-porn without adequately acknowledging that a lot of feminists have been anti-porn -- not for the sexual elements, but for the depiction of the sexes - the constant portrayal of women as props who all want to be violated and only protest on the surface when deep down they are "dirty." I think the alienation we are feeling isn't just because of a false utopia (that's way too simple of a conclusion), but a combination of factors: our tech grew faster than our mindsets did (across the partisan spectrum), nearly all American eroticism depicts women through a misogynistic lense that says violence against women/submissive men is okay because it is "sexy," and that men should always be at the helm in a sexual relationship. But I wouldn't expect the author to touch on that. :P
I do think the author's touch on Tinder as part of the problem is spot on. People are treating each other like take-out and get upset when their pizza starts talking back and having feelings.
1
One of the reasons for the decline in crime rate, overall and including sexual crimes, in early nineties is the effect of Roe-v.Wade in 1973, that legalized abortion and drastically reduced unwanted pregnancies. The generation that turned 18 after 1991 (1973+18=1991) was less likely to be a result of unwanted pregnancies. This finding can't be explained by any other factor, except Roe v. Wade decision many studies conducted by social scientists.
Perhaps conservatives like Mr. Dothat would like to take legalized abortion into account before considering the rise in internet porn and onanism as the reason that the pessimism of conservatives in 1970s did not ultimately pan out.
4
Ross, this column should be about the sexual sickness in the Catholic Church. Much, more serious and damaging to anything you talk about here.
3
Back in my day you had to WORK to find pornography, not like lazy button tapping kids today!
4
Wait...did you really refer to masturbation as "self-abuse"?! Do you also believe it will result in insanity, blindness, cancer, epilepsy and other dire health consequences? Wow--I thought those ideas fell out of favor over a century ago.
4
@soccermom. Also: Hair on the palms of one's hands. Dreaded!
Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse
You are unhealthy obsessed
1
“Self-abuse”? What a horrible, guilt-ridden phrase for pleasuring one’s self. We learn a lot about the author’s twisted mindset from this depiction. Unfortunately, he’s far from alone in his perverse reading of a perfectly natural and wonderful phenomenon.
4
As long as we're referencing sci-fi and fantasy authors: "Real freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite." Robert Heinlein. In this case, Mrs. Grundy is an NYT columnist who seems to be obsessed with our sex lives.
What, no link to that egg?
4
Seems Mr. Douthat is hanging with David Brooks and has caught the pseudo intellectual bug that only this infected understand.
1
You want us to have more sex!
Yay!
Because that will liberate us and make for a better society!
Yay!
But only within marriage!
And only between a woman and a man!
Boo!
Maybe the one use egg isn't such a bad thing.
3
On the upside of internet porn, at least you don’t run the risk of finding out that the woman you were “with” is also a Trump supporter.
3
I’m not especially a porn enthusiast, but I don’t think it has tamed the sexual revolution; and, no pun intended, revolutions come hand-in-hand such as with porn and the “virtual revolution” in general. Perhaps if a “verbal”, “intimacy” and “personable” revolution were introduced side-by-side porn, there wouldn’t be such social impotence or decadence
1
"self abuse ????"
I laughed so hard I nearly skipped a beat.....
... then got right back on it !!
5
Mr. Douthat writes,
"Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse, the crowding-out of real-world interactions by virtual entertainment, and the growing alienation of the sexes from one another."
I wonder,
"Self-abuse" ??? And you Mr. Douthat (as I understand it) weren't even born Catholic. (By the time of my "First Confession" at age 7, the Priests, and members of my extended, "One True Church"-'saturated' family, had managed to make me fear my ultimate disposit into the fires of hell in consequence of the commission of sins I didn't even know how to commit -- or even ... had I known 'the how' of it [e.g., "self-abuse"] ... the physical ability to 'perform.'
P.S. Now, 'at' 69 (years-of-age, that is) … I just fear the dying of the intercourse light (and of -- 'as yet necessary 'in a pinch' -- the pleasure of some good old and guilt-free "self-abuse").
2
A single-use, sperm-filled silicon egg. What a thing to add to the world's waste stream.
1
Brilliant. And this development also tilts the balance of power between the sexes. Granted that women have been abused, etc, but they have always been able to hold the sex cudgel over men. Although onanism is a sad solution for a male to handle his sexual needs, if porn helps make the experience at least adequate then it lessens the strength of the sexual power that women have traditionally held over men.
"Self abuse"!!! That term went the way of the dodo around the time that "Reefer madness" did. What a throwback.
3
Immediate and total loss of credibility by referring to masturbation as self-abuse. You won't go blind either, Ross.
3
Blah, blah, blah. Just another yawner where Ross sticks his nose into everybody else's business. What happens in your bedroom is private and is no one's business but your own. It is both government and religious over reach to impose your values on others. Mind your own business Ross, stop pontificating about sex and leave the rest of us alone.
1
Pro Tip: If it's wisdom you seek, read more Huxley, read less Douthat.
7
So...sexual violence fell in the 90's...because of porn on the internet?
Sigh. All types of violence fell in the 90's, against the conservative prediction. Remember, Ross? The reason why the guys at Freakonomics caused a stir? They had proposed that abortion had a positive impact on our culture. Some had a different hypotheses, that it was the ending of lead in gas that contributed to the decline in violence (lead poisoning leads to deficits like poor self control).
Maybe you need to get off this kick, Ross.
4
Like all forms of authoritarianism, Trumpism is mass mutual masturbation so that just as the caravan vanished a week ago so has the health hazard that Republicans have named pornography. Trump pays porn stars to keep silent about their misadventures and yet he rightly said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Av without losing a vote, and so even this bloated aged gelding senses the Puritan strain in the American genome. Among the most popular porn fetishes on the Internet are cuckoldry, infantilism and faux incest, which have at least the virtues of deeply held unconscious needs Freud could feed on for a lifetime. When the dust has settled and Mr Trump has gone the way of the dodo for violating campaign finance laws he may ask his mirror what was it he feared from the public confessions of sex workers after the infamous audiotape about grabbing you know what didn’t deter even devout Christians from believing him to be the Messiah who will bring on the Rapture. That we are watching more free porn since Trump took advantage of the Electoral College bondage fetish testified to the empty streets and pitiful Antifa threats to public order. After Nixon invaded Cambodia and Laos those of us who had no porn to pass the day by took to the streets, ignited bombs rather than bimbos and laid Nixon and Kissinger low until one resigned in disgrace and the other became a fugitive from The Hague for crimes against humanity. Brethren, I tell you, some climaxes are more equal than others.
4
Ross sounds like an ornithologist trying to describe bird mating patterns. His analysis is observational rather than participatory. Any young adult can tell you his description is not how technology intersects with sexual intercourse. What Ross doesn't know could literally fill a book.
Let me try to lay this out for you. The equivalent of phone sex today has been replaced by anonymous streaming services. No study is going to record these interactions because there are no records to record, mostly. Tinder is essentially the in-person equivalent of the same thing. Researchers would need verbal confirmation of sexual frequency from the actual participants.
This introduces the next problem when generalizing modern sexuality. Unlike unnamed Supreme Court Justices, young adults today don't boast much about their sexual conquests. Quite the opposite. Young adults tend to understate the frequency and extent of their sexual encounters. You only brag about getting some when you're not getting enough.
Are there lonely celibates out there relying on internet porn for satisfaction? Sure. However, I'm suggesting the data is jacked. You're not capturing reality.
By the way, extensive knowledge of J.R.R. Tolkien has been romantically successful for me more than once. I've never gotten laid as result of discussing Aldous Huxley. Food for thought.
1
"Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse..."
Isn't using the word 'self-abuse' sort of begging the question in this argument bemoaning the increase in masturbation? Seems best to consign that word to the list of archaisms where 'sodomy' resides.
3
Ross skips over many interesting points (especially in the Kate Julian piece). Such as:
Many young women and men are now so self conscious about their less than perfect bodies that they fear to be seen naked by anyone. This is tragic. (And as an older person, I wish I could reclaim every minute I worried about my physical imperfections. )
Apparently many young men mistake porn for real sex, and actually try to do these things with real live women. And then are shocked when real women feel assaulted and abused.
And file charges.
Many young folks have spent so much time in the virtual world that their social skills have atrophied. (Incels, ditch those computers and try the real world. )
There was much food for thought in these 2 pieces; the “culture war “ religious perspective doesn’t really provide a good vantage point.
2
Ross, it's not that it's too much, because we expect this from you. We know this is what you are, a right-wing religious zealot who favors terms like "self-abuse" and "onanism," (that word straight out of the bible), and who thinks that people who are satisfied with the choices they make from increasing possibilities are going down the wrong path. We do know you, including that one of the tenets of your beliefs is that sex is only for procreation within the structures of a god-sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman, with the man in the superior position.
Face it, your theocratic vision of the United States is being washed away by waves of information and freedom from ancient dogma. Human society will always be far from perfect, but at least we are gradually rejecting the bondage of religion. You don't have to be happy about that, but those of us who have opened eyes will never stop calling you on it. On the bright side, you did get paid to write this little screed, so good on you.
4
Ross, how can you possibly worry about being "too on-brand" when in honor of over 100 women winning seats in the House it's obvious that you simply had to write about how technology and masturbation have destroyed sex? I know it's the very first thing that came into my mind as I saw the election results come in. In fact, the very first thing I said to my sex robot was: "Well this is good for Democrats, and bad for Trump, though unfortunately not a total rebuke of him, but if this election proves anything it's that tech and masturbation have tamed the sexual revolution."
I never would have even considered the value of a sex robot if not for your obsessions with all things sexual Ross. It was your piece this past May, "The Redistribution of Sex," which inspired since all your arguments led to you saying: "Which brings me to the sex robots." The great thing about your sex robots Ross is that they solve so many of the pesky problems with filthy sex you've repeatedly pointed out. First off why do I need to even consider advocating for contraception if I have a sex robot? Family planning certainly is not a problem, and abortion, what's that? Ross, most of all when I tried to follow your previous prescriptions and insisted on having lots of unprotected sex the only way I could be sure that the women I got pregnant stayed pregnant was if I could steal their shoes and clothing and keep them locked up for at least 10 months.
Sex robots have solved all these problems. Thanks Ross.
2
Umm, really, does anyone believe that porn on the internet has had a greater effect than herpes and AIDS on sexual activity. Really? Young adults who want to live to maturity, don't screw around because they fear one life changing and one potentially life ending disease.
1
Ross is forever wrestling with his bible, the 2 testaments that blinker his perspectives. But when he drops a clunker like 'self abuse', we see that he can't see the landscape. He treads a Manichean world-view that has banished empirical thinking. There is no evolution, relativity or quantum mechanics. God forbid. Look up, Ross. There is more evil in a child biting into the thigh of a chicken.. and more evil in a priest biting into the thigh of a child. Religion gives sex a bad name, not because they deny its power, but because they can't. Look around. Human contact is everywhere in decline. Conversation is in decline. Love is in decline. Couples stare into phones on their first date. It's easier to tart up one's avatar than it is to repair one's failings. People photograph paintings before they look at them. They want lasting erotic images, not fleeting erotic contact. They want to swipe each other, not smell each other. Lovemaking requires physical exposure, where as self pleasuring (not self abuse, lol!) fits the self invention that defines our new, virtual world. Besides, people give other people the flu. There is another element at the root of the decline in sexual contact. Many young people don't feel inclined to put a child into a world plunging towards catastrophe, a world whose 'moral' leaders choose mammon over life itself. It's shareholders that want their Paradise Now! Who wants to raise a child in a pit of greed, somewhere between a wild fire and a hurricane?
3
Mr. Douthat,
Explain this in relation to your premise "the sexual act itself has fallen somewhat out of fashion...". From August 28, 2018, CBS News "STDs on the rise: CCD say gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia hit record levels in the US." According to the CDC this is the fourth straight year in which STDs continued to rise. "The US continue to have the highest STD rates in the industrialized world." How does this happen if everyone is in front of their computer or performing "self abuse", Ross?
132
@Linda Campbell Perhaps because the most sexually active segment of the population is participating in riskier sexual activities. More people are celibate, but those who aren’t, really aren’t.
29
@Linda Campbell
I don't see a contradiction. STDs are a function of ignorance, which is dramatically amplified by ubiquitious porn. NYT frequently has articles exploring how porn has become the de facto sex ed for everyone under 30 in this country.
That means wildly unrealistic expectations about sex. That means that, even if sex itself is declining in frequency, the proportion of 'safe sex' is almost certainly declining faster.
Again, no contradiction.
21
@Linda Campbell, I guess the first thing to ask, in answer to your question ("How does this happen if everyone is in front of their computer or performing "self abuse", Ross?") would be: Do you know where your hand has been, and what it's been doing?
3
I had plenty of causal encounters in my teens to mid twenties. That didn't stop me from finding a wife to live monogamously and have children with. On the other hand I have some people I still consider good friends, though we only see each other occasionally these days due to life choices, who got married in their early twenties after dating since high school who then became swingers by their thirties and are now divorced and still childless. They are both now in long term relationships with other people. My female friend in question relationship is an open one, but she does live with her primary lover. My male friend in question is monogamous, but after selling his house bought a motor home and is residentially promiscuous traveling the country while working remotely for the last year and half with is girlfriend. Neither of them seem interested in settling down and starting a family any time soon. Which frankly, if they are happy I don't really see the problem. And as far as I can tell, they do appear happy. There are more than enough people worldwide having children.
2
@Still Waiting for a NBA Title
Wow, if you pitch that story in Hollywood you're sure to have the next big hit reality TV show. Can I suggest the title "Utah U-Turn"?
1
Ross,
I don't know if it is porn itself or the seeping of porn references into our everyday lives. I see it in marketing references regularly. It is not a beautiful photo of a luscious dessert, but danish porn. It is not a gorgeous photo of a sports car, but car porn.
I remember thinking that the reference was odd and revolting when I first heard it. We sexualize everything, which numbs us to the beauty of sex itself. It is also the ubiquity of tv installed in almost every public space. I stopped in to a fast food restaurant recently. They had 2 or 3 tvs hung on the walls. One of these was set to a soap opera. The scene was in a bedroom with partially naked characters cavorting in bed. I suggested to the manager that since it was a family restaurant, they should change the channel, which she did promptly. I once visited a dentist with tvs in all the exam rooms with a small sign warning patients not to turn the tv off. I did not return to that dentist. I wish I knew the answer to this conundrum.
104
@joe parrott, I can't agree enough! The newly installed gas station pump has an 8 inch screen with commercialized garbage spewing out. It's not sexual (yet) but the commercialization of every public space is debilitating.
21
@joe parrott Perhaps this would seem to be less of a connundrem if we were more vigilant about guarding our young people against the constant onslaught of incessant violence and stopped worrying about them viewing the beautiful human body and depictions of lovemaking. In my day we liked to say Make Love Not War, though that opinion has never been greatly in fashion.
13
@joe parrott Turn off the TV anyway. I've gotten so I dread going to airports because you're stuck with a loud news report in the waiting terminal, which used to be a place where I could read in peace.
17
"Brave New World" is not a dystopian vision. Huxley never described it as such. Rather, it represented for Huxley a "bad utopia" or what I term a "pseudo-utopia"---a society in which we are made "happy" under conditions that we really should not be. While "Brave New World" may be the nightmare of conservatives, Huxley's 1948 novelette "Ape and Essence" depicts the nightmare for liberals. Only in his final novel "Island" (1962) does Huxley attempt to advance his "pragmatic dream" and a more humane, but nonetheless controversial approach to human sexuality that neither trivializes it, as in "Brave New World", nor cruelly regulates it as in "Ape and Essence". For a fuller analysis of what Huxley got right as well as what he got wrong, see my volume, "The Educational Prophecies of Aldous Huxley: The Visionary Legacy of Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and Island" (Routledge, 2015).
2
@Ronald Zigler
Thanks, I was going to read Huxley's books, but I now realize I should read your book about Huxley instead.
I'm personally thrilled that sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and consequently fertility are all plunging. The reason fewer people are having sex is that now the only people having sex are the ones that really want to. In the past, there were no alternatives, so men coerced women, and women were (societally, physically) powerless to stop it. Also, look at the planet, dude. There are way too many people, by several billion, and it's literally burning. Yay, masturbation (or self-abuse, as you judgmentally term it.)
14
Classic Douthat. A plethora of florid language and “ references “ with the requisite gnashing of the teeth. All leading to His singular conclusion: Liberals Bad, MY Church is the Supreme arbiter. Except, of course, when the Pope is a (gasp) Liberal.
Time for a Vacation, Sir ??? Perhaps the Vatican.
Seriously.
12
what a horrendous inch-deep dig into this subject. one should probably do some real work in a field prior to proclaiming a prescient saint and then shoveling regurgitated dogma onto a discussion.
a word to the wise, anyone who would still use the terms onanism or self-abuse is not an adult fit to sit at the table.
there are those who have worked very hard to think and talk about isolation, sex, intimacy and their impacts all through human history. their opinions are as varied in every generation as on any subject. I know the nyt is desperate to apply a veneer of political balance to it's op-ed page, but Christ, read this.
as I believe is currently in vogue, "stay in your lane"
12
@sb
Yeah, I can't figure out if Mr. Douthat is pranking the NYT or the NYT is pranking Mr. Douthat.
1
He has a priests interest in sexuality that borders on creepy.
12
Well. First you folks tell people not to have sex until they are married. You tell them they can't use birth control and if they get pregnant they can't have an abortion. They can't seek comfort with someone their own sex because that's not allowed either. Then when young people stop having sex because they're masturbating instead, you get mad at them for that. It's almost as if there's a whole religion based on wanting to prevent people from fulfilling the biologically innate urge for orgasm...led by a bunch of people who have been twisted into pedophilia by this impossible constraint. When will you stop?
35
Way to complicated, men are knuckle-draggers, and stand-on-the-coner guys, women know it and don't want to be punched again. Women would rather work for low wages and raise children as single mothers and form family relationships with their Mothers and Grand Mothers
I suspect that the annual crop of 9 year olds being introduced to porn by the worldly 12 year old in the neighborhood, probably looks at all the intrusions, manipulations, misogyny, s&m, and the like, and says "Yuck". Is it any wonder those little girls grow into women who decide - after years of seeing this stuff - 'No, thanks'?
2
Ross, you might want to consider basic economics (dating costs money, lots of younger people are relatively less wealthy than before), perhaps some science (eg, there are studies suggesting that the increasingly widespread use of plastics in modern societies leaves residue that mimics human hormones, reducing libido), the increase in other forms of entertainment (the big drop in Western family size coincided with not only the Pill, but the arrival of broadcast TV, and there are now many other new forms of entertainment and pleasure to choose from, online and offline, besides porn OR dating).
BTW, your panem et circenses theory is a concept that predates Brave New World by nearly two millenia (as the Latin phrasing suggests), but your version of it may be a bit too simplistic for either Caligula or Aldous Huxley to swallow. For example, when you talk about the conservatives opposing online porn, do you mean the "free market" conservatives who believe in global trade unfettered by governmental interference? I suspect not. It seems that you're referring to another brand of conservatives--or is this a case of the invisible right hand not knowing what the other invisible right hand is doing?
"On-brand" or just generic click-bait? Well, I guess I clicked. But there are worse things I could be doing on my computer (at least according to you).
BTW, are you trying to turn the NYT into The Onion? If so, I'll give you credit for one of the most inventive conservative pranks ever!
7
“Self abuse”? Seriously Ross?
10
@walt amses
He was being ironic. Please.
You're looking for something to ridicule, not understanding that the joke was on the readers.
“Self abuse”, Ross? In 2018? Maybe you need one of those Japanese eggs.
23
Huxley was also one of the progenitors of neurotheology suggesting that, in the end, once the alcohol is gone and everyone is too tired for sex, we will turn back to the eternal answer that Russ favors. So, in the end, maybe things will come round right.
1
Yawn.
Despite all the huffing and puffing -- very little of this is worrisome.
here's the real Huxley deal, and it's not the result on Internet-enabled onanism. . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq7Muf6CKg
Once again, Douthat, you fail to even have a clue.
The sexual revolution wasn't about "sex". It was about empowering women to be more than breeding test tubes and household.maids for men. Only someone with a patriarchal, even adolescent view, would think the sexual revolution is about masturbation and orgasms.
Of course, what else would you expect from someone who advises women who are abused to stay with their abusive husbands, as per Catholic doctrine, and not divorce. And to not use contraception.
Douthat, you should be sued for column malpractice.
9
Want to know why pornography has slowly been replacing sex within relationships, with other people? And why virtual reality sex and the sexbots are going to continue the trend.
Control.
Sex with other people, is, well, messy under the best of circumstances (and we're not talking about the fluids). It's emotionally messy. If you're contemplating sexual relations with another human being--at least consensual relations--you do have to on some level get involved with their feelings, their desires, and their very human idiosyncrasies. People do strange things for private reasons of their own they may or may not be revelatory about. And that means having to navigate a minefield of complexity and subtlety that many just don't have the skills or time for. (This is one reason prostitution has always been around--the "parameters" of that "relationship" are transactional and much easier to handle emotionally.)
Intimate relations are not the only ones in which people are turning to technology--think of online communities and Facebook "friends" and other social groups that try to avoid the ambiguities of right there present interaction.
Ultimately most people prefer security and certainty and control and find ambiguity and complexity disquieting and difficult to handle. And technological tools that will allow them to enhance the former have a good shot at becoming widespread (and reducing relationship and fertility rates).
8
Commit. A six letter word that is the new four letter word. Commitment to sexual longevity, and monogamy, like everything the internet has upended, is no longer fashionable nor sustainable. Marriage is down. Church attendance, down. Speaking with your parents and/ or children is also down. America’s greatest generation, ushered in the age of television. It also came with a warning for the “boob tube” generation. What is missing here today is the morality police.
The other half of this body electorate, the conservative movement, one would think would want to reign in the internet. You would be wrong. They have no more sense of morals than anybody else. They talk the talk then push away in wheel chairs. If cash is king then porn is the prince. The internet is the message, the messenger, the messiah.
Unplug your router, blow up your TV. Go for a walk with some friends. Come home read a new book talk with your neighbors. Exercise.
A dream a dream, the matador.
1
"Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse..."
No, Ross, it's not self-abuse. It's giving yourself pleasure. And it's nothing to be ashamed of. I've been married for 16 years, have two kids and I take care of my own needs about once a week. My wife is well aware- I don't have to slink off and hide in the bathroom- and is supportive. And sometimes I'll watch some good quality (to me) porn online to spice things up a bit.
It's always easiest to jump to the worst possible conclusions with issues like this: The end of romantic love! The further decline of Western civilization! Huxley's Brave New World coming to your neighborhood! It's not as bad as all that, Ross. It's just your Catholic guilt and abhorrence of sex shining through. And that's not your fault. You were probably fed those lines along with your baby bottle in the pew at your parent's church.
It's like fast food: If you lived on a steady diet of it, you'd probably feel pretty awful after awhile. But every now and then, it tastes good and scratches an itch like nothing else quite does.
10
Sex isn’t the only aspect of American life that has become ubiquitously pornographic.
Donald Trump himself is pornographic in his vile representation of himself as a powerful political man.
Like all pornography, it’s low, cheep, and morally corrosive. Just look how far into the gutter he has taken this country. Disgusting!
5
@Al
Poppycock. Like the word racism, pornography here is extended far beyond its correct limits and, in the process, debases our language.
What I find this opinion / observation highlights is our obvious need for comprehensive sex and sexual education. The conservatives have won that fight to keep America ignorant about the sexual aspect/ component / driver in our lives. Thus Internet Porn is our sex-educator-in-chief. It’s a sad substitute for real understanding and knowledge.
3
Wow. It really IS true that conservative Catholic men are obsessed with sex.
12
The couple that views porn together,stays together.
6
Masturbation =self-abuse?? A terrible sin to be confessed to a Roman Catholic priest. Oh, my, Mr Douthat! Oh, my!
5
Sex is alive and well. This article is nonsense.
5
The nerve endings that produce pleasurable orgasmic release in our genitalia are very similar to the nerve endings in our noses that produce the release of a sneeze. Sexual pleasure is evolution's way of getting us to get it on, to procreate. The politics of sex have very little to do with fast cars and big breasts and everything to do with property rights and the prevention of incestuous procreation.
In "Brave New World," society has realized that sex is not a powerful mystery but a simple physical impulse that is best catered to without a lot of fuss and bother.
3
Really, “self abuse”? Russ, I think you need some significant down time with a therapist. You have some serious repression issues.
4
I was with him until he called masturbation "self-abuse"--if you define it as sick and sinful, you saddle the vast majority of human beings with needless, cruel shame and guilt. That said, it's really interesting to read Stephan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday," completed in 1942, in which he writes about the terrible consequences of sexual repression in late 19th-century Vienna. Along with tragedies like the suicide of a teenage boy who contracted syphilis from a prostitute, he mentions the--to him--disgusting trade in pornographic pictures, the need for which he hopes is going to disappear in more enlightened times, when young men and women are more sexually free. How wrong he was about that!
2
"Conservatives didn’t expect it ... when the anti-porn crusade Alberta describes was strongest."
That long, sixth paragraph is one of the most beautifully constructed sentences I've ever read, a perfection (truly) not found in everyday life - at least not in my little hamlet.
Thanks to technology! I found it.
The author's concern about being too "on-brand" is warranted, but it still didn't stop him from using the terms "onanism" and "self-abuse" as synonyms for masturbation.
His recent columns in the wake of *yet another* revelation of systemic child sexual abuse in his church served more as opportunities to sling mud at a Pope with whom he disagrees politically than to condemn the behavior itself.
I'll take "self-abuse" over child sexual abuse any day.
3
That was one sloppy piece of conflation. The US is a sexually violent culture whether it has porn or not. Rape (thought under reported) takes place at a rate 25x that of Japan and depending on the country between 3-6x times the rate of most western countries. Even our apparently rapist southern neighbor of Mexico is 1/3 our rate of rapists. The US stands with just seven countries in the world with a sexual abuse rate of females greater than 20% - Australia, Costa Rica, Tanzania, Israel, Sweden and Switzerland. We need to address a society that lauds violence both sexual and non-sexual. It preceded internet porn and will undoubtedly continue through many technology cycles
A few observations.
“Self-abuse” covers a lot more territory than just masturbation. Calling it that is a ‘tell’.
Consider the alleged decline in intercourse leading to fewer people engaging in relationships leading to successful reproduction an evolutionary challenge. A world where the human population continues to increase beyond sustainable levels is also an evolutionary challenge.
What about traditional conservative disapproval of contraception? Wasn’t the complaint that separating intercourse from reproduction would lead to sinful promiscuity and contravene the Biblical injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply”?
How do you account for the InCel movement - men angry that women won’t have sex with them?
You might do better Mr. Douthat by comparing masturbation and pornography to the sexual equivalent of fast food; cheap, easy, and offering immediate gratification. What does it say about a world where that is becoming a default for people?
You might also contemplate that studies and surveys appear to find that areas in the US with the highest rates of pornography consumption (and teen pregnancy, etc) correlate with conservative politics and religion. Or that the current occupant of the White House is allegedly frustrated because he can’t indulge in pornography as much as he would like to there.
As opinion pieces go Mr. Douthat, this column is the pundit equivalent of masturbation porn - going through the motions with no expectation of anything productive out of it.
1
Reducing human sexuality to a mechanical solitary experience is to entirely miss out on Nature's reason for sex: reproduction, which requires two people, male and female, who come together to create new life. Emotional attachment is the secret sauce which inspires responsibility for each other and for any children of the union. Masturbation and porn are poor substitutes for sexual relationship. I feel sorry for people who choose this lonely road.
2
Ross Douthat and David Brooks sit in a bar…
5
Yeah, you really are out of ideas. Time to either rethink some of your most cherished dogmas or take a break.
1
Douthat discussing sex? No Thanks.
3
Many liberals detest pornography as anti-women and anti-feminist, Ross. We dont all fit into the neat little boxes you've created in your mind.
3
@R.A.K.
This just blows my mind. How the heck is porn anti anything? Are the folks participating being coerced? This is just pathetic.
Is it me, or is the real issue here being minimalized. How much or how little sex folks are having, how satisfying it is or isn’t, is rarely the true concern of conservatives. It’s all about the birth rate.
Which is falling. Which has many social and economic repercussions. Which is a kind of barometer on the health of traditional family structures and marriage.
Of course, that conversation would have to go into the fraught reality of raising kids in a society like ours: family care leave, day care, healthcare, affordable housing, wage stagnation whereby even if both parents work they are permanently struggling, the assaults on public school funding and the cost of college.......
So much easier to blame it on too much masturbating.
1
Onanism? Self-abuse? Your inability to use non-prejudicial terminology (it is called ‘masturbation’, Ross) dooms the rest of your argument to irrelevancy. At least the Times title writer is a grown-up about matters personal.
4
@J Oberst Ross would likely be quite happy calling it "masturbation" if he were aware of the origin of that word. It's a New Latin (read "Catholic Church") coinage that literally means "defiling oneself by hand." I'm sure Ross would derive great pious pleasure from condemning in those terms what the celibate(?) pontificators of his Church still define as an "intrinsically and gravely disordered action" in their catechism.
We really need a new term for this ubiquitous act that isn't freighted with pernicious medieval religious judgment.
1
@Ted
The existing vernacular offers many choices, thankfully none of them editorially acceptable for placement in a headline.
Cherish your impotence I would say and think about it. It might be a better situation to love your partner in her ways and less to bother about abstinances (like magnificent porn). It will extend your sexlife into older age and could change younger women's appetites in the future. It fits with the rightfully remarks of women who know women are better.
1
"Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse, the crowding-out of real-world interactions by virtual entertainment, and the growing alienation of the sexes from one another."
When all else fails, count on a conservative to see masturbation as "self-abuse." Then laugh and remember that Mr. Douthat is really just all about hyper-intellectualized fretting.
2
The Internet has made good sex and good relationships easier to find for people who consider themselves kinky.
The Internet might have made good sex harder to find for people who think that their preferences are "normal." Too many young people, especially men, assume that everything they see in (what they take to be) mainstream porn is "normal" and therefore presumably what everyone wants. It's not.
"Normal" people should do what kinky people have to do...communicate! Different people want different things. Sex is better when people recognize this and try to find out what their partners want.
2
Self Abuse?!? Why are you so afraid of sex? This is just so bloody silly.
4
@W
What is silly is some readers' inability to discern irony and humor in the use of those terms.
Ross needs an editor badly. The phrase "self abuse" jumps off the page as archaic, parochial and from a scientific standpoint, just plain wrong. The reader is waiting for a report that dermatologists are having a field day with an epidemic of warts among young men and that it is SRO in hell and they have even stopped taking names for a waiting list because of the unanticipated arrival of millions of Americans who get themselves off while viewing internet porn. In the real world, if Americans weren't holding down two jobs to barely support themselves and benefited from family leave and generous vacation programs, they would have more inclined to be sexually active instead of collapsing at the end of the day, knowing that in 6 hours it was time to get the kids up and on their way to school or logging on to UBER to pick cup their first passenger for a two hour shift before showing up at their real job.
3
@rgoldman56
Ross needs a therapist, not an editor, to cure his ills.
1
Sex. Yep. its great. Whats that great trivia question? The one about men having thoughts about sex, on the average, about once every MINUTE. since the begining of time. And we got pretty good at actualizing some of those thoughts, too. Heck, men have conquered Continents....purty much just so's they could get more sex. We'd still be living in caves, eatin meat off a stick, if women wasnt a-promisin' us they'd give us a little bit if we stack some of those rocks up into a castle and kept her in warm furs.........There was always the realization that sex potentially led to "children"....and the best form of birth control...is to raise one or two kids!! No more of those....be careful. then came the Pill......we lost ALL control....no more concerns about the future......but kids kept happening.....so we legalized abortions in order to keep these mistakes from interfering with new found wild sexual abandon. And now, men, working hard at being lazy.....invented the Internet to transmit data instantaneously.....what Data you ask? Well, scientific data....including scientific analysis of nekid wimin.
2
Where was the sexual revolution going before the advent of technology and masturbation?
There is nothing wrong with using masturbation & the internet to whet your sexual appetite. Masturbation is sex, it really isn’t anything inferior to having sex with another person. Having sex with another person includes many risks you wouldn’t experience alone; there are the negative possibilities of STI’s & emotional turbulence, while the end result is the same, you simply stimulate yourself until you feel satisfied. Having sex with another person can be just as good, sometimes better & sometimes worse, than having sex by yourself. I don’t believe there is anything inherently more fulfilling about sex with a partner than without. We still live in a world that can pressure you into feeling lonely when you are alone, but there is nothing wrong with being alone. Do what makes you happy, so long as everyone involved is consenting!
2
Socrates nails it. All of Mr. Douthat’s columns must be appreciated through the understanding of his personal working through of the grip of his Catholic upbringing and beliefs, challenged as they are by modernity.
It was so much simpler to live before the scientific revolution. But, must we embrace the superstitions and submissiveness to unquestioned authority of that age?
The biggest challenge of our time is confronting global crises such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, and economic polarization through democratic institutions unencumbered by religious biases, nationalist demagogues, or non-belief in evidence. We are running out of time to make this transition.
2
Brave New World didn't have smart phones that require permanent attention. I am 70 and it takes 20 minutes to put on my support hose. I don't know how I could survive responding to the dozens of Facebook messages every five minutes.
Young people have a more important problem than sex . The all pervasive always ringing phone is a bigger problem than sex or pornography it sends them to their virtual reality and keeps them there.
2
A lot of good responses here. Wouldn't it be interesting to know where the sexual revolution would be now without the interference of the internet. The suggestion seems to be it is easier and quicker to just gain some pleasure in front of your laptop than romance your partner or hit on someone in a bar. Not only has ubiquitous pornography switched things up, perhaps as argued, but #metoo and the rising tide of it has as well. No one factor is ever responsible for trends, IMHO, although one may be more influential than another. Reading this article I cannot help think of the incel (involuntarily celibate) movement, if that really is a thing. I am confident there is no shortage or promiscuity and infidelity ongoing. And the always will be. I am not comfortable knowing that sexual component of long-term relationships is waning. But then again how strong is that evidence. But longer hours, more needy off-spring, something has to give. I have always been disturbed witnessing in my own extended family young lives deeply affected by teen pregnancy, premature marriages, and obsession with relationships when they weren't done with school! I could go on for pages.
82
@Pete: Yours is an astute comment, especially your thought-provoking reference to "obsession with relationships" among young people "when they weren't done with school." This is a major reason kids, especially girls, ruin their lives with premature motherhood and too-early marriage.
Enabling children to discover their unique talents and interests, focusing on things other than social relationships, can enrich their lives immeasurably and give them brighter, more fulfilling futures.
It seems strange to have to tell social conservative Ross Douthat "Sex isn't everything," but he seems to be obsessed with the subject.
31
@Pete: Relationships "when they weren't done with school!" was not considered disturbing until fairly recently. My parents (WWII generation) considered themselves old when they got married at 28 and 27. Even in the 1960's, when I graduated from high school, it was not that uncommon to marry your high school sweetheart. I'm beginning to see 50th wedding anniversary status updates among my Facebook friends. Even for college students of that era, getting married the summer after graduation was a fairly standard practice.
I agree that postponing marriage and children until one has more real world experience and a better sense of what one wants out of life is by far the preferable option in a complex world. It appears that this is happening, as data indicate that the age at which people marry and have children is increasing. But the obsessions as you call them seem little changed from what they have always been, just a little more public.
11
@Carson Drew
Conservatives, especially those who promote so-called "family values," generally are more obsessed with sex than the rest of us.
Hmm.
23
Mr. Douthat,
Your personal opinions regarding the state of sexuality in this country are tempered by your religion and what can only be characterized as a personal abhorrence toward that activity that perpetuates the species and is as necessary to the human race as drawing breath.
The opposite side of the coin that you present is that the pleasure related to the reproductive act is the main reason that humans even participate in the act. That factor of this equation has resulted over the millennia , in both formal religion and the American society to regard intercourse as a necessary act only to be indulged in for the purposes of procreation.
Both formal religion and the conservative attitudes toward sex is that it is a necessary evil and , if left unsupervised , will create moral ruination.
Nothing could be further from the truth than this medieval hogwash.
Sex education should be encouraged as well as birth control to teach young people a responsible path towards the inevitability , the necessity , and yes , the absolute pleasure involved in safe and consensual sex between caring partners.
This a matter of absolute personal privacy and the thought of either our government or Mr. Douthat invading the bedrooms of a free society is beyond abhorrent. That this invasion is fomented by a Republican Party that's only interest is in sweeping up Evangelical votes is despicable.
So much for freedom and the First Amendment .
2
In his first letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul advises us to live the good life. We should flee " harmful lusts" but instead pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience and gentleness. Living otherwise " plunge people into ruin and destruction." Excellent advice for our times.
1
...and here I thought that simply checking the World Population Counter would simply put any aspect of this subject matter to rest. It is still adding humans to the count. I seriously doubt that all those being added are coming out of petri dishes.
3
Only since the age of the internet have individuals had the opportunity to explore a range of sexual pleasures. While in the past hushed sexual innuendos were a private vice shared between the elite. Among the participants of these so-called deviations were members of the clergy and royalty. Because the internet, the lowest common person can now witness, and perhaps emulate the variety of carnal pleasures once only privy to those with "more sophisticate desires."
What is wrong with that, I ask?
Reading the author's article I wonder if anyone realizes that happiness is a combination of interaction and self-absorption. Sex is little more than an impediment in achieving both? I wonder if pornography didn't have a different effect? Perhaps it allowed us to appreciate and achieve human interaction without the desire to poison it with sexual desires? Professional self-absorption is self-explanatory.
1
Heterosexual pornography is largely a male enterprise that commodifies female bodies. It is produced largely by men, for men. If pornography is ruining intimate relationships, it is because of that male drive to make women into things for their own sexual pleasure. So let's put the responsibility where it belongs, on male privilege. I can’t think of anything that kills female desire to be intimate more than the sense that one is denied full humanity and equality in male eyes, that one exists solely as a thing.
2
Maybe it's the fear of contracting a sexually transmitted, sometimes fatal disease, that leaves both the man and woman wary of spontaneous encounters. And, when opportunities do occur, then the male (usually) has to use a condom, which filters out the sensation. Which leads to less desire, which leads to less pursuit, etc....
(This is just my explanation for people turning to self-sex instead of seeking out partners - I'm certainly not advocating unprotected sex.)
After reading this I've gotta be honest, I'd have been satisfied with one more elf.
4
This is a perfect example of the extreme right and extreme left following their respective margins until they meet back-to-back on the far side of the mainstream.
Progressives campaigned against pornography as the ultimate expression of misogyny, and foresaw a generation of porn consumers as rapists-in-training. Conservatives saw the complete breakdown of our moral fiber, indulging in lust as a mark against God that would cause the collapse of society.
Guess what? They're both wrong. In our current times of what often seems like toxic polarization, it's important to remember that the broad center is where we should be placing our targets.
To buy Douthat's argument, you have to assume that porn and masturbation are crowding out real relationships, rather than real relationships are starting later and some turn to porn and masturbation to tide them over.
Seems unlikely. Seems unlikely that the primary reason one seeks a permanent or long term relationship is the short term gratification of a sexual episode rather than the long term benefits of marriage or relationships.
Look to other reasons for people living longer with their parents; to people choosing to focus on goals other than marriage until later in life. Are they trying to save up, get out of debt? Are they looking for people who complement them - people who have a job, people who have the same goals? Are they so caught up in the practice of existence, that time for relationships is nil? Or are they unsatisfied with the pool of single people they meet?
Are people taking longer to mature into the people they will finally be?
I can imagine a lot of reasons for society to have moved the bar out, leaving people older before they settle down. The availability of easy porn seems like a minor contributor.
2
Behind all Doughat's words is the blame that women no longer accept his Gods decree that men should be the leaders in all decisions. Blame is all Religions and Republicans seem to have. If they really are concerned about solving society's problems they should start by looking in the mirror.
6
Interesting fresh article by Ross Douthat.. I'd suggest an additional re-examination of Marshall McLuhan too. While he never called it the "Internet", he certainly defined a number of attributes of mass media that are very relevant to the Internet as we know it today. All pervasive. Once just a tool of scientists....now hijacked by commercial interests that have no concern for restraint only profit.....A community shared resource that is exploited by narrow focused profit making enterprises. Along the way, the Internet becomes our collective nervous system.....trivializing/isolating the individual and exagerating/emphasizing the collective. Cool and hot at the same instant. Like our subconcious thoughts, sex runs rampant through the Internet. Sex is the Drug...the virtual Drug. It is all consuming....without Guilt, as, in theory, no other human contact is involved........but Taxation will become the Internet's Guilt Complex....its restraint. Tax the Internet........and many things become possible again as human endevor begins to focus again on longer range goals than immediate guilt-free sexual satisfaction.
1
I think it has been shown time and again that rape has very little, if anything, to do with sex, and everything to do with exerting power. I really doubt that any alleged decrease in the rates of sexual assault has anything at all to do with the increased prevalence and accessibility of porn and it is not in anyway helpful to conflate those two things.
2
Self abuse? Has anyone used that term since the Victorian age?
8
This is an interesting companion piece with an article in the NYT from about a year ago. An older woman who was born and had matured in a communist country was complaining that her younger relatives who were married had far less sex than she did under communism. She thought that they were just too tired under capitalism; both spouses worked very hard, there was no easy child care, they always had to worry about medical costs and other items that were provided under communism. Nothing to do with porn. Just relaxation, working to live rather than the reverse: a happy sex life.
5
I think the author misses an important point, urbanization. Population studies show that as density increases procreation decreases. Our world is increasingly urbanized and overpopulated already with no end in sight. In addition, there is the lack of community in cities built on increasing levels of fear ramped up by mass media, yet we live in a world where crime rates have plummeted, and more people commit suicide than are killed by crime and war combined. Add to this the modern corporate culture with its 80-hour work week, and who has the time and energy for sex or sexual relationships?
Our urbanized world is awash in people, fear, anxiety, and exhaustion. No wonder people only have time for a self-quickie anymore. And the internet availability of sexual knowledge and porn has normalized all of that.
130
@Unclebugs I assume you are speaking about the United States instead of much more civilized places like Mexico, Thailand and many parts of Europe where people are not in so much of a hurry.
3
@Unclebugs
"Population studies show that as density increases procreation decreases."
I was hoping someone would mention this. When I was growing up I was heavily involved with 4H -- primarily raising rabbits. After about a year of successful breeding, my rabbits mysteriously stopped. They would maybe make a half effort and then lose interest. When my 4H leader came over to advise me, the first thing he noticed was that I now had too many rabbits per hutch and the hutches themselves were too close together and a little too small. He pointed out that if the rabbits lived in conditions that they perceived as too "dense" they would stop breeding. As soon as I implemented his suggestions, they got right back to business :)
I am certain that human population density surely must play a similar part in our declining interest in intercourse. Half of the couples I know have decided not to have any kids and the other half have had only one, occasionally two.
As for technology, perhaps it simply helps people to cope with a shift that is happening on a deeper instinctual level due to over-population.
It would be very interesting to see if the decline is happening equally in urban versus rural areas.
20
@Unclebugs As wealth and education increase, the number of kids decreases. But that's population, not sex acts. The drop in sex acts suggests teaching fear of disease and violence in sexual encounters works, a nudge that suggests sex is dangerous to your health and perhaps your liberty/job.
4
Ross are you saying that your favorite religion’s (Catholicism’s) demand that a person enter a darkened booth and confess to a Church official every time they practice “self-abuse,” watch porn or even have an “impure thought” is preferable to lower rape rates that have resulted from contemporary sexual behavior? Catholic priests supposedly practice the kind of theologically-justified sex you argue for, yet look where it got them. Perhaps if they had more porn available to them, there would be fewer instances of sexual abuse.
“God's plan for love and sexuality,” according to the Church is not about celebrating humanity, but about exercising an obsession to control it.
What you are smugly suggesting is that we return to the glorious days of yesteryear when men were men and women were women, and each knew their place in the divine order of things. Gender assignments were rigid and inflexible - male or female - and sex was reserved for procreation, nothing else, because Big Brother in the sky was watching your every move and thought. If “Brave New World” was about social engineering gone awry, how is the Catholic fiction any less an attempt to engineer Paradise?
It’s just that Huxley is a lot easier to read than the Vatican’s convoluted, opaque, linguistic-bending definitions of human nature and sexuality, and he didn’t claim omniscience and infallibility about such matters; he just offered a satire on that very kind of thinking. Why? Because it’s dangerous.
3
Finally, another writer agrees that in "Brave New World" Aldous Huxley knew what he was writing about, and was ahead of his time!
1
"Tranquilizing affects" and "alienation of the sexes" - I'm not sure if this piece lauds pornography or laments it. Here's an alternative take on the affects of pornography, among other things "masculine" related, from a combat vet: https://medium.com/s/man-interrupted/todays-problem-with-masculinity-isn-t-what-you-think-b43e80edcf60
1
"Self-abuse"? Why not "self-pleasure"?
And is it possible when there are alternative ways of fulfilling desire, then each becomes more goal focused.
Those who got married because it was the only un-sinful way of having sex (you know who you are) now can stay at home and enjoy themselves instead of making others miserable.
4
Ross lost in his fantasy of sexual purity and conservative religious morality is still litigating the sexual revolution and its consequences. In nothing else does Ross & the morality police have more in common with the mullahs of Iran and the clerics of Saudi Arabia than in their rigid myopic view of human sexuality and their desire to put the genie back in the bottle. Ross doesn’t offer a more healthy version of human sexual expression, instead he offers a return to the shame based ideal that defines all conservative religions. Better he take his chastity belt and spare the rest of us any more diatribes on an adolescent view espoused by misogynist prelates who desire control of humanity in all things, especially sex.
3
We can stipulate to the ubiquity of porn on the internet, and how it has adversely affected relationships. But that still begs the question of "why."
Our late capitalist, commodified culture is built on giving customers what they want, when they want, and the internet is a perfect medium for that. One can indulge any dark impulse - from extreme sex to extreme political views - with a mouse click.
Addiction is a predictable result. In fact, addiction is built into much of what the internet has become. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites are structured to keep people viewing them as long as possible, because the information people give them while using the sites is how those companies make money. Here in the pages of the NY Times not so long ago, there was an article about how Silicon Valley executives are trying to limit their children from using smartphones and the internet. That speaks volumes.
The rise of internet porn and its impact on society is but one symptom of a deeper societal addiction problem, propagated by companies that compete and profit from your attention. And as virtual reality and "deep fakes" are developed further, it will only get worse.
I wonder why Douthat felt the need to disparage the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in a completely unrelated column.
Perhaps the alleged colleague complaining about an overabundance of elves was reading "The Silmarillion," Tolkien's posthumously published "Elvish bible." Certainly neither of his two best-known works, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" spends a great deal of time on elves.
But complaining about elves in "The Silmarillion" is akin to complaining about Jews in the Hebrew Bible: they are the protagonists of the story.
What a needless, snarky snipe. I'm disappointed in Douthat, who, I would previously have imagined, would have an appreciation for the rather Catholic (in the best sense) moral exploration that is "The Lord of the Rings."
The decline of sex is only just beginning. Since the sex drive only exists because of evolution (sorry, believers) it must have an evolutionary purpose i.e. promoting reproduction. God (or gods) aside, people have sex because Nature intended them to have kids.
We have now engineered our way around this and can have sex without consequences. Very clever. But that is not the end of the story. Nature's counter-move will be to take away sexual pleasure; the sex drive will atrophy over time and the type of person who has kids by deliberate choice or for other reasons will prosper; horny humans will become just another endangered subspecies.
I think Ross needs to find the place of Catholic predation in all this. Our emergence from religious mythology is surely a key achievement of the modern age.
“Self-abuse”??
I beg to differ.
"Instead we’ve achieved social stability through, in part, the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse...."
"Self-abuse." Man, you can't make this stuff up. Is there anything more entertaining than listening to Catholic men preaching about sex?
So thank you, NYT. A real time-save for me; I skipped reading the comics this morning and went right for Ross's column. He did not disappoint!
Are you kidding, if you think that the sexual revolution was tamed you know nothing about the women/girls of today. Hookups on the first date are nothing, Tinder girls give it with a simple swipe to the left. Marriage is at an all time low, divorce at an all time high. Guys don't need to get married to get it so they don't. There are multiple Sugar daddy sites which young girls join as soon as they come of age to earn a few bucks having sex with older men.
In many ways the victim of the sexual revolution were women themselves. Sure to those select few women who wanted to have this freedom it has been great, but to those women who'd rather have a conventional type arrangement, it's been terrible.
1
My comment is on the selective and maybe more than a bit off-hinge. I beg your indulgence in advance, dear Ross Douthat. I glanced at Kate Julian’s article. Let me dwell on the Japan issue. There has been a lot the ambiance of Japan bashing in America, historically it can be traced back to Japanese Imperialism aggressions (notably onto the Perl Harbor, brought by not national referendum or any sort, though). Culturally, Japanese language appears to be too alien for Westerners to consider engageable, except the level of cartoons, baby talks, or young girlish coroquial versions. Consequentially, very childish and kitsch aspects of Japanese culture tend to be welcomed by media, for Japan seen as far foreign and even a dystopian model meets well American general audience’s preferred view of Japan. Articles, opinion pieces pick up terms and exptrssions in Japanese for the authencity; such as so-shoku (or so-woo shoku danshi), to be contrasted with carnivorous boys/men (nikushoku danshi), which are terms created by Japanese mass media around 2009, crudely describing sexual appetites as the herbivorous or carnivorous. Otaku has been around for a longtime, the connotations of which vary depending on contexts. Bukkake is not the word for every one’s vocabulary. Hentai is introduced loosely in Julian’s article, omitting its dual meanings; sexual pervert or zoological/biological transformation in a life. No more space for me here. In short, please take a balanced view on Japan.
@Juliette Masch (former Ignorantia A.)
You wrote "very childish and kitsch aspects of Japanese culture tend to be welcomed by media."
And nowhere is that more the truth than in Japan itself. I have lived there for several years and was astonished by the relentless and pervasive presence of "kawaii" culture throughout Japan's mainstream media, regardless of what age group were the target audience or the media producers.
No one should be allowed to comment on sexuality when they still use the words "self-abuse."
They still have "issues."
1
But everyone knows that "sex began in 1964." And the Beatles done it.
The real question is whether declining birth rates are related to the substitution of pornographic self-gratification for social sex. Birth rates are declining across almost all developed countries, and there are many possibilities for this most of which are not mutually exclusive. It would pay to examine this scientifically. Secondly, there is the question of whether declining birth rates are desirable. Most developed countries have birth rates below the replacement rate, the U.S. included, meaning that, without immigration, our populations' numbers would be in decline (as they are in Japan, which discourages immigration). The positives of this are that a less populated world is a less polluting, carbon dioxide-producing world, and fewer people in developed countries leaves room for more immigrants to fill jobs as well as prepares us for robot worker substitutes without destroying our work economy. A negative result is that less developed countries with fewer resources contribute larger and larger percentages of the world population and increase famines, epidemics and local territorial wars. If less two-person sex and more porno-fueled masturbation is a factor in these changes, we should find that out.
Puppies. Don't forget about puppies. How many times have I been dumped by women who wanted to spend more time with their dogs?
2
So, in a world of 6 billion people, teetering on the edge of ecological collapse, with sexual violence decreasing, and some "social/dating" apps providing consensual sex-on-demand, we are supposed to be worried about people increasingly self-satisfying themselves, not marrying and not reproducing?
Of all the issues in the world to worry about, I'm taking this one off my worry list. Back to climate change, abused children, the Middle East, the scandal that is the Catholic Church, gerrymandering, etc.
Ross, men don’t rape because they want to have sex. It’s a crime of anger, of hated, of violence. Its 2018. Get up to speed, please.
Also, a complete fail at yet another “both sides” argument. You acknowledge that anti-porn activists were completely wrong about the societal effects of porn. But rather than straight up eating crow, you you somehow leap off topic to castigate “liberal optimists” as also “wrong” about the overall sexual revolution before returning to the topic of pornography. The other “side” in the porn debate weren’t “liberal optimists.” They were anti-censorship citizens.
1
Bottom line, revolutionary though it may be: Perhaps people should make their own decisions about how they wish to conduct their sexual lives.
Why does sex have to be a "happy vice"? Happy healthy sexuality has a whole wealth of complications without the added stupidity of thinking that it is inherently bad or evil. There are apparently lots of people who need to do some more therapy around this issue.
1
Maybe the moral of this story where everyone was wrong is to stop worrying about and trying to control people's private lives?!!
If there is a 'conservative' lesson to be drawn here, it is that when things become to easy they are not rewarding. TV, video games, porn, processed food, twitter, cheap Chinese goods from Walmart - they all drain life of its depth and value in the same way.
The thing is this is so weird. So cultural-centric as to be flabbergasting. One has only to visit other countries, out of the realm of the comfortable, air-conditioned, and privileged, to see that sex and reproduction and, to some degree, relationships, are alive and well and contributing to growing overabundance of the human species. In fact, is this not what many of our compatriots in the USA fear? That all those brown and black people from other countries and cultures will overtake the reproduction rates of light-skinned people in the USA? Thus, many among us, including the current occupant of the White House, dehumanize them and threaten their culture, personhood, and very lives.
So Ross Douthat postures as if writing something wise and serious on the subject of sex while at the same time un-ironically calling masturbation "abuse" and saying that the acceptance of same sex preference is obviously evidence of a moral decline.
Yes, by these ridiculously retro, sexist, standards things have taken a turn for the worst. For people who don't think in these religion-based old school morality-tinged ways, some of this sounds about as sensible as Henry Higgins in the Music Man lecturing about the evils of pool versus billiards.
I certainly would not describe masturbation as "self-abuse." As Woody Allen pointed out, it's sex with someone who loves you. Also, it's safe sex in these times of HIV, HPV, and whatever. I'm only sorry I didn't start doing it years earlier than I did.
I'd be interested to know whether the phenomena Douthat describes are more likely to be found among Roman Catholics than among Jews, among younger folks than among Baby Boomers, among rural folks than among urban dwellers, and so on. The demographics would be worth looking at.
Thank you for not mentioning Hugh Hefner.
Mr Douthat's dogma needs a new outlet. Out of our bedrooms, please.
1
The tracking of the fall of sexual violence and rape after the rise of easily-available internet porn maps far better with the general decline in violent crime of the 1990s, and that decline maps with the decline of free lead in our environment. I know it seems like a far-afield reach, but it's a factor that should not be ignored.
As for the unexpected-by-conservatives stability of the permissive society, I would say that the human ideal to find new and novel experiences is still alive and well, and it still ventures into dangerous territory--this gives the lie to Huxley's narrative of Soma-induced content. There has been a rise in violent porn based in non-permissive activity. So long as it strictly stays in the realm of fantasy that is fine, but I am personally concerned that it might be what some teenagers use to teach themselves about sexual norms. Porn that is "a little bit rape-y" is not a good basis for a stable norm.
I admit that part of me is waiting for some conservatives to bemoan the loss of magazines promoting mere nudity to the rise of highly sexualized content. Playboy, we hardly knew ye.
Translation: "everybody else's sex life should be exactly like mine. The fact that it isn't means that our society is on the decline. Or something. I'm not really sure."
Re "the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse": The term "self-abuse" isn't merely prudish; given its conflationary purpose, it's a disgusting insult to every victim of actual sexual abuse. And at the same time that he at least has the intellectual honesty to admit that some *other* dire predictions of conservatives did not come to pass, Douthat falls back to absurd Victorian hand-wringing over masturbation draining our vigorous essences. Tempting as Douthat may find it to ascribe real or imagined social ills to biblically proscribed activities, there is no real evidence for a masturbation crisis now, any more than there was in past centuries whenever the same alarm was raised.
An eloquent defense of prostitution if I have ever read one. As marijuana has gone legal, so too should legalized, pimp-free, prostitution.
The economic benefit is easy. But Ross gives us plenty of social reason to favor prostitution over pornography. Internet porn is profoundly anti-social, and providing safe legal alternatives is a social good.
Please remember, I am not speaking of the kind of prostitution practiced currently. Just like weed, it has to conform to new rules.
Oh, Ross! You would have escaped your fear of the "too much" if you could have avoided the serious use of "self-abuse." You couldn't avoid giving yourself away.
1
This is not a subject I have spent too much time thinking about, at least at a societal level. It's a good thing we have Douthat to do so. I guess.
The ubiquity of pornography and unfiltered anonymous commentary on the internet have had a profound effect on human identity in the modern world. I would argue that loss of the super-ego of the imagined human ideal has unleashed forces that include our current president, an unapologetic fornicating philanderer, bully, liar, boor, hypocrite, criminal and con artist who prides himself on his "political incorrectness." In fact, he is the antithesis of what was once our social ideal. No self-respecting society would choose him to represent them. With our forums for anonymous communication, we have witnessed hate speech, insults, crudeness and the kind of thought that was once reserved for the stall doors in service station bathrooms. That said, all this self-exposure, I believe, will ultimately prove beneficial for the evolution of humankind. We will no longer see ourselves as members of linguistic, racial or religious tribes. We will see ourselves with all our defects and will then be in a better position to correct our deficiencies through the development of artificial intelligence. In the meantime, online porn and commentary allows us to manage our passions in a way that reduces actual physical conflict and predation, allowing civilization to progress through default.
I think this is very funny Ross. Soma could surely be used in our world today.
Read Ms. Julian's article in The Atlantic rather than Douthat's biased and misguided interpretation.
1
Yes, I concur. An excellent article.
When the 2000 Year Old Man was asked whom he thought to be the greatest explorer of all time, he answered, rather quickly, "Onan." When his puzzled questioner asked what Onan discovered, the ageless sage replied, "Onan discovered....himself. One day, Onan was walking down the street and when he tripped, grabbed onto himself and fell in love."
Print THAT, Gray Lady!!
Fantasy is cutting edge. Reality is warts-and-all. Enhancement is entrancement.
The use of the negative term "self-abuse" here neutralizes this piece.
1
Conservatives have always been over-concerned with other people's bedroom habits. It really annoys them that someone else might be having fun.
1
One can only wonder if we had the Internet back in the 60s through the successive decades that perhaps all these clergymen would have practiced more self-abuse and kept their clammy paws off of so many innocent young people.
1
"Conservatives... believed that sexual liberation would inevitably lead to social chaos..." Conservatives believe anything outside their scope of perception and belief will lead to social chaos. We should all be glad that forced monogomy and forced child-bearing are behind us.
Douthat failed to mention a significant factor in the changes in sexual body politic; HIV/AIDS. Masturbation is the safest sex there is, from a number of points of view.
195
@Ralph Averill Masturbation may be safe from the standpoint of sexual disease prevention, but it is not emotionally fulfilling, and a society in which most people feel no emotional closeness to anyone else is a disturbing thought.
11
@Ralph Averill Is it still sex when you are alone? Sexual relations suggest more than one person. At what point is touching your sex organs considered sex -- is it the touching or the goal/intent?
@Raindrop,
You can feel emotionally fulfilled in different ways in love and friendship, where the word 'love' is never mentioned. Many of us care about somebody, knowing that we will never see them again.
3
Tax the Internet......Problem Solved. think about it.
1
Given the large and growing number of reported #metoo incidents, which still remain only a fraction of those which actually occurred, it is HARDLY correct to believe that the attitude of a non-trivial percentage of men (e.g. women are property, I can grab them by the (you know), she shouldn't have dressed that way) has changed one iota with the saturation of porn online. In fact, it may have gotten worse.
When the number of rapes and crimes against women has dropped to ZERO perhaps it will be a good time to have this conversation. But only then.
2
Decline of sexual intercourse? How to square this with a population of 7.5 billion people on its way to 8 or 9?
1
The article is talking about the US, not the rest of the world.
A couple of years ago one of my sisters and I were talking about an NPR article we'd both heard. The article was about how happy people are, who are not parents. My sister is a mother; I am not. She thought the article came down on the side that people who aren't parents can be just as happy as people who are, and she was glad for me. I thought the article came down to people who aren't parents are happier than people who are, and I thought they were asking the wrong question. I am not conservative, but I agree with Mr. Douthat that we should have higher aspirations than just happiness, or any temporary form of gratification.
I don’t understand the obsession with dissecting the populations sex lives. We are far from a crisis caused by a lack of babies being conceived and born, the world actually needs slower population growth, and who cares whether people have sex or not?
One could argue that sex in general is repetitive and gets boring. Any entertainment alternative will lead to reduced sex. Maybe it’s porn maybe not, does it matter? Don’t we have real issues to work on?
206
@Jeff Loehr Mr Douthat will argue that technically and economically advanced nations are having to few children. I always wondered that since child rearing (sooo quaint a term) has been made too much of a burden by unreasonable demands of time, money , and vigilance by the "helicopter parent model.
7
@Jeff Loehr The idea that sex in general is repetitive and gets boring definitely needs more open examination. Women in general have been willing to discuss this, but it seems that men have felt that pointing it out diminishes their virility, exposing them to ridicule from other males.
18
@Jeff Loehr Could not agree more. Who cares what people are doing alone or with other consenting adults? I also think sexual preferences and having children are two different issues and not as closely related now, when contraception is available. This column is a typical example of conservative obsession with everything related to sex. Too much sex-social chaos, too little sex-social chaos. The answer is always the same- more restrictions, more telling people what to do, more "morality". I see all kinds of people around- celibate, in relationships, dating, cheating, paying for sex, doing whatever they want. I don't think it's even an issue or that there was any change in human nature.
19
As with most technology platforms, pornography is just the canary in the coal mine. Just wait until all aspects of our lives are lived this way. It’s already in motion.
You, sir, are no J.R.R. Tolkien.
Douthat's return to themes is not the same as Tolkien's return to his themes.
That first paragraph of comparison does nothing to excuse this.
This is actually proof that porn was not the cause of "Teen pregnancy rates and abortion rates rising together, a pornography-abetted spike in rape and sexual violence, higher crime rates among fatherless young men … basically everything that seemed to be happening in the 1970s and 1980s."
Douthat's people blamed porn. It was a target they liked to bash. It did not however actually explain events. They did not want to talk about those things, because they did not want to fix them. They wanted to end the Great Society, not to make it work. They wanted the 1950's, and an ugly 1950's as run by Biff.
This wrongly assumes a better past, and a better alternative if only.
People in long marriages sometimes just stop having a lot of sex. That link of healthy sex life to marriage is just false.
Celebacy is not new; Plato argued for it, as did St. Augustine, and it dominated the life of Dante as he fixated on Beatrice (a woman he'd only seen in passing a few times), and of course Douthat favors it for his Church.
If "This isn’t the sex-positive utopia prophesied" then neither was the 1950's, nor would have been the world Douthat seeks as his constant theme.
2
Sex is BAD and war of course is double plus good, right?! No sale here.
1
I recall the chilling effect I experienced when first reading "1984" as thirteen year old. The only other time I was affected as deeply and as fearfully was my initial reading of "The Handmaid's Tale" as a young woman. All my anxieties are coming true.
"...unhappy with it" - only for now, and only because we elders can remember society without the internet..
1
If pornography has such a mollifying effect then tell me why we can't leave our kids alone at the bus stop anymore. Why are parents considered negligent if they allow their kids to run "free range"? Maybe you could tell me why the big box stores all have a Code Blue system.
In 1964 I was 12 years old. My parents put me on a Greyhound bus in St. Louis and sent me to San Francisco. How far do you think I would make it today without being picked off by some pornography inflamed sicko?
Do you think there is no relationship between the #metoo movement and pornography? What do you think is driving these men who abuse women? Do you really think that the way women are portrayed in porn doesn't skew men's view of women?
Pornography has no redeeming qualities at all. Pornography distorts and emboldens normal men and twists sick men into monsters. Ted Bundy got his start with some pornography he found kicking around in a city dump.
What about the new phenomenon of mass murderers killing women like the latest one at the yoga studio? These murders are perpetrated by intensely frustrated young men who don't have the social skills to date women. These inflamed and twisted young men see the object of their frustration as women themselves. If the porn they are consuming is portraying women as breathlessly willing but every woman in their life rejects them out of hand these sick men can't handle the dissonance. Might misogyny have its roots in pornography?
4
Withdrawal from combat in which you are prejudged to be immoral and insensitive is not stability.
1
Interesting article and some good points.
Not to get all economically determinist or anything but I think there is huge aspect contributing to the decline in inter-human intercourse (heh), that is missing.
That is that economic insecurity and the various kinds of overwork it produces, i.e. working 2 jobs for blue collar folks and multiple-competing-priority-70-hour weeks for white collar folks, make people literally too tired and stressed to have the mental an emotional space for much leisurely, mutually fulfilling, emotionally satisfying sex.
Hence Kirsten Ghodsee's interesting article highlighting the natural experiment of the effect of eastern block socialism on sex (apparently positive). These stultifying, oppressive, totalitarian states (no I'm not in favor of them and I wouldn't want to live in one, I like the Bill of Rights, thank you) also promoted the status of women and provided economic security (for better or worse).
According to Ghodsee this meant better sex and more of it.
See:
Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism https://nyti.ms/2uQli6s
So if more positive sexuality is what we want maybe we should find a way to live in a liberal democracy AND also improve the status of women, provide universal health care and education, and guarantee everyone a job (as opposed to an income).
Just a thought.
3
The reference about listening to another story about elves was made by C.S. Lewis, a close friend and protege of J. R. R. Tolkien, and fellow professor at Cambridge. See the text "The Inklings" for the exact quote. Unfortunately, I can't quite summon up the name of the author.
Great points, Ross. The dystopic aspects of our world, in general, are much closer to "Brave New World" than "1984". With pleasant vices and a population lulled into complacency with a barrage of media and great visual effects.
Two interesting fragments in Mr Douthat's latest lament, not juxtaposed within the text, but certainly within his thinking.
The first is when he refers to masturbation as "self-abuse." The second is when he refers to certain people struggling "to find their way back to a worldview that takes moral virtue and human flourishing seriously again."
Therein lies the problem: The ancient guilt and shame of self abuse by immoral (amoral?) practitioners, up against the noble struggle for moral virtue (more guilt and shame) and human flourishing (the cherry on top.)
It could very well be that this is the right formulation, but the presumption of morality that underpins it simultaneously undermines it. It's the Catholic church describing all that's wrong with world based on the teachings of the Catholic church and papal infallibility. The presumption precludes any argument.
Steve Martin once did a routine on how to become a millionaire and never pay taxes. "First," he said, "get a million dollars. Then..."
That's what this reminds me of. First, stop abusing yourselves and return to moral virtue and human flourishing. Then...
5
@Jim: The flap over Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders advising teenagers that masturbation is preferable to unsafe sex demonstrated how difficult it is to discuss sex frankly in the US.
@Steve Bolger
The same woman who advised us that we needed to "get over our love affair with the fetus?" Her term in office, however long it was, was too long.
We spay dogs and cat for a reason. There's too many being produced by sexually active members of the species.
Kinda the same dilemma for humans, but we don't see it, just like we don't see climate change.
2
I agree--another elf.
6
"...that’s the sexual culture we’ve been forging..." Speak for yourself, sonnie. There's a big world out there, with over two and a half billion people in China and India, and I doubt they're reading this. Maybe they're reading about sex slavery, the kind, for example, busted in northern England where hundreds of young people have been victimized in recent years; or the sex slavery of the kind that keeps our FBI busy every year.
Douthat has constantly exposed an extreme form of conservatism. And that’s associated with his unyielding Roman Catholicism: a toxic combination, but an all too common form of American dysphoria. Here he tells us: “Conservatives didn’t expect it [the actual outcome of the sexual revolution] because they believed that sexual liberation would inevitably lead to social chaos.” Conservatives believe that anything that looks new will lead to social chaos. And he balances the books with: “But liberal optimists were wrong as well.” Who are they? And how does he know? He’s never asked me!!! Sadly, here and throughout his writing, Douthat ignores the ancient wisdom that gave us: “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Follow the money, not the panting rubes.
4
There are obvious implications in Douthat's article that cast shadow on the normal, elemental act of loving one's self. That is unfortunate. It is as much a legitimate form of sexual pleasure as any other. He acts like we've regressed as a society. I recommend "Socrates" article, just below.
Yes, we really needed a religious, Catholic, right wing conservative to weigh in on the intersection of social stability and human sexuality. Truly enlightening. Not.
4
This column strikes me as an analytical apparatus desperately in search of a problem, and not actually identifying one.
9
Mr. Douthat, if you'll stop writing about the sexual revolution, I'll stop writing about quantum physics. That way the world will have two fewer people writing about things they don't understand. It's win-win.
16
I think that the decline of many activities, not just sex, can be traced back to the inordinate amount of time we spend with our smart phones.
4
@Peter: I've seen couples, on dates, where they were both on their separate smartphones and ignoring EACH OTHER in the moment. I have no doubt the same couples do this in bed in the evening -- smartphones have even replaced TELEVISION as the prime distraction from human connection!
If you get everything -- social interaction -- shopping -- ego boosts -- flirting -- pornography -- on your phone....then you almost don't need other people at all. And that is scary.
I’m not sure the point of Mr. Douthat. I see the reduction of rape as good and if that comes through porn and not a healthy, fulfilling committed relationship, so be it.
That is not to say I support porn because I don’t. It has promoted what is “ok” or “standard” during sex— 60% of videos on Pornhub have violence against women. That’s not ok. Or worse it is a source for education for children wanting to know how to have sex. Porn is NOT sex, it’s fake sex.
I think what Mr. Douthat would like to see is strong marital bonds with a rich sex life. I would love that too. Somehow our education of the joys of sex is a loving, commitment partnership are lacking. It leaves millennials ignorant of why such a life is enriching or how to create it.
1
The conservatives and liberals of the 1980s didn’t foresee what the sexual revolution would become because they didn’t foresee the internet or what it would do to the world. Nobody did.
The impact of the internet on sex and relationships is but one part of the “oneness” Ross describes. We have a generation (or, perhaps, more than one) who have limited real interactions with people generally. When they want sexual gratification, they can get it with internet porn. They can find their “friends” online through gaming and other activities. When they want political discourse, they can find likeminded people and rant and rave with or against them. They can do most of their personal business on line—banking, shopping, etc. When they need employment interactions, in many jobs and “gig’ professional today they can do that on line as well.
They have eliminated the messiness of human interaction, but also many of the joys of being human. And internet porn as a substitute for relationships won’t do much for propagating the species.
1
Douthat is such an old fashioned idealistic conservative. Should we really be unhappy with developments that provide personal gratification and a stable society devoid of violence and coercion?
1
Why oh why does it need occur to Mr. Douthat that his beloved free market - let the market solve all ills - is utterly at variance with his beloved traditional Catholicism?
Edward Bernays (Freud's nephew) realized nearly 100 years ago that it was possible to serve the plutocrats by crafting messages designed to stoke desire - and to stoke it, infinitely.
Living in a world where virtually all media, education, business - basically, nearly the entire planetary culture - is based on endless growth (meaning, endless stoking of desire and craving), you don't need to look to sexual mores or simplistic social analyses to understand the extraordinary alienation and worldwide depression created by the deliberate provocation of our desires.
Dan Siegel, in his most recent book, "Aware," uses an image, the "wheel of awareness."
Imagine, he writes, that in the center, is the experience of simply being aware, and arrayed around the rim of the wheel is all that we are aware OF.
Resting in the calm and quiet of the still point of just being aware, it is possible to learn to view all that is on the rim (desire, craving, addictions, fears, trauma, etc) with equanimity, kindness and compassion.
Over 30,000 people have done this experiment. Results have included full recovery from depression, PTSD, and more.
Christian centering prayer, certain forms of "effortless mindfulness' (see Loch Kelly) do the same,
The ultimate solution to plutocratic kleptocracy.
www.remember-to-breathe.org
I don't mind Ross Douthat endlessly harping on the decadence of contemporary society (he's right, of course, but for all the wrong reasons) so much as that underlying everything he writes is principle that sees the "happiness" of men and women to be forever contingent on women being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen while "their" men go out hunting for food for their many offspring.
Mr. Douthat! Do you really not know we had an Enlightenment? While men like you continue to resist it, and long for a return to Paradise, most women get the fact that there never was a Paradise.
To the topic at hand: Pornography has always and forever been around, and in less repressive societies than ours, was enjoyed by both sexes. But pornography in the age of the Internet is entirely a male invention and almost entirely a male source of sexual satisfaction. The decline in sexual intercourse within long-term relationships, sexual happiness between the sexes, blah blah blah, even if it's as dire as Mr. Douthat asserts, has come about almost entirely because millions of men around the world have failed to adapt to modern rights--have failed to accept that women have the right to say no to sex with a man (even a husband), and that men no longer have the right to sex just because they want it.
Until conservative pundits like Mr. Douthat accept that the advancement of women in society is an overall good, there can be no discussion taking us forward.
2
@Emile: I have read Douthat for years and often disagre with him politically and culturally -- but he has never to my knowledge called for "women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen". Where do you GET these stereotypes?
@Concerned Citizen Is your thinking really this literal? Rhetorical exaggeration used to drive home a point about an overall attitude is a very ancient device.
@Emile
Yet, scores of commenters are taking his joking reference to "self-abuse" seriously and literally. Physician, heal thyself.
People are having less sex? Excellent.
Assuming there is a corollary decline in birth rates, this is encouraging news indeed. Our planet is overpopulated -- overpopulation, as I recall, a social concern much discussed when I was very young, which eventually fell out of fashion.
Overpopulation exacerbates or is the direct cause of crises that threaten us all -- global warming not least among them.
So it is high time we do what we can to curtail the spread of babies. If ubiquitous online porn can play a role in that, you won't hear me complain.
2
Whenver there’s a buzzing new social panic (now it’s “not ENOUGH sex” . . . ) conservatives blame “liberals” by which they mean leftists and socialists. (Of course sometimes they blame “leftists and socialists” when they really mean liberals.)
And no matter the social problem, we liberals, leftists, and socialists blame capitalism - or the excess of it.
But the term “capitalism”, as used in general discourse, is a vaguely looming label draped over a dynamic complex of relationships, institutions, technologies, conditions, laws, and beliefs.
No wonder we’re so often befuddled and overwhelmed!
It’s only somewhat clarifying to focus on the core elements of capitalism. These center around the ability of a tiny few to make inordinate profits from wage labor by the rest of us. But, as obnoxious as that may sound, capitalism with wage labor is indisputably an improvement over slavery and has allowed for an infinity of progress and freedom compared to other forms of domination.
Meaningful human relationships which promote productive creativity ought to be what we are striving for, but we have so little claim to understanding the actual forces driving us whether they are dynamics of our cultural political economy or somehow intrinsic to our biological existance.
2
Ross,
I'm going to have to sue you for the eye-rolling injury I just sustained while reading the term "self abuse."
7
What about the orgasmatron? Certainly not before Huxley, but certainly Allen was a forecaster of technological sex-satiation. Anyway, Fowles put this all much better in the French Lieutenant's Woman, when he said that scintillation was not based in the sexual act, but in the anticipation and imagination of it. To a great extent, the world is now released from scintillation by reason of freely available sex acts (and so avoids much sexual violence). I think the companion piece to this article should discuss the link between increased availability of video games and reduced rates of youth-based crimes (burglary, assault). Technology is now a substitute for both life and other life-forms.
If there were any doubts that Ross Douthat's assault on women's reproductive rights (and opposition to LGBTQ marriage) was driven by a sex negative fury, this column should put an an end to those doubts. The squeamishness, revulsion, punitive attitude, the pure abusive hysteria of it, reminds me of the sex obsessed guilty youngish Brett Kavanaugh when he suggested to Kenneth Starr a series
of explicit Peeping Tom questions that he wanted Kenneth Starr to ask Bill Clinton (or was it Monica Lewinsky).
3
substituted " self abuse" for relationships???? No,we've created a society constantly at war with something or someone. who
has time and emotional energy for relationships and children?
What Mr. Mr Douhat doesn't understand is that chat rooms and other forms of interactive porn, are proliferating because they are advertising platforms for sex workers. A large majority of contacts for sex work now take place online. Street work has nearly disappeared, as has third party involvement..... pimping. Anyone with a phone can advertise sexual services in their neighborhood, town or anywhere in the world, give a sample of the sexual wares on offer, discuss favorite sexual practices and arrange meet-ups. And, btw, the educational attainment of sex workers mirrors society as a whole. The sexual revolution in its current form, is, very often, transactional.
1
Reading this, a flashback occurred. 1964, I was 20 years old, our cargo vessel tied up at Naples, Italy taking on cargo. Had some time off and decided to visit Pompeii. The guide took us around to different sites, and near the end showed us a room with paintings on the wall. It was a little house of prostitution. You can imagine what the pairings were about. Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
That was a long time ago, and some things just don't change. And the Italians, last time I checked, are very liberal, and very happy.
Not sure why as a culture we have to continue to analyze what has been going on for centuries. Pornography is here to stay.
1
"Liberal optimists" never desired a utopia of sexual fulfillment via pornography or anything else. We are, however, mindful of this thing called the Constitution and the fact that personal sexual choices were never any of your business. Besides, if this all leads inexorably to mass celibacy, nothing could make you and your church happier.
3
A tour through the antiquities section of almost any museum might be in order for Mr.Douthat. There he will find an amazingly wide array of artistic homage to various forms of sexuality, including "onanism" and "self mutilation," that predate technology by thousands of years. Why is it that arch conservatives are always so sure that sexual repression is a primary cause of the pending fall of civilization especially when sex is required for the endurance of civilization? Get a hobby and stop thinking about what goes on in other people's bedrooms.
1
Neil Postman wrote about this more than 30 years ago in "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Except that Postman did this on a more global level, going beyond sexual pleasure. I have thought a lot about Postman's book the past three years - beginning with the day Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower
"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy."
1
If nothing else, this column elicited comments from thoughtful, educated, eloquent people. Vocabulary and critical thinking still exist.
2
"Instead we've achieved social stability through ... the substitution of self-abuse for intercourse..."
Only a religion as repressive and sex-loathing as Christianity could mis-characterize the most pleasurable individual act given to us as "self-abuse."
1
In substance, this could have been written at any time in the past century. Maybe more. Everybody thinks that whoever comes after them isn't human enough.
Women in the workplace! Sex on TV! Automobiles! The written word! Ross, you and every other living person are the products of a million years of "dehumanization." Nonetheless: There's nothing more human than thinking mass existential decline is the inevitable sequel to your own normal, richly human youth.
As a progressive, liberal or lefties whatever you choose as a descriptive I don't recall some long winded debates about pornography, let alone pornography on the internet. The internet has a life of its own and even brazenly defies governments the world over to dare to regulate it. So I'm not sure when this was a left-right debate since both groups participate and have access to it. As to masturabtion being describe by Ross as "self-abuse" I find this arcane Catholic descriptive ridiculous.
2
Douthat and other social conservatives don’t embrace “a worldview that takes moral virtue and human flourishing seriously.”
They insist that men and women conform to rigid gender roles that are “complementary,” not equal. Wives must be submissive to their husbands, who always must be the family leaders.
Conservative men in power who want to retain that power have decided that women can’t be priests or hold other leadership roles in society because it isn’t “natural.” This is a clear violation of common sense.
“Human flourishing” requires a full and equal opportunity to educate oneself and develop one’s God-given talents, whether or not they fit traditional gender schema.
For the female half of the human race, flourishing requires having the ability to control how many children one gives birth to and when. Breeding thoughtlessly and involuntarily like farm animals isn’t “flourishing.”
As for healthy sexuality, what percentage of those who addictively masturbate to internet pornography are conservative men? According to news reports in religious media, support groups for sex-addicted evangelical ministers are proliferating because they are desperately needed.
Douthat constantly portrays well-educated, successful liberal women as unhappy. But we know what fulfills us and what doesn’t, based on our own experience. We’ve also seen the lives our mothers and grandmothers lived. Many of them were miserable, sexually and otherwise. Once again, Ross, you’ve failed to convince.
313
@Carson Drew I’m not sure any part of this comment responds to the article. First, Douthat doesn’t say that the moral flourishing is a specifically conservative aim or goal, he only says that this goal hasn’t been achieved in open access to pornography. He even starts off this article saying conservatives at the time were wrong about the impact of pornography. Further, none of this article talks about reproductive rights or gender roles, as you talk about in paragraphs 2-5. And then you say that all the people who masturbate too much are conservatives anyways so who cares? This article wasn’t about any of that!
His argument is that open and cheap access to pornography, and further more pleasure (see, marijuana or, opioids) anesthetizes people in making it easy to choose stable, easy, and reliable pleasures (masturbation) over more complicated, harder to attain, variable ones (human to human interaction). This article was hardly about conservatism, reproductive rights, or women at all!
23
@Thomas K.:Anyone who reads Ross Douthat’s column on a regular basis, and who has read his books as I have, knows that he’s a social conservative who opposes reproductive rights for women, including not only abortion but birth control. It is his major focus.
In this column, Douthat states what he clearly believes is a crucial goal: finding “a worldview that takes moral virtue and human flourishing seriously.” But he says we need to find the “way back” to moral virtue and human flourishing and take it seriously “again.” He wants to return to an idealized past.
No way did I say that “all the people who masturbate too much are conservatives.” This is, quite simply, a lie. My point was this: in today's column, social conservative Douthat decries addictive masturbation without honestly admitting where the most serious problem may lie.
You might find these links informative:
“Why red-state conservatives are the biggest porn hounds”
https://www.salon.com/2014/10/19/why_red_state_conservatives_are_the_biggest_porn_hounds_partner/
“America's Bible Belt states indulge in more online porn than other less religious states”
https://www.christiantoday.com/article/americas-bible-belt-states-indulge-in-more-online-porn-than-other-less-religious-states/42045.htm
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@Thomas K.
Uh, in case you are unaware of Mr. Douthat's views and beliefs, you are missing the obvious subtext that Carson Drew picked right up on, as did many.
30
It is easy to despair over modern life, although with some effort we may let the "what the ' ' is going on" be in Itself a teaching moment
We are living through the metamorphosis (a dying into a new becoming) of Western Civilization, one major aspect of which has to be a complete reboot and re-examination of the real issue of our Age: men&women.
Our societies are living organisms, and if we wish to "see" that, we need to make our thoughts live as well. To much abstraction and this/or/that category-creation leads us astray.
Evaluating the "change" misses the point, because it is the fact of the change that reveals the underlying new growth.
If we widen the scale of our point of view (in time phases of centuries), and just follow the movements in the social life without going to war with these changes (what a reactionary mind does), we see individuals emerging more and more free of social and family constraints.
In the '60's we saw this step as a change from "do the right thing" (the socially acceptable action) to "do your own thing" (create yourself).
There are mobs out there, who judge and declare what is the good, universally true for all, ... fortunately children generally rebel. Otherwise civilizations would choke on their traditions and die just from that.
When that is the music to which all must dance (radical change at high speed), which the Hopi call: Life out of balance, which is a needed social chaos. A " Day of Purification", sing the Hopi seers.
The research offered by Kate Julian and cited by Mr. Douthat seems awfully thin to me. For one, researchers who believe teenagers are telling the truth about their sex lives should embrace a healthy skepticism no matter the answer. Secondly, the idea that millennials are "two and a half times likely to be abstinent" as Gen Xers lacks context. Has it grown to 2.5 percent from 1 percent? Thirty to 75 percent? Mr. Douthat is right about what I view as his very predictable logic and conclusion: It's a little, well, too much.
The computer becomes your lover.
If what one needs is always there in front of you, but not in true
life,
but what is put there stems from desire and the solution
remains to what extent it shall remain there or come true.
Reading the comments here, and especially the NYT picks, I feel compelled to add that in my experience as a one-time young person, and now as the teacher of college students and the father of a teen, the number one reason why young people avoid things, including dating, is fear of failure and rejection. The sexual revolution seems to have replaced a cruel hierarchy of respectability with a cruel hierarchy of desirability--particularly as sex and romance are depicted in our public media (and one should also never forget how important the latter is in how young people learn about the world).
4
Actually, what would keep us out of Huxley's trap is either to be less human (we can't control our animal natures in a good way, so we erect rigid controls over behavior that always lead to either unstable civilizations or the sociological equivalent of heat-death), or more human than we seem to be capable of at our current stage of evolution (truly understand our base instincts and consciously override them at all times, for goals that we have fully thought out, accurately confident in the override).
Drugs? Addictive ones eventually result in dealing with the drug rather than the "real" person taking them. That is, judgement is warped because the elemental purpose of the junkie is getting and using more drug. If certain Internet behaviors eventually cause brain chemistry changes similar to the taking of an actual drug, then those behaviors are essentially addictive drugs.
However, many people are resistant to addiction. Many people do find their way to being more human than most people end up being. A stable society would be pillared by such people, satisfying the rest without disrupting stability, and still progressing.
Huxley's trap would not remain stable without some additions to the trap; genetic modification or breeding control, to remove those resistant to the trap, with neither a sure bet. I think that life has a pressure towards evolution out of that trap. Species that attain intelligence either manage to evolve further, or they end themselves one way or another.
Ross, quit twisting yourself into a pretzel. Your only vision of an orderly society is one dominated and ruled by the beliefs of the Catholic Church.
Many people do not believe the only excuse for human sexual behavior is procreation. Many people don't believe that marriage vows trump marital rape, mental and physical abuse in the marriage and addiction by one or both parties. Many people don't believe that faith requires parents to ignore the sexual abuse of their children because is was done by their parish priest with the knowledge and consent of his Bishop. Many people do not believe that a hellacious life on earth is the ticket to eternal bliss.
There will always be people who have issues with their sexuality. Thankfully, we now are able to make our own choices and seek the help we need from true professionals.
3
One thing that I have observed in my 66 years is that people who have happy, fulfilling, pleasurable and yes, long term passionate relationships don't broadcast it. Privacy is one reason, honor and/or loyalty another. These people can be gay or straight, let me add. So the handwringing about the lack of happy sexual lives is perhaps based on incomplete data.
However I think that ubiquitous pornography is damaging. For one thing children often view it. It is very hard to prevent this. And sexual images, seen at early ages, do lay down some neural stimulus response pathways that may be significant.
Also it does present-for the most part-women as endlessly young, with flawless bodies and interchangeable , but in endless supply. This can also become an expectation and need for men. And there are a lot of very unhappy men and women who cannot now settle on a real person to love and love them back. But this is not a majority yet. Plenty of young people that I know find love and commitment still and are ecstatic to find " the right one." It's a powerful human need.
I'm glad that people are talking and writing about the hookup culture, the pornography habit, all of those "sexual aids" which have become a substitute for understanding your partner.
We live a life mediated by machines and devices in very many ways. So I guess some people accept that the most intimate relationships need a little machine as well. The essay is on point there. Why have a partner, much less a lover ?
234
@Consuelo
“One thing that I have observed in my 66 years is that people who have happy, fulfilling, pleasurable and yes, long term passionate relationships don't broadcast it.”
If people with fulfilling long term relationships keep it to themselves, how can you, or anyone else, possibly know it?
7
@Consuelo
Oh just stop. This is so silly. Human beings have been looking at pictures of other human beings naked since the beginning of time.
If you cannot tell the difference between pixels and flesh I feel very sorry for you.
10
@W
The writer mentioned children's exposure to pornography, not adults.' Nor is pornography merely a matter of pictures, but of moving pictures, which are relatively new -- not to mention ubiquitous, and presented in a highly valorized context.
As an adult, I know I can watch anything without having my fundamental responses altered -- though even for me, some images, especially very violent ones, might cause temporary trauma.
I didn't get the impression that the writer is confused about the difference between being and being seen.
12
I've been listening to a podcast by Jon Ronson called The Butterfly Effect. Turns out one Canadian umbrella company called Mindgeek owns most (almost all) of the internet's streaming porn sites. If some organisation were to buy that company and delete all of these sites and eradicate internet porn on one move would it solve the problem ? My answer is no because other businesspeople would pop up and fill the void. It is now up to us to educate ourselves and parents and children to give up porn which is highly addictive.
This is incidental, but is anyone else troubled (or amused) by Mr. Douthat's referral to masturbation as "self-abuse"? I mean, really? I didn't know anyone still called it by that term.
4
Yeah. I caught that too. The last person I heard use that term was a priest at my Catholic high school... oh, right, we are talking the altar-boy op-ed writer here.
1
This is a very narrow view of reality. Many variables determine whether people are sexually actively or not. The fact that Japanese men use a silicone egg might have to do more with their being exhausted from their long days at work and being physically and mentally drained. They literally have no time nor energy to find partners.
In the US, applications such as Tinder or Grnder have had the exact opposite effect as to what is described in this article.
Everyone is having sex!
Just not more than a couple of times with the same person!
So, no, I do not agree that masturbation is the root cause of anything. They used to say that it led to depravity. Now, some people want to blame it for their lack of intercourse. An easy escape goat.
People are having sex. Lots of it. With more partners than ever before.
So why is it that some do not? That’s a more interesting question.
41
@M,
No! everyone is not having "lots of sex" because of Tinder and Grnder. you need to actually read the Atlantic article. only about the top 25% attractive people online are having sex- and this is creating a lot of sexually frustrated, mostly entitled men. expect an increase in violence from the so-called "incels". I find them almost scarier than neo-nazis and other home-grown domestic terrorists- they all have a way of intersecting here.
15
I read this carefully and again but I still do not get the point.
If actual rates of intercourse are decreasing among married people, which is hard to quantitate, it may well have to do with the demands of both spouses working.
Among the young and unmarried it just may be the empowerment of women and that they are now actually doing the choosing of whom, when and yes or no. And that is a good thing.
As for the rest of the essay I must admit Douthat seems to ponder at length things I never worried about; that is other people's sex lives.
741
@Edward Blau For years the advent of cheaper television sets and TV stations staying on the air past the evening news all were reasons that people no longer had as much 'free time' on their hands and were tired when they finally did go to bed.
I agree that the busy lives we've all embraced (getting home at 8 or 9 pm from the soccer match or hockey practice) has made time for sex as a bonding event more difficult. Still, singles spend an inordinate amount of time and money at bars looking for someone to engage in a relationship or a brief sexual encounter. That too is changing with on-line 'link up' applications that not only tell you who is out there, but how far away they are. I don't see this cutting into people hanging out at bars, but it will take a decade for sociologists to study this phenomenon too.
17
@Edward Blau
"I must admit Douthat seems to ponder at length things I never worried about; that is other people's sex lives."
Perfectly expressed.
142
@Edward Blau:
But Edward, concern about other peoples' sex lives is a primary requirement to be a card-carrying conservative!
They're so obsessed with the specks in someone else's eyes they can't see the large pieces of kindling in their own.
72
Sex crimes down? Masturbation up? Oh my oh my! I believe society may be on the verge of collapse. Or maybe, Mr. Douthat, direct your attention to more pressing concerns of which there are many.
1
Brave New World wasn't a cautionary tale about hedonism per se; it was a cautionary tale about how fulfilling people's desires is a more powerful means of totalitarianism than telling people what they can't do.
Was flooding the world with hardcore pornography a liberal victory? I don't recall any mass movements demanding it. In fact, I'm pretty certain that if, back at the dawn of the commercial internet, you had told people about everything the internet would give them, along with all the downsides they'd have to accept (ubiquitous pornography, uncontrollable fake news, the destruction of long-form reading & attention, Facebook, universal surveillance) people on the left and right would have said "no thank you" with unprecedented unity. The biggest cultural change of my lifetime, IMO, is that democracy is no longer allowed to question or regulate the social changes that the marketplace of individual desires & manipulations dictates. That's exactly the world that Huxley described, but it's a political victory for the economically powerful and no one else.
708
@Martin
Thoughtful post. When you write:
"democracy is no longer allowed to question or regulate the social changes that the marketplace of individual desires & manipulations dictates"
isn't that because we don't actually vote on (or unequivocally express) the issues that the marketplace addresses through products and services? Moreover, the marketplace can be seen as a rolling referendum on those specific issues rather than a blurred snapshot of another time and place, which is what an election provides.
An exception (proving the rule as ever) would be child pornography where there appears to be a substantial minority taste for the product with a corresponding marketplace but which is excoriated and sanction by law backed by majority sentiment. The odds aginst a law de-criminalising paedophilia are not so much 'long' as 'tending to infinity'.
26
@Martin
" a cautionary tale about how fulfilling people's desires is a more powerful means of totalitarianism than telling people what they can't do."
Exactly! Perhaps the right's excessive liberalism will ultimately bring it disfavor.
9
@Martin
This is one of the best comments I've ever seen, on any subject.
And not only is democracy not allowed to question "market logic," but any attempt to question the "market" is instantly painted as regressive and totalitarian. I love how you neatly preempted that move.
15
For the most part, porn has achieved something I would not have thought possible. It has made sex boring.
2
I studied 1984 and Brave New World as a dystopian pair when I was in school. While I enjoyed both, Orwell was clearly talking about his present and the near future, about Fascism, Soviet Communism (both of which he saw firsthand in Spain) and also about some of the measures democracies had taken to combat Fascism and Communism. But Totalitarianism peeked in the middle of the 20th century, not long after Orwell wrote his book. It was in serious decline by the 1980s. Russia and China today are close to dictatorships, but the only truly Totalitarian regime in the world today is North Korea.
.
Huxley was the more far sighted about what we would become (to be fair, I don't think Orwell was trying to be a futurist). His world of genetically engineered humans, synthetic pleasure drugs, and order through the easy satisfaction of all bodily desires did anticipate many of the problems of today's society, and likely tomorrow's. Was he right in his assertion that only through struggle and pain can we be truly human? There's a Puritanical bent to that idea, but there is something to it. Pleasure is fleeting, but satisfaction and pride in one's life can be long lasting if life has been a series of significant hurdles overcome, difficult times endured, and long term human relationships that go through bad times and good. Of course the ideal life is a combination of small pleasures and a few big challenges to conquer, but Huxley does have a point: small pleasures are not enough.
1
Many in my Boomer age group have begun to notice that the sexes have begun to merge. There isn't that tense isometric exercise between the sexes, especially the younger ones.
Also, you have to put the phone down for a bit. Rules that out...
Once the artificial womb that Huxley predicted is perfected, all bets are off on the future relationships of men and women.
The near universal retreat to the relentless flicker of virtual reality has curtailed conversation, the writing of letters, retired a heads-up awareness of the world, encouraged the dumbness and meanness of our public discourse, and it has underlined the inefficiency of sex, with its time-consuming warmth and emotional entanglements.
It should be possible, though, to examine our malaise without resort to the Boy Scout Manual (c. 1910) understanding of masturbation as "self-abuse."
8
The loss of the conservative voice came in large part due to the fact that the anti-adultery televangelists were caught having affairs, the anti-gay clergy turned out to be hiring gay prostitutes and the give-to-the church personalities had both hands in the coffers. Now, it seems conservatives have the nerve to proclaim no one is having fun anymore the way God intended, back when men were men and women knew their place.
16
So you were looking for something to write about beside Trump and the recent election and ended up here?
"Self-abuse"?
Good grief.
Although on the one hand I'd imagine you must be at least somewhat reluctantly gratified to find that the proliferation of porn seems to have actually had the effect of dampening the out of control rates of libertine fornication by unmarried people of all ages.
That's a pretty good trade for your troubled morality, no?
15
According to google and porn websites the highest utilization of internet porn comes from those geographic areas of the country that are the most religiously and politically conservative. It turns out that all those Evangelical pro-lifers really, really love internet porn. So much so that the "scourge of internet porn" is now a frequent internet sermon among Evangelical preachers.
It turns out that our bible and gun toting Make America Great Again Trumpsters really love their Jesus and porn, but maybe not in that order. The internet porn addiction in the Bible Belt (aka Trump's Base) goes a long way to explaining how Trump not only survives politically with this group, but actually thrives.
16
Declining birth rates are good for our poor planet. So bring on the “self abuse.” Ross, your screed reminds me of why I left the Catholic Church.
At least we agree that Huxley’s Dystopia is the one for our time. The biggest dangers in our Huxlean world, however, are rampant consumerism and the desire to end not mend. Those may kill us all.
12
Good sex requires self-discipline (lacking in most) and a willingness to give as well as take (often people are too selfish), and it requires (especially during the "giving") a good work ethic (often lacking).
Hollywood presents a dream world of easy, simultaneous, ecstasy, versus the real world of an attentive taking of turns under often arduous conditions.
A mis-educated generation is likely to have to be in love to bother to figure it out (if at all).
107
@Craig Mason It's up to the individual to decide if sex is good and what it requires. You are not the arbiter.
7
@Paolo -- Haha, Paolo: I am just saying that a lazy, inattentive partner who imagines that Hollywood sex (or typical porn sex) is reality is unlikely to be a good sex partner. Lord knows that I was not being the "arbiter," as, in fact, sexual needs are very, very individual, within a range of species-typical physiology and behavior, and may the strikingly atypical find each other! I hope for happiness for everyone. Best wishes.
19
@Craig Mason
Loved your line about a good work ethic!
3
The idea that the left has "won the culture war" is perhaps a bit premature.
One of feminism's many branches seems obsessed with the idea of "banning pornography," which dovetails nicely into the holy crusade of the religious right for all these years. Many would not agree that pornography has correlated with reduced rates of rape (although the criminal justice statistics seem clear about that). The left circles around to meet the right, as often happens.
Once we've legalized pot, what are we to do with those prisons? Well, return to sending nonviolent "offenders" to jail for normal human impulses. One would have to be in a cave not to notice the push (by organizations such as Demand Abolition) to re-brand "prostitution" as "trafficking" and to turn ordinary prostitution into a very serious criminal offense (by the customers, of course).
It's not easy to be so pious, when the right has written a permission slip to Donald Trump to violate every rule, while slyly advocating that the rest of us peasants go to jail, for not being Mother Teresa.
Incidentally, the fertility rate plunged as much in the 1930's, and Internet porn was not to blame for that. Maybe we ought to look more closely for the real reasons, before blaming porn stars.
6
So perfectly stated. Would that we had a REAL left wing.
@Charles Coughlin
two articles does not a flood make
perhaps it's time to retire the worn and tattered labels-
liberal, conservative
especially when their employment sheds darkness instead of light
Two thoughts: First, young people have not stopped falling in love. If they have stopped pretending to when they're not, that's a positive development. Second, what made Brave New World dystopian (at least to a liberal like myself) was not the pleasant vices but the biologically enforced stratification of society, something wholly at odds with reality.
I'm happy to see Ross Douthat is self-aware enough to realize that he is one of the few people out there worried about this "issue." I am not even sure the big change is connected to porn specifically, but may be due to other distractions such as video games. I imagine I am not alone among parents of teenage boys in being both mildly concerned at the amount of time they spend on computer games but also relieved that they are not engaging in significantly riskier behavior.
It's hard to see where this is all going, but it does not look like a harbinger of doom to me.
68
@Paul Callahan I dissent. That risky behavior is what would teach the boys how to relate intimately with another person and begin to care, it is the natural avenue to becoming a citizen. Instead, the idea is for them to repress the force that drives that, sex, and play games? The behavior is risky if it is accomplished in ignorance -- of the other person, of sexual diseases, of the chance of pregnancy. Otherwise it is ESSENTIAL behavior and one of the best things in life. "Oh, they are too young," has meant that during the years when they needed to experiment and learn they were repressed and distracted (games of any sort, homework, propaganda, religion), and then afterwards it was too late: they were either uncouth or exploitative or neurasthenic. Because learning to love must be coordinated with that unique time of puberty and romance. That is the way nature organized it, it does not need us to short-circuit the process of growing up on time. We do so, and the results are horrible.
1
@pedroshaio. Oh, phooey. Some of the happiest love relationships and the best marriages I have observed over my long life have involved people who waited until fairly late in their lives for romance and sex.
4
@Paul Callahan What makes you think we are not living in a biologically enforced stratification of society? Take a look at the top, middle and bottom levels in the US. It is not as stark as in the book (currently) but just because the stratification is not perpetuated through mass production in bottles doesn't make it any less real.
3