February 28th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
We Live Like Gods
In a recent column, advice columnist and kink/sex educator Rain DeGrey addresses a reader’s worried impression that people are coming to prefer porn and self-pleasure over “actual physical sex”. Rain thinks it may be true, but if so it’s far from worrisome:
If some people decide that hopping online and summoning up porn in any style, any shape, any hair color, any variety without even popping a breath mint first is easier than meeting up with an actual human, well, who can blame them? We live like Greek Gods and are spoiled for choice.
Yes, indeed.
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Unfortunately, that post had the victim blaming: “most people, if they really really want to, will find someone to interact with in some way.” From her podcast, she is more or less in isolation with her boyfriend since COVID hit, so she must know one reason why bars, clubs, and swinger’s parties are not an option for everyone right now (likewise, not everyone is capable of feeling amorous in noisy crowded spaces). Online dating works for some people but not everyone and is an option for some people but not everyone (some of us have specific wounds from social media). Likewise, commercial sex is a great option for some people, but its not what everyone wants and a lot of people are struggling to pay their bills right now!
On another topic, do you have a reference to point people to why the General Social Survey should never be taken seriously on sexual matters? The moral panic in the USA about kids these days not banging enough seems to come from that kind of evidence.
I have a lot of time for Rain but in my experience attractive, outgoing, sexually-confident women tend to overestimate the ease with which other people who are not most of those things can get their social needs met. I wouldn’t jump to calling that “victim blaming” because from my perspective, she does the thing most of us do, which is assuming that her lived truth is more universal than it actually is. It’s just a bog-standard cognitive bias.
As for your question, I’m sorry, I don’t have such a reference. I’m not tuned in about the GSS.
It looks to me that in that paragraph she is engaging in a common mode of thinking: “you people who are different from me do not have problems, you just make bad (= different) choices, which are your own individual responsibility.”
I don’t want to slip into a way of thinking that Americans on the Internet talk a lot about, namely the assumption that cute women can easily get laid, but it seems like as an individual women she figured out a way to meet her particular romantic and sexual needs early in life (and good for her! Aphrodite knows she has had to deal with some crap like stalkers and gynecological trouble)
Fifteen years ago, before the dark times, before the smartphone, I spent a lot of time reading blogs by sex-positive Brits and Americans. It was educational to see the diversity of human experience: I didn’t know anyone who was having sex or in a long-term romantic relationship as an undergraduate, let alone getting invited to orgies between classes like Greta Christina. One reason I gave up as the blogs faded away was that it never lead to action or to a plausible plan of action that only required things which my body and brain can do. The people who write sites like that tend to be very sexual and very socially adventurous or extroverted so what works for them is probably not what would work for me.
Also, there are a lot of good things in that post (like pointing out that in the mid 20th century lots of people in the North Atlantic had a disastrous early marriage or two because they were horny or someone got pregnant). I just think that it overlooks the possibility that some changes in society and the economy over the past few decades have made it harder for some kinds of people to find lovers or romantic partners or whatever else they are looking for. Not much hanging out at the record store and bonding over a shared love of an obscure band today!
I don’t “feel” that vibe in her post but it’s a very American attitude, so perhaps familiarity with it has reduced my sensitivity to it.
I miss that era when sex blogs were too numerous to keep up with. So much great public discussion of sexual experience, that literally never happened anywhere before and now (in the era of prudish and censorious social media dominance) isn’t happening again.
Sometimes when I’m on TikTok (for example) and I see people using cute euphemisms and coy emojiis and deliberate misspellings to thwart the automated censors, even to talk about the most pedestrian and unremarkable aspects of their sexual lives, it just makes me feel like I want to cry.
Meeting people can be as simple as having a hobby. Knitting circles, woodworking classes, pottery, walking, reading out loud, poetry, reading at coffee-shops. Leave the house. Someone will want to have sex with you.
I was a part of the alt.sex-wizards list for 17 years until 1995 or so when we became more or less obsolete on the net. We were able to answer any question (any question at all) about sex in an honest open way, delivered by people who understood. We had real professionals (including medical) as well as talented amateurs — we even had Elf Sternburg.
One of the reasons I admire Rain is that she carries on that tradition.
Bacchus I also don’t feel that vibe in her post.
I don’t see “victim blaming” in her post or the context either. Context is important to that kind of a situation and mining someone’s choice of words for a sound bite doesn’t work for me.
fuzzy, that is a little bit hard to answer within the constraints of a blog comment to a stranger on the Internet, but I will say … some years ago I found things I liked doing which brought me into contact with a wide variety of people. Then very very bad things happened in those movements and I was not experienced enough to ignore the national and international drama and focus on what I liked locally. A lot of people who seemed compatible were not what I thought they were.
A few years later on another continent I found one or two more things that I liked or didn’t mind doing with other people. Then I had to leave the country for personal reasons during the pandemic. I found myself with no income in a country where I had not lived for many years and where the obvious candidates for things to do with other people no longer existed (see previous example of record stores), showed signs of the same problems which happened in those other activities, or had not restarted after the early stages of the COVID pandemic last time I checked; the place where I live is also set up for drivers and I don’t have the money or license to drive (not sure I have the spoons to learn). My experiences damaged my ability to try new things with new people which was never high, and some common forms of bonding such as sharing food and drink indoors do not make sense for me at this time.
Pretty much all advice for unhappily single people boils down to “let people around you know you are looking” and “do more things which bring you in contact with new people.” The reason that is not very helpful in the abstract is that people who have less social contact usually face some combination of objective barriers (lack of fluency in the local language, sensitivity to noise, taboo against using the local social drugs), psychic injuries from past experiences, and internal barriers / habits that only friends can help with. I think you can make a case that the third is their own fault but the first and second usually exist too. And knowing that my problems are partially my own fault does not make it easier to reach out to a new group or activity and believe that other people there might value me!
Another of my mistakes was continuing to use the Internet as a social outlet after smartphones. That lead to a cycle where I felt lonely, turned to social media, and just felt sadder. The self that most people express on social media is not a self I want to be closer to, the way that the self they express on their websites and oldschool mailing lists / forums sometimes is!
Rain de Gray has a lot of great posts and interviews like https://www.raindegrey.com/you-will-meet-people/ (another reason I am skeptical of social media is that I see so many clever people with lives posting hourly that a new BAD PERSON said a WRONG THING) One common symptom of PTSD and depression is that you see things as aimed at you which were not.