As a person on the older end of GenX, and as somebody who missed out on the free love parts of the sexual revolution by just a few years, I’ve been been fighting the sex positivity battle my entire adult life, in alignment with sex-positive feminists and in opposition to anti-porn activists and sex-negative people who spread myths about “sex addiction.”

Only in the last few months did I become aware that there’s a sex-negative cultural tendency in parts of GenZ — even the secular parts — to vilify sexuality and to disdain normal expressions of sexuality and desire. One of the linguistic markers of this cultural trend, if you didn’t know, is to use the words “lust” and “lustful” as a derogatory, like some 19th-century brimstone preacher. So far I don’t know very much about this sex-negative GenZ cultural drift, so I haven’t mentioned it previously on ErosBlog. Thus I am sharing this video as a placeholder, to indicate that I’m aware, and will no doubt have more to say in future:

Barrett says:

I have to be honest, I thought people were kind of making up that there was an increase in using the word lustful in a derogatory way.

I just never saw somebody do it. I saw a bunch of people reacting to it, but I never actually heard somebody use that. So I took it upon myself to search, and… Oh, no. Oh, no!

That… That has hit a lot of y’all’s vocabulary, hasn’t it? Uh, you are actually being real casual and throwing that word around a lot.

No Nuance November came a little early this year, girls.

Um, lust. Not a bad thing. Full stop.

Not a negative in any way, shape or form. It is perfectly fine, normal, and good to wanna have sex. It is perfectly fine, normal, and good to have sex. It’s perfectly fine, normal, and good to see somebody at a bar, at a party, on a dating app and wanna have sex with them.

Really strap in for this: It’s fine, normal, and good for somebody to see you in one of those situations and wanna have sex with you. Obviously, everybody needs to treat each other with basic dignity and respect and be mindful of your boundaries. You don’t treat another human like a piece of meat just because you wanna have sex with them. You treat them with kindness, but it’s okay that you wanna have sex with them. A sizable portion of you are, like, full adults who can legally smoke, drink, gamble, rent a car. Why the hell are you using the same rhetoric that a 13 year old homeschooler in the Bush era would use? What the hell?

What she said!

Similar Sex Blogging: