Sorry, everyone: The future of sex is total apathy
fusion.net
fusion.net
I'm glad that sex and sexuality are no longer as repressed. I think, though, that the pendulum now may have swung too far toward near cultural obsession and proactive promotion in recent years.
I'll be glad if we settle in a spot where sex is just a thing-- an experience with many variations just as with most of life. Neither censored nor overexposed. No real fuss, no real shock value, no special forbiddenness or "cool" factor. It feels like we're getting closer to that, which seems healthy.
And we are not going to do that any time soon. You're right any experience can be special. But they are saying special treatment, we handle sex differently as a society. And while I think openness and education about sex is great I don't want my kid to walk down the street and see people having intercourse.
I think it's like how we sexualize breasts. Other cultures do not to the extent we do because they are just treated like another part of the body. They are not covered, they are always there. We hide them and show them off to get a glimpse, but for the most part they are censored in most situations in the U.S. That makes them not "just another experience". It drives curiosity.
So the treatment of sex should be similar to other experiences at a more abstract level than at the experiences level.
To go the other way, we can say that even the different instances of various experiences are not equal. e.g. one eating experience is not exactly equal to other eating experience in one's life.
So what they are trying to say and seems like you might have missed is: the way our society treats other experiences, it must also treat the experience of sex and our society should not treat sex in an extremely special way the way we treat the experiences like murders.
Hope it helps.
I doubt people feel uncomfortable or anxious when talking with their parents about eating -- or at least, if they do something is deeply wrong with the parent/offspring relationship. Nobody should feel embarrassed to talk about the bike trip they went on. People shouldn't hide the secateurs under the bed for fear their parents will find out that they want to start gardening.
Thus it can be seen that we treat sex more differently than we do any of the experiences you listed. That does not mean making it less special, or dulling the experience in any way -- rather removing the taboo aspect of it, and allowing people to talk about it freely.
This allows young people to get a better idea of what 'safe sex' is, and makes them more likely to speak up if they have questions or have been assaulted.
The author seems to be upset about a bunch of low-signal articles that claim that young people don't want to have sex anymore. So she writes an even lower signal rant about it.
It also goes against the happiness stuff that has been linked to having more sex.
If there was a point, it's to allow people who already opt to not have sex, to not feel stygmatized by it.
But, I guess, there is another factor too. With easy access to too much and uninterrupted entertainment (TV, internet, whatsapp, snapchat etc) our brains may be getting too tired to bother about sex or our brains may be getting too satisfied to desire sex.