Fed up with the sex talk

There is one element that the two sides in the on-going debate between abstinence advocates and hook-up culture propounders and defenders seem to share: they all sound self-righteously prescriptive when they talk about their lifestyle choice. Today in Salon, assistant editor Tracy Clark-Flory writes about her objections to the abstinence movement by trumpeting her own choices:

I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships.

[The fact that she's 24 and an assistant editor in Salon makes me feel old and washed up. Good for her.]

She then launches into her relationship and sex history, which makes fine conversation with a friend but seems almost like bragging in an online magazine article. She doesn’t really acknowledge the reasonable defenses of other approaches to getting sexually involved with people, like the view of one of the article’s response letters:

Most of the world religions attempt to teach restraint, not chastity. For the Jews, sexual restraint is incumbent on both genders, especially men. For other religions, modesty and restraint come in all shapes and sizes. What is universal, however, is the noble idea that we’re not supposed to act like mindless animals.

Yet, I discern a fundamental commonality from the casual sex loyalists and the abstinence loyalists which is that they are all looking for devoted companionship, a mature relationship, perhaps the love of their life. Also, they both also talk a hell of a lot about sex, whether it be how much they have or how they aren’t having it.

Whenever I read these articles–yes, maybe I should stop–I always come away resenting that some over-confident 20-something is shoving their views in my face, be they “you’re a prude if you have problems with casual sex,” or “you don’t respect yourself if you are having sex with someone you don’t love or aren’t married to.”

Particularly, with Clark-Flory’s article, I resented her insistence that her approach of throwing herself into relationships, hookups first, is a way of “vetting” her future companion is silly. There are plenty of people whose approach is to only get involved with someone who she is very much into and find their future lover or husband that way. I don’t believe that finding someone you love and love spending time with is quite the same as test driving til you find your perfect car. Still, I think the thing that can be said in favor of Clark-Flory’s approach is that it often reveals what you don’t want in a relationship, which is useful too. Most of all, approaches differ.

It would be ideal if women would stop turning on each other in these fruitless fights that pit “prude” versus “slut,” and, in the spirit of positive feminism channel the vituperation into more on tangible problems in which we all have an interest: equal pay in the workplace, friendlier workplace policies toward women who are pregnant, more help for daycare, equal parenting responsibilities between husband and wife (if that is what the couple wants), and so on.

And in the meantime, as the saying from the ’90s about abortion went, could we try to keep public disclosures about one’s sex life “legal, safe, and rare?”