BY JOSH COHEN

In print | March 8, 2007

In a review of her book about the advent of our generation’s “hook up culture”, in which she criticizes the idea that sexual “freedom” is sexual liberation, the author Laura Sessions Stepp was quoted as saying: “Really, when you look at it, hookup culture is gravy for guys. So how much are we [feminists] winning?” I’m not going to read the book. I don’t think anything meaningful can be said about what it means to be a part of a generation from anyone outside that generation — especially if that someone suggests this to our generation’s women: “Bake cookies, brownies, muffins. Ask your girlfriends for assistance. Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods.”

But the idea that the manner in which we college students relate to one another just continues the cycle of repression of women and triumph of men is an idea you often hear — and it’s only half true. The freedom to bare all is not really freedom. But the freedom to ogle girls in thongs all day is not any sort of freedom, either. The tyranny of false fulfillment is the thing, and it’s indiscriminate.

This isn’t what I want. Take Playboy, or any of its seedier offspring: Porn today either substitutes for sex or models for it, and porn today isn’t sexy. Take our generation’s models. There is something conspicuously un-sexy about what is sold as sexy. The curves, colors and smiles are uniform and painted on. The commercial idealization of a women’s body has led to the most curious of situations, in which the public exalting of sexuality has made sexuality commonplace, even boring. Playboy’s great achievement was, in fact, to give a little power back to man and woman alike. Hugh Heffner famously said that he wanted couples to read his magazine together, in bed, to share in a woman’s (and soon a man’s) beauty. That sounds like art. Dig into your bachelor uncle’s attic: you’ll find a magazine whose models were imperfect, just stepped out of their clothing and unsure what to do next. The original Playboy was a magazine of allusions, not illusions, and it served as a sort of public inspiration to one’s private life.

Today, porn has all sorts of cruelly contradictory effects, none of which work towards my actual fulfillment. Ubiquitous flesh desacralizes the naked body while simultaneously, continuously, encouraging masturbation (by dint of paralysis in front of one’s computer, if nothing else) more than actual sex. The increasing gap between virtual titillation and real satisfaction has the modern man anxiously turning into himself, paying more and more for a woman who’ll never be there. “Porn addiction” indeed: It’s almost funny.

You reap what you sow. Maybe men have gotten ourselves to the point where the only thing that can satisfy us is a fake woman. I understand the sentiment, I love the irony — and yet, in the end, the argument does more to conserve our lustful lassitude than it does to challenge the system. It’s a mistake to claim that your average college man is empowered by this culture. And it’s an even worse mistake to respond to this by saying, well, men unconsciously perpetrate the system, regardless of how they feel about it.

When the unconscious is used in cultural argument it becomes an easy explanation for anything inexplicable or unpleasant, which achieves the opposite of revelation. So forget what’s going on inside our heads. We’re a generation whose unconscious desire has been appropriated by a profit-based culture, which equates the pursuit of sex with the pursuit of happiness, and which teaches us that our duty to society is to satisfy ourselves.

I remember being younger, clandestinely watching Girls Gone Wild commercials and thinking how triumphant it’ll be when I’m old enough to seize all that sex for myself. I’m old enough now, and I can identify two types of men: The ones angry (but secretly unsurprised) that all that sex isn’t adding up to anything, and the ones able to numb themselves by ordering everything into a program of sex, marriage and money. Either way, our philosophy of sex saps men of their sexual power by making them delusional, desperate, flesh-crazed and love-deprived creatures, the same as it does women.

I mean, isn’t love the thing? (Why is this almost embarrassing to write?) If you reinforce the idea that Girls Gone Wild is man’s clever triumph, you preclude conversation by passing up the opportunity to focus on our greater commonality: in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist ideal is a “universal humanity in which all persons equally realize their potential for self-development”. Freedom, she said, striking down the myth of liberatory masturbation, comes only through the freedom of another.

Gender is a necessary social construct, but it is still ultimately superficial. Keeping the genders divided enables the rhetoric of oppression in that the focus stays on the surface, where change is, of course, an illusion. The rhetorical dichotomization of the sexes provides a sort of relief in delineating the bad guys — and yet us bad guys, for whom it is all purportedly gravy, are similarly enervated and stultified by a culture that has us horny before we even know what sex is. To speak of men as “winning” is to commit the same crime of low expectations against men as men commit against women when they exalt whorishness. Misogyny weighs on our souls the same as it does on yours.

I don’t want to absolve myself of the responsibility for hollering, “Take it off!” I’m only suggesting that if we want to talk about sex we should a) ignore all writers who aren’t having as much sex as we are and b) start by taking a leap of faith in one another, so that I’ll believe you don’t really want to be dressed like that if you believe that what I really meant to say was, “Please, in the name of everything that’s sexy, holy and good, put some clothes on.”

Josh is a sophomore. You can reach him at jcohen2@swarthmore.edu.

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