Sorry (again) for the long silence around here. I am writing a weekly blog for my church which you can find here. This post just did not have much of a place there, but I felt like I needed to share it anyway. So, it goes here.
I was pointed to this post by one of my favorite liberal bloggers, Andrew Sullivan. He posted it as what he imagined a laudable testament to my generation. I must say I disagree. This was a post written by a man named Ray Downs, criticizing some new television show for having the temerity to represent uncommitted, hookup sex as problematic and awkward. Downs disagrees thus:
I am concerned that Hollywood’s depiction of sex is going from unrealistic romance and passion to exaggerated awkwardness. And this can have a similar, if not more damaging effect on the image of sex. While the over-romanticized sex of Hollywood’s past probably gave many young people unreasonable expectations of what to expect, this new “sex is awkward” theme that they’re projecting seems just as disingenuous. Just because sex might have been awkward for a few people who have been lucky enough to pen their own TV series, does that mean we should be marked as a sexually awkward generation?
Look, I have a lot of problems with my generation: we’re selfish, pretentious, and superficial. But one thing I like about us is that we’re the coolest sexual generation there has ever been in quite a while.
Think about it: interracial sex is totally cool, homosexual sex hasn’t been as publicly accepted since probably Greek times, and premarital sex is pretty much obligatory. All the boundaries that were set in stone merely a few decades ago are gone and we’re a lot freer than we were. And it’s my belief that we’re better at sex — not more awkward. How do I know we’re better at it? Because there are cool sex toy stores like Babeland that have helped make it acceptable and even praiseworthy to make sex better for you and your partner with the help of fun-colored inanimate objects. That’s progress!
Here is the thing that got me in this post, which is an otherwise unspectacular defense of a sexual milieu which seems to be churning up an entire generation: Downs wants to praise our generation for our freewheeling sexual ethic, but he also criticizes us for our selfishness, our pretension, and our superficiality. Perhaps it does not occur to Mr. Downs that perhaps those things are inextricably linked. In other words, perhaps part of why our generation is so selfish, pretentious, and superficial is precisely because, or at least of a piece with our progressive sexual ethic.
As it is, Downs seems to advocate some sort of Platonic body/soul divide so that whatever we do with our bodies does not touch our immaterial souls. If only it were so simple.
