I don’t remember when I first started noticing that people I knew out in the world had lost their sense of erotic privacy, but I do remember the day it struck me as a phenomenon that had escaped my timeline and entered my real, fleshy life. It was last year, when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, who, for the record, is five years younger than me (I’m 31). I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified.
“They had no idea you felt something sexual about them,” she said. “What if they found out? Lowkey, I hate to say this but: you took advantage of them.” I was shocked. I tried to explain — and it felt extremely absurd to explain — that this had happened in my body and in my thoughts, which were private to me and which nobody had the right to know about. But they did have the right, my friend argued. She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them. Offended at having been accused — in my view, in extremely bad faith — of being some kind of peep-show creep, I tried to argue that I’d simply responded in a physical way to an unexpected, direct, and involuntary stimulus. Back and forth, back and forth, we fought like this for a while. In fact, it ended the friendship.
There were other conversations, too, that suggested to me that conceptions of love and sex have changed fundamentally among people I know. Too many of my friends and acquaintances — of varying degrees of “onlineness,” from veteran discourse observers to casual browsers — seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire.
Hence, there was the friend who justified her predilection for being praised in bed as a “kink” inherited through the “trauma” of her father always harping on her because of her grades. There was the friend who felt entitled to posting screenshots of intimate conversations on Twitter after a messy breakup so that she could get a ruling on “who was the crazy one.” Then there was the friend who bitterly described a man he was dating as a “fuckboy” because he stood him up, claiming that their having enjoyed sex together beforehand was “emotionally manipulative.” When I dug a bit deeper, it turned out the man in question had just gotten out of a seven-year relationship and realized he wasn’t ready to be sexually intimate, and while he was rude to stand my friend up, it shocked me how quick my friend was to categorize his rightfully hurt feelings as something pathological or sinister in the other person, and that he did this in order to preemptively shield himself from being cast as the villain in what was a multi-party experience. This last friend I asked: “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.”
I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent. It is quite easy to dismiss these “discourse wars” as a “puritanism” afflicting the young, a reactionary current to be solved with a different, corrective discourse of pro-sex liberation, distributed via those same channels. If only it were so! To me, the reality goes deeper and is bleaker.
The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism. This was especially true after the prominence of organized campaigns such as #MeToo. #MeToo was smeared by liberals and conservatives alike (united, as they always are, in misogyny) as being inherently punitive in nature, meant to punish men who’d fallen into a rough patch of bad behavior, or who, perhaps, might not have done anything at all (the falsely accused or the misinterpreted man became the real victim, in this view). #MeToo did make use of the call-out — the story shared in a spreadsheet anonymously or in a signed op-ed — but the call-outs had a purpose: to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions. Underlying this was a discursive practice and a form of solidarity building in which people believed that sharing their stories of trauma en masse could bring about structural change. As someone who participated myself, I too believed in this theory and saw it as necessary, cathartic, and political, and far from vigilante justice.
But the pushback against #MeToo reveals a certain peril to storytelling as politics, not only in the retraumatization evident in the practice of revealing one’s most intimate harms before an infinite online audience, which could always include those listening in bad faith. But also, a discursive market opened up in which trauma became a kind of currency of authenticity, resulting in a doubled exploitation. This idea, while not very nice, lingers in the use of harm as an authoritative form of rhetorical defense. The problem here is not what is said, but how it is used. A friction has since emerged between an awareness of weaponization of harm and emotion and the continued need to express oneself as vulnerably as possible in order to come off as sincere. This friction is unresolved.
The organized goals of the #MeToo movement are missing from the new puritanism. I think that the prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex. Punishing strangers for their perceived perversion is a form of compensation for a process that is already completed: the erosion of erotic and emotional privacy through internet-driven surveillance practices, practices we have since turned inward on ourselves. In short, we have become our own panopticons.
The prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex.
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