I’m a bit late responding to Erica Jong’s rather controversial opinion piece in the New York Times the weekend before last. If you haven’t already read it, Jong basically argues that the younger generation (by which she mostly means women in their thirties) have “given up” on sex, trading in its complexities for the simple pleasures of marriage (simple? huh?), motherhood (double huh?) and the internet.

Jong isn’t the first person to make these claims. As I’ve written about here before, the New York Observer’s Nate Freeman made similar observations after no one got any action at a couple of Manhattan parties he attended (millennials are too narcissistic and Twitter obsessed to pursue sex, apparently). Slate’s Jessica Grose wondered if there was a backlash against sex positivity and casual sex because Lena Chen got a live in boyfriend (okay, I simplify!) and ran a conference critiquing popular perceptions of virginity.

These articles rely on a number of assumptions. Some of which, I would argue, are not all that different to the other type of commentary we often see about young people and sex. That is: “Oh my god! kids today are getting it on more than they ever have before, and they are ruining their chastity and ability to form lasting relationships in the process!” (See here for but one recent example).

Both types of articles assume that the norm for young people is to have a lot of sex with a lot of different people, which as I’ve written over and over again, and will be writing about in more detail in a forthcoming Sunday Life feature (it’s about number 6 in the pipeline at the moment, though, so you probably won’t see it for a while), simply isn’t the case - even amongst beautiful, confident, partying-since-they-were-14 types.

They also assume that this alleged outbreak of carnal activity is a matter of freedom. In the case of social conservatives, it’s about “too much” freedom, or freedom gone amok. For some on the left, it’s about a sense that if sex has historically been repressed, having lots of it must be an act of resistance.

In Jong’s era, this made sense. If you grow up being told that sex is dirty, that premarital sex makes you a “slut”, that having sex with people of the same gender makes you a “freak”, then it’s no great leap that you would be pissed off about that. And in response to that climate, becoming sexually active - and doing it on your own terms - might feel like a juicy, sensual freedom. (Then again, it might also feel like it did for the characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.) 

Our own era is more complex. Slut shaming may be alive and well, but we also live an era in which sex is almost, I would argue, compulsory. In which if you’re not having sex, you’re deemed boring, ugly or just plain weird. In which people worry that they’re not having “good sex” unless they’re engaging in carnal acrobatics six times a week.

Look - done right, sex is fantastic. (By “done right”, I mean with a healthy degree of self-sexual knowledge and/or with someone who is willing to put in the effort to make it good. And no medical issues that make it difficult or painful for you.) As physical pleasures go, it’s definitely high up there.

But just because sex is pleasurable doesn’t mean it should form the crux of our freedom or identities. And just because Jong’s daughter is not as invested in pursuing sexual freedom as her mother was doesn’t mean she is repressed.

Sometimes not getting laid does signify some kind of internal repression, sure. Other times, it just means you’ve got other things on your mind or there’s no one around you want to have sex with. Sometimes hooking up is about pleasure, sometimes it’s a thumbed nose to the establishment, and sometimes it’s just an awkward performance of what we’re told is “freedom”.

As (the very sex positive) Rachel Rabbit White said to me over lunch last week: there is a difference between sex positivity and sexual hedonism.

Related: Kids today, they don’t know how slutty they are!

Elsewhere: The Author of Fear of Flying Detects a Backlash Against Sex (New York Times) 
Younger Generation Totally Over Sex, Proclaims Someone In Older Generation (Jezebel)
No, Erica Jong, Sex Is Not Passe (The Nation)