Sex during lockdown: are we witnessing a cybersexual revolution?
It’s with an almost nascent nostalgia that I recall the coining of the Gen Z “sexual recession”: a patronizing concern that our youngest generation would be rendered psychosexually stunted, unable or unwilling to fornicate due to over-exposure to smartphones, social media and porn.
To an extent, the stats affirmed this; between 1991 and 2017, the number of high school students having sex dropped from 54% to 40%. But in the nick of time, a worldwide pandemic arrived, and a budding sexual renaissance emerged in its wake.
Flinging the Gregorian calendar into irrelevance, humanity will be bisected into pre-Covid-19 and post-Covid-19, and although many will ruminate on how we have changed, one thing is indisputable: the rose-colored epoch before the coronavirus bitterly shamed the sending of nudes. They were perceived as gauche, even pathetic. In the lockdown era, however, thirst traps and nudes are not only making a glorious, unrepentant comeback, but are now a form of emboldened agency in Gen Z’s blossoming sexual liberation.
Sexual revolutions are often birthed by a narrowing of choice. Confined by the puritan values of 1950s America, the free love movement prevailed as a counterculture in which sexuality was celebrated instead of admonished. Its belief system was salaciously novel; the normalization of casual sex, porn and masturbation (all table stakes today) was bemoaned as a doomsday harbinger by the “boomers” of the time. They feared the death of convention: conventional love, conventional relationships, conventional sex.
Ironically, a deeper symmetry links the sexual revolutions of then and now, and that is pandemic. Free love met its abrupt end at the hands of Aids, but times, and the tools at our disposal, have changed. While one pandemic cut off a sexual revolution, another pandemic is galvanizing a new one.
The confines that spurred free love were morals, but the confines that mobilize the Gen Z sexual revolution are walls. Stratified by distance, Gen Z is similarly tasked with reinventing what sex looks like, in a quarantined world where physical sex is frequently impossible. As free love shattered the conventions of its time, Gen Z’s sexual renaissance is doing the same for organic sexual connection.
Is sending nudes foreplay? Are thirst traps posted to Instagram “close friends” lists modern courtship? Is mutual masturbation via Zoom sex? What separates the virtual from the real? Why is sexuality by video-screen considered lonely or isolating? If anything, we are seeing humanity at its most tender, reaching earnestly through the virtual void to “actualize” contactless sex. Filled with unfiltered longing posted with abandon, Gen Z’s sexual revolution is one that has been reconfigured and reborn for the digital age.
So, how exactly is this so fruitful for a groundbreaking sexual revolution? No one knows when lockdown will lift; we may be social distancing on and off for the next two years. Some commentators predict the “normal” we knew will never return. The mantra of the day is “nudes sent during the quarantine don’t count”. Yes, Gen Z’s sexual revolution is partly a response to the pure boredom of lockdown; what else are we supposed to do with our days besides masturbate excessively and send a flurry of nudes? But it’s more than ennui or physical stratification. It’s a seizing of finiteness.
Quarantine not only encourages, but forces, the prosperity of sexual exploration; of experimenting with nudes, thirst traps, camming and sexting for debauchery, mostly without IRL repercussions. Unlike regular life, which would encase sexual choices with all the judgmental trappings of “forever” – what will the other person think of me? What will this be like in person? – a pandemic provides a getout-of-jail-free card. In the absence of consequence, there is the abundance of freedom.
If Gen Z are more sexually reticent than prior generations, a pandemic finally caters to Gen Z coming into their sexuality on their own terms – with