Why, in an era of total oversaturation and overstimulation, sex has never felt emptier
Earlier this summer, the words ‘BBC broadcaster’ flooded social media timelines and sparked speculation all over the UK. As with many British scandals, behind the viral scuttlebutt was The Sun. The tabloid headline on the 6 July – ‘Top BBC Star in Sex Pics Probe’ – was almost retro in its accusation. One could almost hear the delight of the right-wing press at the juicy prospect of sexual misdemeanour and celebrity wrongdoing. Despite The Sun’s commitment to the story, which it maintained in the face of active refutation by its apparent victim, the scandal never really gained traction. In lieu of actual photographic evidence, the headline figures an indexical set of supposedly defamatory or immoral images (‘SEX PICS’) that readers were asked to imaginatively conjure as a stand-in for the work of the truth, or due process. The machinations of this attempt to revivify sex as scandal were almost comically visible. One person paying another for illicit photographs? Hardly the stuff of front pages these days. Unlike other infamous sex scandals – Lewinsky and Clinton, Kim, Paris, Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwarzenegger – this one fizzled out in a matter of days, raising more urgent questions of journalistic due process than of sexual conduct.
Very little in our current cultural or popular milieu seems deviant these days: porn is available at the click of a finger, Timothée Chalamet wears a sequined harness on the red carpet and TikTok influencers blithely rate and trial sex toys as calmly as they do mascara. This digital screenscape has a kind of thrilling amorality – the algorithm simply doesn’t care about anything other than eyeballs, attention, clicks. Those discussions of sex on TikTok are seemingly frank, but the nature of the platform always threatens to undermine this candour. As each video is immediately replaced by the next, the specificity of sexual experience is lost in the deluge. Sexual content is just like any other kind. It’s been almost 30 years since Michel Foucault claimed that ‘sex is boring’, but in 2023, his assessment seems more apt than ever: If sex scandals can’t even get it up anymore, is sex played out?
Sex has never been an autonomous realm; it’s always been implicated in hierarchies of power, property and propriety. That is nothing new. Yet, in a world of dick pics and nudes, are we now inured to the exchange of sexual images? While our timelines show us thirst traps, adverts for sex toys and screenshots of all the worst things on dating apps, these images are interspersed with live footage of military coups, wildfires, terrorist attacks and invasions. In the 1980s, French media theorist Jean Baudrillard referred to the ‘diabolical seduction’ of images. Now, when we live in a digital culture in which the ceaseless flow of images is impossible to stem, seduction has turned to stupefaction. Is this new indifference a form of sexual freedom or have we stripped sex of its erotic charge? It seems that we are caught in an image-obsessed culture defined by salacious tales of sexual misconduct and impropriety, in the context of a world where porn is easier to access than ever before.
Between a prurient, conspiratorial morality and the banal ubiquity of porn, people still want a space to understand their own sexual lives, and how to live them under rapidly deteriorating economic and political conditions. We still want to talk about sex. From September 2022 to April 2023, we ran ‘Up Close’, a six-part reading group on sex and desire at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. To our surprise, each session sold out almost immediately. People are hungry for a space – offline, curated, intellectual but not necessarily academic – to understand how our intimate sexual lives connect to this wider image-saturated sexual and digital culture. People seemed keen to find that sweet spot between the theoretical and the personal, between the library and the group chat. Each month, we set a theme and some relevant examples – essays, podcasts, television shows and so on – that we used to ground the discussion. We covered heterosexuality (and whether it deserves its bad reputation); sex, technology and money; couples therapy (and how it feels to witness a session, via Esther Perel’s podcast or the television series with therapist Orna Guralnik); fantasy worlds; sex, affairs (and whether they can be an avenue for self-realisation as well as deception); fathers. People were candid rather than confessional, sharing stories of how a parent’s affair shaped their childhood, how online dating only sharpens their loneliness, how their desire always leads them back into the same emotional traps. Some people came with partners in tow, hoping that a public conversation about couple’s therapy or polyamory might stand in for, or precipitate, the experience itself.
And yet it was landlords that we discussed most regularly, mortgages more than dildos: in London, it seemed our participants were more concerned about how the rental crisis, the pandemic, authoritarianism, sexual violence and domestic labour were fundamentally shaping our intimate lives. As such, an unbridled politics of sexual liberation seemed a rather distant prospect. When we were able to break out of these dismal circumstances, it was through poetics – through language, character, narrative: in the podcast Love and Radio, especially an episode called ‘The Boys Will Work It Out’ (where Lord of the Rings fan fiction offered a route to sexual healing); in the poems of Sharon Olds; in television series like The White Lotus (2021–) and Succession (2018–23). It was in cultural production that addressed sexual violence that we found the most reparative and generous discussion. It was in the darkest corners that we found our ability to see sex most clearly for what it is: equivocal, expansive and enduring. In the poem, ‘Sunday Night’ (2002), Olds writes:
my father would put his hand up a waitress’s
skirt if he could – hand, wrist,
forearm.
As a group, people discussed the poem with an uncompromising clarity, considering what insidious forms of violence look like, what it might mean, in the case of the persona in the poem, to feel the generational inheritance of quiet sexual violence and to ‘work off’ her father’s ‘sins’. Participants spoke of the ambivalent penumbra of sexual harassment and #MeToo, and then about our bewildering attachments to those who wrong us. Ultimately, we realised that it is in spaces of fantasy – in poems as in fan fiction – that we can find some other possibility for a future sexual politics that is hopeful, if not necessarily utopian. There was a desire to withhold judgement, to see others as complex and messy and imperfect – and to accept that we want what is sometimes bad for us.
Sex, in public and private, is everywhere, yet it has never felt emptier. The unabating parade of decontextualised sexual images cannot tell us why we want what we want. The constant cycles of public sexual misconduct and cancellation cannot explain the ubiquity of sexual violence nor our attachment to those who hurt or betray us. Our collective oversaturation – whether salacious or staid – seems to be a surrogate for a more complicated engagement with sex. Despite the space it occupies in our lives and timelines, sex-as-content feels insufficient, and obfuscates the material, the forbidden, the ambivalent – the things that actually matter. As sex scandals recede from their ability to organise the mainstream, perhaps we can take advantage of this new space of possibility and turn our minds to sexual poetics, investing in the quieter languages of longing, ambivalence and imperfection.
