On Gen Z Women's "Celibacy Era"
The mainstreaming of (pseudo)kink has taken the sincerity out of consent and intimacy for many young women
I remember my last sexual encounter like it were branded onto my temporal lobe. This happened four years ago so that’s impressive! My memory palace has conveniently compartmentalised this encounter into “Parts 1 and 2” since the day it happened, and, for dramatic effect, everything is in far more vivid a colour palette. If I’d had my way and God permitted us all to walk around with soundtracks sentimentally playing in the passage of time, the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony would suffice these defining hours of my young life.
“Part 1”
I have to give it to him: My ex’s phallus was a work of art. It was something I liked to observe with intrigue and naïve curiosity. I was like a schoolgirl looking at a nude for the first time at an art gallery, wide-eyed, giggling at times but also doting. It was a little secret that I was exceptionally privy to and proud of. Although I was in my early twenties, I’d never had an urge to watch pornography. If I’d known that it was virtually littered before me on the internet, perhaps I would have scrolled and watched for hours. But, back then, I was a romantic: If I closed my eyes tightly enough such things just couldn’t exist, surely! Hardly anything that occurred in the boudoir between my ex and I caused me pleasure or excitement. I say “hardly anything” because two things did: Committing to memory my ex’s rather da Vincian features and being held afterwards.
I saw it as an unspoken negotiation we had: He could re-enact his kinky search history on me with ropes, butt plugs, and (yes) his gym equipment. This was on condition that, afterwards, I could cradle him, have him cradle me, trace every inch of his face and neck with my fingers and have him relax into my personal small talk. He was starved of fantasy; I was starved of touch. Some days I’d walk around in pain, but I didn’t care. I leaned into it. “No pain, no gain” as my maths teacher would say. This was something to be proud of – I was earning my rewards. All I’d been hearing since childhood was that sex is transactional. Now, years later, this reasoning causes me more grief and self-degradation than I could have imagined.
Yet the one thing I wholeheartedly dreaded about our negotiation was one of its most uncontroversial, “vanilla” clauses: the renowned blow job. The dread lay in the fact that in these instances I couldn’t just let him re-enact on and in me at will. Suddenly I was the actor and he the subject whose will was in my hands (or, rather, mouth). And this proved a very difficult feat when it came to two people trying to gauge two opposing fantasies from the messiness that is modern sexual relations. He wanted the outlandish and I wanted something lovingly serious. His kinks didn’t make easy bedfellows with my attempts to extract some underlying philosophy of two sweaty bodies ascending toward The Good!
“Part 1” would be more accurately labelled “Emotionally Stunted Man Gets Frustrated At Docile Woman Who Keeps Nipping His Member During Fellatio.” As I’m sure you can tell, we were a match made in Eden. If I were a psychologist, my armchair theorising would go something like this: Man’s abysmal paternal bond and disdain for weakness causes him much sorrow and anger. He seeks an outlet through porn consumption, fantasies of intellectual grandeur, and being a gym rat. Anejaculation is his true nemesis when fantasy isn’t realised through sex; but, to conquer it, Man needs to stare into the abyss and let it stare right back at him with a megaphone. The futile escape into performing lewd acts on a girlfriend he’s secretly repulsed by will come back to haunt him with every failed blow job. And so it did during this last sexual encounter.
For understandable reasons, most young men look to porn not just for relief but also for insight. My ex was no different. When things abruptly ended between us, I took a deep breath and plunged into the world of online adult content. Everything clicked into place: His fixation with my rear, the bondage, the roughness of it all, the implication that an explosive orgasm is guaranteed if only you just thrust harder and yank tighter. In porn, a woman has consented. Her genuine pleasure after the fact appears to be of a secondary concern or simply assumed. Watching porn was like witnessing my sex life in 4K. Yet what also became clear was that my ex wasn’t getting the guaranteed orgasmic experience his search history had promised him. There was truly something amiss here, and neither of us had known how to communicate honestly with each other about it.
By the time “Part 1” transpired I already had a hunch that I was on trial. If I couldn’t get my ex to ejaculate for the first time in our nigh year long relationship, he was going to leave me. I could feel it in my girlish heart, and I couldn’t let that happen. He was the only person who held me, and I wasn’t prepared to let that go after months replenishing a deep-rooted touch deficit! I began recalling the Cosmopolitan articles, Reddit posts, and Quora answers I’d consulted as I approached da Vinci’s finest work, mouth wide open. There’s something of the dark comedic arts in a woman on all fours furiously bobbing her head up and down over a man’s lap as he sighs with the most melodramatic impatience! “Part 1” lasted about twenty minutes before my ex yanked himself from my mouth. During this interlude he went to what would become known as the “disgusting public toilet” in my shared accommodation.
“Part 2”
“Consent is complicated.”1 I’ve been grappling with this since watching Lena Dunham’s hit series Girls as well as the content of a controversial (though brilliant) internet personality called mrgirl. Both these sources were the first to perfectly put into words the horror that was “Part 2”, both for me and, I’m sure, for my ex in his own way. There’s a final scene in episode 9 of Girl’s second season that had such parallels to my own encounter that I instantly burst into tears when watching it. Finally, somebody got it; and of all people that “somebody” was Lena bloody Dunham! A Ms. Magazine article on the scene summarises it best:
In the final scene of the episode, the character Adam (Adam Driver) orders his new girlfriend Natalia (Shiri Appleby) to crawl to his bedroom on her hands and knees, then roughly picks her up and throws her onto the bed. Natalia is clearly distressed by Adam’s behavior; at one point she explicitly says the word “no,” but Adam simply tells her to relax and she reluctantly submits. After sexually penetrating her from behind, Adam flips her over and ejaculates on her chest while she’s telling him not to mess up her dress. After it’s over, Natalia quickly covers herself and seems near tears when she tells Adam “I, like, really didn’t like that.”2
My ex came back into my room. He was annoyed that he’d had to use a “disgusting public toilet” and wanted to go home. To his mom’s place. I didn’t want him to go; I wanted to be held and I wanted to talk about what had happened as well as – it makes me cringe to admit it now – what I could do to improve things. The way he looked at me and said “disgusting public toilet” felt like an indirect way of expressing his growing repulsion for me. I was the “disgusting public toilet” that he was obligated to use in pursuit of his fantasies being realised. At this point in time, kink was the scenic route to my whims of affection and his “remasculation”. Unlike Natalia, I was more confused than distressed at the roughness of our sudden intimacy. It’s a horrible feeling to experience something as intense, intimate, and close as sex when you can feel how much hate someone has for you. I hated being contorted, bound, and slapped. I hated when I kept trying to face him in an effort to hug him only to have my head held into my pillow as he fucked me from behind.
But I never said “NO.”
I didn’t even get to say “I, like, really didn’t like that” before my ex scooped up his things and hurried out of the room barefoot. He vanished without a word only to emerge months later before disappearing for good. I can’t help but wonder if I dreamt our entire relationship. Not getting closure makes for a goldmine of speculating and monologuing. Although it’s been years and we are one another’s personae non gratae, I cannot help but wish I had been less yielding to my own longings for love from somebody clearly ill-equipped to understand them. This isn’t especially empowering of me to say but it is something that, I’m sure, many (young) women can relate to: That not knowing what to make of a horrible, violent sexual encounter with a loved one who perceives aggressive sex and/or kink as norm. I felt angry and used because my consideration of his feelings were not reciprocated in ways that had previously been subconsciously negotiated. You hope that words won’t fail you at such junctures, but they always do when everything preceding them has been at a subconscious level!
When sex becomes about the other person and isn’t all about you, there ought to be no room for confusion or complication. The theory is pretty straightforward, but the application is the question we’ve been arguing about for decades now. “Consent is complicated” when it comes to the dystopian direction our atomised interactions with one another are, at times, going. Young people’s preference for virtual interactions over real ones is also a worrying trend. Right now, sex horrifies me because for a lot of us (women and men) it isn’t a romantic fantasy nor a kinky extravaganza. It becomes a painful and harrowing experience that a few texts can’t express nor resolve in the aftermath. Sex is serious and ought to be treated as such. It isn’t entertainment as porn would have many a customer believe, and I think that’s where so many of us are going wrong in our sexually liberated era.
With the right person, I believe sex can be an elixir, especially for women. With the wrong person, it can be soul-crushing. I think we need to have an honest conversation about this as men and women; all of whom are trying our best but aren’t — myself included! — doing a very good job at it.
Consent is complicated by Max Karson (https://www.bitchute.com/video/1noiivrmgIew/)
Did “Girls” Romanticize a Rapist? by Angi Becker Stevens. Ms. Magazine. Published: March 20th, 2013. (https://msmagazine.com/2013/03/20/did-girls-romanticize-a-rapist/)
Keep writing, don’t you dare stop! 💙
A very interesting read!