"You don't lose your virginity, you gain empowerment"

Planned Parenthood, Pornhub, and the toxic myth of the self-creating sexual subject

MARY HARRINGTON

In a set styled to resemble a classroom, the presenter delivers a 3-minute lecture on “virginity”. We learn that virginity is “a completely made up concept” created solely to inflict gratuitous shame and stigma. And the only reason it’s a concept at all is because “society” has arbitrarily opted to centre a “narrow” definition of sex, ie “penis in vagina”.

We might retort that “penis in vagina” can claim to be the most important feature of sex because, for existential reasons, it is in fact the most important. Most of us wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for “penis in vagina.”. But no matter. Saying so is against the Cyborg Sex Code: that is, the moral orthodoxy that’s replaced the vanishingly brief “anything goes” 1960s code-less sexual code.

The Cyborg Sex Code now structures the modern orthodox understanding of what sex is, and what it’s for. Under it, any opinions you hold about sex must comply with the following premises:

• Sex is wholly privatised. Your desires emanate solely from you, as expressions of your authentic individuality. Provided the contractual law of private transactions (ie consent) is upheld, society has no standing to intervene in your desires or behaviour

• Sex is simultaneously the most and least important thing. It’s so important that being forced to do (ie if the other breaches contract) it will traumatise you for life. It’s also so unimportant you can do it with complete strangers, and there’s nothing special about doing it for the first time

• There is no such thing as “normal” sex. This follows logically from the first two premises. Sex is only incidentally connected to reproduction, and has no aim or objective except what each individual ascribes to it

All these premises, which form the bedrock of the modern “sex positive” moral orthodoxy, are predicated on the presence of reliable birth control. You can only treat sex as a private matter if there’s no meaningful risk of pregnancy, or if it’s illegal to abort a baby; nor can you teach that sex is unimportant if that risk exists. And it’s only once it’s broadly accepted that sex is sterile by default that we can, rhetorically, collapse the procreative act together with all other potentially erotic acts, as if these were all interchangeable.

Hence “cyborg”, in view of how inseparable this moral system is from the technologies that enable it.

Given its technological substrate, no one should be surprised to find that this Cyborg Sex Code masterclass on “virginity” comes from the original American technosex nonprofit: Planned Parenthood.

In it, every one of the CSC nostra is in evidence. We learn, for example, that virginity is “complete nonsense” because “sex means different things to different people”. You could count as activities that end your “virginity” acts as varied as a first orgasm, or masturbation (she doesn’t specify whether this still counts if it’s solo) or even - I kid you not - anal sex. Sex “is defined by one thing: you!”

This hugely important but also completely casual and everyday activity is also, as per the code, wholly privatised. You don’t “lose” your virginity in having sex, you gain private goods, such as “self-insight”, “pleasure”, and “empowerment”. And no one else has any right to define or set limits on what you do. “That’s the beauty of your sexual journey. You’re in charge, and you can figure it out on your own terms.”

But these cheery lines elide a crucial question: how do any of us know what to desire? This becomes especially urgent if we’re also unmooring sex from reproduction. If sex is private, norm-free, and wholly individual, and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with babies, we could in theory extend the definition of “sex” to pretty much anything. How, then, do we work out what floats our boat?

The Planned Parenthood schtick is premised on the idea - never examined - that desires emerge fully-formed from individuals’ authentic inner selves. But this isn’t actually how desire works. On the contrary, as the philosopher Rene Girard argues, our desires are to a significant extent shaped by watching what others desire.

And this extends even to the ways mimesis shapes our most basic reproductive (which is to say sexual) urges. The fumbling process of teenage sexual awakening has probably always come wtih plenty of pitfalls. But if you’re watching those around you for clues as to what “normal” looks like, the templates available to you for mimesis will be relatively limited and relatively grounded. What happens, though, when your real-world templates are falling away, because family sizes are shrinking, kin networks are scattered and fragmented, and young people spend ever less face-to-face time with friends? And what if, on top of that, everyone is telling you there’s no such thing as normal?

In this barren and denatured libidinal terrain, the main mimetic vector for many adolescent sexual desires is now pornography. Children are now on average exposed to porn for the first time by the age of 13, and some much younger. It’s shaping young people’s sexual scripts: one British study found that 44% of boys between the ages of 11 and 16 who viewed pornography said that porn gave the ideas about sex acts they wanted to try. A 2021 study found that 24.5% of young American adults cited pornography as the most helpful resource for learning how to have sex. Evidence is mounting, too, that porn consumption is driving growing rates of child-on-child sexual abuse.

Given this, we should ask ourselves: is it really the case that every adolescent is, as the Planned Parenthood presenter promises, “in charge” of their “sexual journey” and able to “figure it out on your own terms”? To the extent that desire is mimetic: no, it is not. And yet the Cyborg Sex Code insists there’s no such thing as normal sexuality, that all desires are valid, and it’s all just up to each individual. In doing so, it hands the whole responsibility for determining sexual preferences, setting expectations, and enforcing boundaries to inexperienced young people awash in a sea of teenage hormones and garnering their sexual scripts from Pornhub.

It’s hard to think of anything more inimical to healthy sexual maturation. Giving children nothing more robust to manage the mimetic power of pornography than the thin, anti-normative individualism of the Cyborg Sex Code is at best wildly irresponsible, if not actively evil. Those who endorse this are a public menace.

Source: Reactionary Feminist