Where Is Our Paradise of Guilt-Free Sex?

Half a century after the sexual revolution, we still haven’t reconciled what we should want with what we do want.

- By Helen Lewis

Tracy Clark-Flory’s memoir, Want Me, is subtitled A Sex Writer’s Journey Into the Heart of Desire, and it begins with an arresting anecdote: Two male porn actors on a set in Los Angeles are complaining to her about “girls these days.” One actor is called Tommy Gunn, because where would pornography be without puns? The other uses his birth name, Charles Dera. Both agree that their love lives have suffered because too many women watch their films and demand a live-action replay, expecting to be choked, gagged, and slapped around. But who wants to take their work home with them? “It’s, like, not even my cup of tea,” Dera tells Clark-Flory, who covered the sex beat for Salon and is now a senior writer at Jezebel. “I want to go to dinner and have a fucking nice meal and take it from there. Where the ladies at anymore?”

The scene is irresistibly bathetic, in the vein of Tarantino hit men bitching about junk food, but it’s also revealing. For many people under 40, the tropes of internet porn have saturated our lives and colored our expectations of sex. For “YouPorn natives”—the 20-somethings for whom abundant free porn has always existed, on smartphones as well as computers— the effect is even more extreme. Their first glimpse of sexual activity was probably not the descriptions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the hippie illustrations in The Joy of Sex, or (as it was for Clark-Flory) the glamorous Jenna Jameson adult movies of the ’90s, but the rough, dirty, extreme porn of the free internet. Some of them no doubt saw a digital gang bang before having their first real-life kiss.