Today at The Atlantic, TNC’s Emily Esfahani Smith has a new article up titled “Is Sex Still Sexy?” commenting on the Bowdoin College sex education play Speak About It. The play, according to its official website, is “a performance-based presentation about consent, boundaries and healthy relationships” that “captures what healthy sex can and should look like.” But in a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences, Emily explains how Speak About It, though perhaps well meaning, ultimately undermines the healthy sexual culture it is trying to encourage. “Rather than promoting healthy sexuality,” Emily writes, “sexual exhibitionism is killing the eroticism that has traditionally been the essence of sex.”
Readers of The New Criterion will be familiar with mischievous goings-on at Bowdoin from Roger Kimball’s May installment of Notes & Comments, which highlighted the distressing findings of National Association of Scholars’ report What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students, but Emily looks specifically at Speak About It and considers what it says about contemporary culture. Drawing on the philosophical works of Allan Bloom and Camille Paglia, the poetry of Rumi, and HBO’s popular series Girls, Emily makes a wide-ranging case that the distinction between sex and eros has been lost:
Eros, in fact, is everything that Speak About It and the hookup culture are not. Casual sex, readily available sex, publicized sex, sloppy drunk sex, sex for the sake of self-gratification and self-discovery—this is not eros. “Sex-on-tap,” Nehring writes in A Vindication of Love, “attenuates rather than inflames passion. It is for this reason that the relentless emphasis on sexual climax that distinguishes our day from most others in historical memory has a largely depleting effect on the life of the emotions… The natural distances between people have been diminished so radically as to make romance—which depends on the retention of other-ness, tensions, and reserve—impossible.”
If we want sex to be sexy again, perhaps we should speak less about it.
Be sure to check out the full piece here.