This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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In midcentury television shows, married couples slept in separate beds across the room lest the story insinuate anything inappropriate for young viewers. Today, all bets are off.
From highly sexualized movies to television shows to books, sex is everywhere. Beyond fiction, the torrid details of real-life moments are exposed in wildly popular podcasts such as “Call Her Daddy,” tell-all memoirs such as the Duke of Sussex’s “Spare,” and even casual social media posts. We’ve gone from unrealistically modest to destigmatizing everything, and though the case has been made against some erotic and pornographic media, here’s why it’s time to make all talk of sex taboo again.
I recently was listening to a top-10 politics podcast when the conversation bizarrely transitioned into intimate details of the host’s sex life. The episode’s topic and the podcast itself had nothing to do with the bedroom or even relationships, but nevertheless, the host went on about private details of his relationship. Needless to say, I was disturbed and a little wary of any future episodes, lest I be further subjected to more unwanted information.
I couldn’t help but wonder: What if I were a parent catching up on news with small children in the car? What if I had been listening in an office? What if I were a teenager trying to keep up with the political cycle? There are a million scenarios where sex is an inappropriate topic, the least of which is that I simply don’t want to hear the details of anyone’s private life.
Certainly, there’s an irony to talking about sex in order to make a case for not talking about it. But there’s also a difference between talking abstractly about the topic and divulging graphic details. When watching news coverage of wars or crimes, for example, we expect horrible statistics and tragedy, but we also expect a level of discretion. We want a warning before seeing any images of casualties or hearing any gruesome details of an attack.
The same is rarely true for sexual content. There’s a baseline assumption that, if you’re consuming modern media, you’ve accepted that nothing is contained to the bedroom anymore. After the sexual revolution, shows such as “Friends” and “Sex and the City” glamorized hookup culture. Whether or not the behavior of ordinary Americans reflected what happened on television, the bedroom door had been cracked open. What was once private became a spectacle.
With the internet, we’ve taken off whatever guardrails remained. Unlike broadcast television, there is no regulating body determining what can hit streaming services (nor should there be). And for social media influencers, when the cost of production is a smartphone, there’s no big-name producer to sign off on every word and ensure that nothing goes too far.
Sex sells, and every producer, marketer, and influencer knows this. The result is that we’ve commodified sex to the point that it’s no longer seen as an emotional betrayal to discuss personal examples of such an intimate act. If we told stories of emotional intimacy, betrayal, and romance the way we discussed sexual encounters, it would reach reality-TV levels of invasive. But sex has become advertised as a purely physical act, championed by hookup culture as such, separate from the emotional weight it once carried. As mere action and movement, it’s no longer an intimate act meant to be shared only between two people, the pinnacle of romantic love.
And yet, as much as we’ve tried to decouple sex from love and emotion, these things are still intertwined. Advertising and messaging cannot overcome fundamental realities, and because we’ve commercialized sex, we’ve also commercialized romance, relationships, and intimacy.
No longer are some moments private and personal, kept special for those involved. Once, some conversations were reserved for a few people, both as a courtesy to those listening and a sign of respect to the interested parties. There were some topics we didn’t share with every passing stranger: relationship drama, family politics, our deepest dreams, and our most cherished moments. It was a matter of propriety and discretion, and also, in some cases, of keeping some memories close to the heart.
There’s absolutely a time and a place for sexual education and advice: pre-marital counseling, a book dedicated to relationship growth, or a steamy sex column for married readers. It’s one thing to find such details in a book about relationships or among married confidants, but that’s a far cry from hearing about sex at every turn. And it’s far from the way real-life sexual encounters are recounted and shared today.
Whether for clicks, for bragging rights, or to titillate an audience, our culture has turned sex into a commodity that is acceptable to blast to a worldwide audience. We’ve taken some of the most exciting, personal, and private moments of our lives and turned them into flippant conversation. We’ve stripped our relationships bare. And whether as disturbed audience members or the oversharing showman, we all pay the price.
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Jordan Jantz is the assistant editor at IW Features as well as a freelance writer, editor, and website designer.
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