Sex and Screens

Even though I deleted my Twitter account in October, it’s still the source of all discourse. Screenshots and links continue to drift into my life as though I’ve only moved downstream from its ruins. This week, apparently — all because of one tweet — Twitter is hosting its semi-annual “sex in books is basically brain rape” festival. So I thought instead of an essay I’d share this wonderful piece that

Robert Stinner

wrote for the Rumpus about a paragraph in my new novel:

Within this single paragraph, Nathan encapsulates an idea central to his novel: that joyful expressions of queer sexuality, historically subject to enforced secrecy and erasure, should instead be celebrated and commemorated.

It’s such a beautiful close read of one of my favorite paragraphs in the book, which Stinner quotes in its entirety. This might be the first time my prose has been taken this seriously, and it feels exhilarating for Stinner’s focus to be this paragraph in particular.

Given its contrast with the cockroachy “why do I have to read characters having sex” meme (I hesitate to call it a conversation), I also thought I’d reshare a piece I wrote for the Baffler in 2021. While discussing Olivia Laing’s Everybody, I explored our culture’s rapid and intensifying oscillation between radical embodiment and radical disembodiment, and how screens themselves “in many ways resembles the involuntary tortures of prison, especially with respect to sensory deprivation (touch, taste, smell, and often sound), sensory overload (constant unpatterned visual stimuli), and sleep disturbances.” This oscillation, of course, is inevitable in our dis-relation not only from each other, but from our selves:

Anyone who’s spent ninety seconds on Twitter at any point over the last several years will understand just how easily this radical disembodiment overrides or erases the brain’s temptation to contextualize, attend to, or imagine the lives and feelings of others. Nor can we see, hear, or feel how we hurt people; the circuit is muted. They are only images — an imagination that our static avatars, frozen in some photogenic stare or goofy grin, do little to dispel. Wired to spread information (or misinformation), our connectivity is optimized for conflict. To be sensitive to each other, to give each other time and risk walking away “a bit different,” would slow this information down, and its consequent profitability.

I’m thinking of this piece (can you tell I’m proud of it?) because it seems to me that this sense of disembodiment, which relates to misconceptions of “purity,” is entwined in the deeply unhealthy relationship with sexuality that this performance of purity in social media spaces has assumed. As with most distortions on social media, to acknowledge this trauma or disturbance is somehow to celebrate it, to distinguish oneself according to its terms, when in reality this celebration just means spending more time hidden behind a screen — our private sensory deprivation chambers we’ve all been convinced to carry around with us, which just so happen to showcase a nonstop phantasmagoria of advertisements.

Have sex or don’t, read about it or don’t — this isn’t my concern. Human beings are going to fuck no matter what you post, and readers are going to respond, in one form or another, to sex scenes in books (and movies, for that matter). But there is something to question, if not fear, in this serial complaint about how sex is represented in art and entertainment, particularly in a country where half of the federal government is continually trying to outlaw sex education and criminalize any expression of sexuality that isn’t sanctioned by a handful of churches. What’s more, the companies supporting this political movement are the same companies, largely, who manufacture those sensory deprivation devices and the applications that make them dangerous, even if their support of this particular aspect of this movement is incidental. Meta, for example, doesn’t care about your sexuality, but they will help criminalize it if it means fewer regulations and lower taxes. As with most “contrarian” opinions, it doesn’t seem terribly liberating or progressive to go around saying and doing exactly what a corporation wants you to say and do. In fact, one might say that the screen in your pocket has broken your will and rallied you to its cause.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll be back with an essay next week — about cities, gentrification, and how smartphones colonize public space. As ever, support if you can, but no worries if not.