We all know millennials kill things, from hotels to napkins to…American cheese? But now, we’re ruining something else, something many never thought could be ruined: sex.
In 2005, when I was sixteen, I noticed that sexual mores appeared to be getting looser and looser, with seemingly no end in sight. This had at least something to do with the fact that I attended a school which, after describing it to my subscribers, was dubbed a “a hornier Gossip Girl.”
My feminist baby boomer mom and I had a very open dialogue about sex, and I couldn’t help but notice that stories of her teen dating life seemed much more restrained, even in the free love era of the 1970s. She told me that when she was in high school, boys and girls typically dated for a while before having sex, even if they weren’t saving sex for marriage. At my high school, however, the standard was that girls started relationships by being “friends with benefits,” and to expect anything more was the behavior of a “stage-five clinger.” Strangely, this expectation did not seem unique to cool or popular boys who had options to burn. I almost dated—but ultimately broke ties with—a geeky, ninety-pound jazz band member, who wore a retainer 24/7, because he was hellbent on “FWB only” and didn’t want to settle down. In his case, the alternative to casual hookups was just not dating anyone, because there weren’t many takers. Still, casual sex or bust. In his case, bust, presumably into a sock.
In a moment that now feels a bit prophetic, I said to my mom, “One day, everyone is going to walk around town with a diamond over their head like in Sims and it’ll turn green when they’re attracted to you and if you both have green diamonds, then you’ll find some place to have sex.” (Of course, the green diamond thing has yet to happen, but dating apps basically work this way.) My mom, newly single and confused about which men would be into her, laughed and said, “Well, at least it would eliminate a lot of guesswork.” Then, I added, “But what comes after that? Would people just walk around naked all the time, having sex in public? I don’t see how things can go any further than where they are today.”
Then, it was my mom’s turn to play the soothsayer: “You’d be surprised. At some point the pendulum will swing and all this casual sex is actually going to be really, really uncool. Future generations will look at what your friends are doing and think they’re the lamest people ever.”
And—what do you know—as “millennial” has become a code word for something that has reached the peak of dated, dorky, cringe, whatever…millennials, in our supreme cringeyness, have also claimed sex positivity, casual sex, and perhaps, all heterosexual sex, in the generational divorce, as Gen Z radical feminists deride sex positive millennial feminists as “male-centered cumrags” across social media, instead touting sex strikes and swearing off men entirely. Having too much sex, especially with too many people, is cringe now. Millennials really can kill anything.
