How Much Control Over Our Sexuality Should the Media Have?
I'm uncomfortable giving the media too much power over our lives
How should sexuality be represented in the media? I don’t just mean the nightly news. I mean everything from Netflix to HBO and even PornHub. All of these venues have different limits of tolerance. They serve different purposes and ostensibly different audiences.
You won’t find the same kinds of shows on HBO that you find on Disney+, and for good reason—children watch the latter, and the former is content made for adults.
This question of how and to whom the media should depict human sexuality is a modern conundrum, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We’re slowly growing out of our outdated beliefs in archaic religions that shunned and even criminalized sex.
We’re casting off the chains of patriarchal bondage that have enslaved women for millennia, forcing them into unhappy marriages with men for purposes of power and prestige (for the men).
As we abandon these antiquated ideas of morality (that obviously don’t work in the modern world), we’re faced with the looming question: what do we do with our sexuality? How do we display it? What should we keep private? And what’s acceptable to do with other people?
Dostoevsky famously said that if God is dead, everything is permitted.
That’s proved to be false.
Secular institutions have held up quite well in the face of human toil and our tendencies toward destruction. And our current confusion is evidence of that.
The discomfort we’re now experiencing over our sexuality stems from a climate of collective self-exploration.
With the Abrahamic religions of old and the powerful Church that dominated everyone’s sexual lives, relegating sex to serve as an instrument of power and patriarchal institutionalism, we went through a long period of collective forgetting. Now, we’re waking up from that long slumber.
If it feels like you’re getting in touch with a primordial version of yourself that might have existed long before large institutions brought down their iron fists on our humanity, forcing us into roles that we didn’t consent to, you’re not alone.
You’re re-learning how to be sexual beings after thousands of years of being denied this basic, natural, and fundamental aspect of your flesh-and-blood existence.
We’re unwinding thousands of years of rules and superstitions and getting in touch with the humanity that existed long before power structures commodified them and rationed them out to us in exchange for our good behavior.
What civilization did to sexuality thousands of years ago is akin to someone stealing your house and offering to sell it back to you. They stripped us of our very human need for sex in order to control us.
They stole free sexuality and offered it back to us in exchange for “proper” behavior. What’s considered proper behavior depends on the society in question.
In Rome, it was going to battle to conquer new lands and capture slaves. In other societies, it was accumulating wealth or building harems. We finally realize how barbaric these practices are.
We’re finally getting in touch with our natural selves, and the media is slowly catching up. Keep all of this in mind as we move forward.
That’s the fundamental theme of this story, the message I’d most like to convey.
The Story of Michael Peterson
I recently saw an article written by Will Cameron and published in the Daily Dot. It was called Tongue-Twister: Experts explore the meteoric rise of eating ass in pop culture (and why you’re seeing more rimming on TV).
That cheeky headline is quite the mouthful, isn’t it?
The article was well-written. It was funny and informative, featuring some prominent thinkers in the sex field. Sex Researcher Dr. Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D., chimed in on the article, as well as Dr. Bryant Paul, an associate professor of media psychology at Indiana University Bloomington.
The article discusses the HBO Max adaptation of a Netflix true-crime series called The Staircase.
Spoiler alert: I will have to explain the plot a bit for context.
The Netflix series was a true-crime documentary that used real footage from the early 2000s about a husband who was convicted of the murder of his wife, who was found dead at the bottom of the staircase in their nice home.
Michael Peterson proclaimed his innocence throughout the trial, claiming his wife had fallen down the stairs in a freak accident.
The police investigation revealed that Mr. Peterson was meeting various men in chat rooms on the internet and having sex with them behind his wife’s back. In the early 2000s, this was an unspeakable violation of social taboos.
Not only was it infidelity, it was gay infidelity.
For many, maybe even most people watching the trial unfold, it was the gayness of the sex that frightened them more than the infidelity.
Had Mr. Peterson slept with a woman behind his wife’s back, many of the people who viewed him with contempt may have just written it off as “something men do from time to time,” seeing him as a benign man making a common mistake rather than seeing him as a pervert. Remember, this was the early 2000s, and homophobia wasn’t only more rampant—it was fully normalized throughout nearly all of society.
A previous wife of Michael’s had also died under suspicious circumstances—falling down the stairs. All of this led to his downfall and eventual conviction.
I couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy as I watched the Netflix series. Throughout the first few episodes, before they got to Mr. Peterson’s trial, I kept telling my girlfriend that I knew this guy would never get a fair trial once the media made a spectacle of his bisexual proclivities behind closed doors.
I have a hard time believing that someone’s sexuality would be admissible in court most of the time these days, which is a testament to how far we’ve come.
Cheating on your wife with men doesn’t make you a murderer.
There was no way he was getting a fair trial, but I make no claims about Mr. Peterson’s guilt or innocence—only that I knew instantly that a fair trial was off the table. It’s crucial that we acknowledge how unfairly LGBT people have been treated historically, even if we think they’re guilty.
It doesn’t justify what they’ve done.
Nobody should kill their wife.
But even if he was 100% guilty, everyone deserves a fair trial, even if that trial lands him in prison.
A bisexual man in the Deep South of the United States judged by a jury of presumably heterosexual and homophobic people is like a black man in the Deep South being judged by an all-white jury. There’s essentially a guarantee that bias is going to cloud the judgment of the jurors.
All of this brings me back to the Daily Dot article.
Who’s Licking Who’s What?
HBO Max created a reenacted drama series with actors portraying the characters.
At one point, Colin Firth, who plays Michael Peterson, comes home and pulls down his wife Kathleen Peterson’s sweatpants (played by Toni Collette) and begins eating her ass right there in the kitchen like it’s nobody’s business.
Michael barges in, interrupts her cooking by unashamedly pulling her sweatpants down and burying his face between her buttcheeks, giving her a palatable rimjob without shame.
A small section of the internet erupted with criticism and repulsion about the scene. Some people were appalled by the sight of a rimjob.
This was the focus of the Daily Dot piece.
The gist of the article is that legacy media must push the envelope and continually create more daring, taboo content to satisfy the palettes of their viewers. Dr. Lehmiller says, “TV—and the media more broadly—keeps pushing the boundaries when it comes to sex.”
He tells us that sex “has gradually evolved on TV over the years, and as nudity and sexual activity have become more mainstream, we’ve come to see more diversity in portrayals of sexuality and sexual behavior.”
Dr. Bryant Paul says:
“Attention is the scarce resource of the information economy. We always notice the thing that stands out, which content creators have really started to seize on in recent years.”
While this is all very true, and I have immense respect for Dr. Lehmiller, all of this makes me wonder if pieces like this one are setting the bar in the wrong place.
It’s not Dr. Lehmiller's or any of the other guest’s statements that I disagree with but the premise of the article.
It’s true that the media is showing a more diverse portrayal of sexuality.
But is it driving it?
The article does an excellent job of describing analingus in media throughout the ages, reaching all the way back to 1999 when rimming was featured in a British TV series called Queer as Folk.
Several more scenes in media are discussed, bringing us up to speed with contemporary times and leading us back to the HBO Max series, The Staircase.
It also covers the way anilingus was traditionally viewed, at least in pop media, as something homosexual and was only depicted in media portrayals of gay sex.
What bothers me is the suggestion that the media is the institution pushing the envelope.
We should be discussing how the media is finally catching up with human sexuality, not ushering it into the future.
Who Drives Human Change?
From the time of Michael Peterson’s trial in the early 2000s until now, widespread acceptance of LGBT relationships wasn’t driven by media moguls. Sitcoms and porn weren’t the central engines of progress, but the unrelenting spirit of activists willing to lay their bodies and minds on the line so they would no longer be forced to live in the shadows because of who they loved.
Ass-eating specifically has been shown in pornography since before I was born (and probably you, too), but we hear about it in the writings of Marquis de Sade dating back to the 1700s.
Ass play has probably been around since prehistory.
Humans are naturally curious, inventive, and affectionate creatures, that potent combination that leads us to express our love and raw desire for one another in countless thousands of ways.
We might express our love through a timeless piece of music, like Beethoven’s Für Elise, or by strapping someone to a chair and electrocuting their nipples! As long as everyone’s consenting, neither form is better nor worse than the other, especially when the message is affection.
The philosopher and politician Machiavelli was ruined politically after rumors circulated that he was having anal sex with a prostitute in the 15th century.
Prostitution was legal and socially acceptable.
Anal sex was not.
For every Galileo who faced draconian punishment by mainstream institutions for looking through his telescope, there are countless thousands of people violently punished and brutally killed for how they preferred to harmlessly express their love to someone.
In cultures from as far away in time and space as ancient India, prehistoric Mesoamerican Peru, and ancient Babylon, people have practiced anal play since time immemorial.
These activities are nothing new. And suggesting that either media or pornography are the cause of these activities is dishonest. This might sound like a small complaint, but hear me out.
We shouldn’t set the standard of sexuality at what’s portrayed in popular media. The media isn’t breaking new ground, it’s not pushing the limits; it’s finally waking up and meeting us where we are, depicting real life for millions of people.
Some people crave oral sex and feel immensely close to their partners when going down on them. Other people like to whip or be whipped by their partners and consider bondage the highest form of human bonding. And other people like to lick each other’s asses. The vulgarity, the unglamorousness of the act, and the rawness all speak to a carnal desire and attraction for the recipient that can’t be found in other expressions of sexuality for some people.
Marquis de Sade said, “We’re it among Nature’s intentions that humans should be born modest, she would not have caused us to be born naked.” We’re all born a little bit kinky and a little bit weird.
We have unique sexualities that are like fingerprints.
There’s no question that the media influences sexual trends. It serves a normalizing function. Dr. Lehmiller and Dr. Paul discuss this and hypothesize how media, especially porn, helps people who haven’t encountered a kind of sexuality that’s novel to them see it with their own eyes.
50 Shades of Grey came out, and suddenly, millions of people discovered new ways of expressing their sexuality.
But millions of other people were already doing that. The media took what already existed and showed it to more people, that’s all. That’s not breaking new ground.
50 Shades of Grey didn’t invent BDSM. Curious humans did.
The Staircase didn’t invent anilingus, some bold lover who wanted to express his affection for someone they felt immensely connected to did.
The media and media psychologists can speculate about the cycles of media trends all they’d like, but sex is real, concrete, and exists between everyday people all the time. It’s unceasing, forever growing, and unassailable.
There are some exceptions, of course. There are a few things that were genuinely invented by modern pornography. Believe me, I’ve spent countless hours searching for instances of double penetration and bukkake in history outside of modern pornography and turned up empty-handed.
It’s almost certain that both forms of sexuality were purely invented for pornographic performance.
But these are the outliers.
They’re the exceptions that prove the rule.
I know for a fact that porn has helped us normalize countless varieties of sexuality. It’s true. But I also know that porn wasn’t the originator of those varieties, just as the media wasn’t. I know people were doing them from prehistoric times until ancient times and up until now.
Sometimes they’ve had to relegate their sexual proclivities to the shadows, far from the prying eyes of polite society. Other times, sex has been more open. That’s how the pendulum swings.
But we simply can’t afford to ignore the fact that humans have been pleasuring one another in kinky ways that flaunt heteronormative religious mandates since time immemorial, lest we lose touch of the fact that such an incredibly diverse array of sexual expressions are a central part of our humanness.
Our willingness to explore and communicate love and attraction in divergent, nonidentical ways is unique to us as a species. It’s what makes us who we are.
Let’s embrace it, with or without the media’s blessings.
lovely article, (& educational, had to look up bukkake - now I know)) and the info on Machiavelli very interesting, I can see me coming out with that at a dinner party to spice up the convo.