Opinion
Last week at the park with our kids, my husband and I passed a car with towels covering the windows. Weird, but ok. My husband said the car’s occupants must’ve been having sex, which made sense, later, of the flushed faces of the young man and woman hovering near the car as they hugged. The prude in me was shocked, it being broad daylight and all.
Then, a second thought. If no one was getting choked (even consensually) during sex, or allegedly pack raped by private school boys, or allegedly having their boundaries crossed by drunk footballers, then today, consensual, legal, enjoyable sex counts as a win.
Good sex feels increasingly rare. Recent terrible headlines represent one distortion of sex. But there are other forces arrayed against us that are driving the sexes apart. We shouldn’t take this lying down.
The reported Gen Z sex recession, our phone addiction, the substitution effect of online porn: all culprits here. There’s more.
We’re addled by algorithms pushing content declaring the awfulness of the other sex: his situationship ways, her extreme pickiness in mate selection, his slackness around the house. As British feminist Louise Perry observes, the internet “exposes what the other sex is saying about you all the time”. Words meant for other men, or other women, can feed hostility between the sexes if a mixed audience listens in.
Given alarming DV stats and toxic relationship dynamics, women are better off knowing what some men really think about them. Male resentment can erupt violently offline, so men bad-mouthing women online is clearly more threatening than the opposite.
But it’s too neat to blame the patriarchy, since this lets the internet off the hook. One philosopher says the negativity bias of online speak makes bad news more compelling than good. Sex sells, and so does content about the sexes behaving badly, even if it fuels heteropessimism – that cynicism at the possibility of successful romantic relationships between men and women.
Shifting dynamics between the sexes are also straining relationships. Male drift has left many men lacking purpose and positive role models, leading to men’s poorer educational, social, and health outcomes. Meanwhile, female success is far less dependent on being partnered (honestly, a relief) and more focused on financial independence.
When Dozer of RecipeTin Eats fame died, we mourned for Nagi Maehashi’s devoted companion. Nagi’s recipes are on high rotation at my house, but what I really eat up is the single-lady-porn she serves up: the fantasy of independent, successful womanhood, complete with dog and giant kitchen island. If this is modern spinsterhood – emphasis on “if”; Maehashi is coy about her private life – it looks so good.
We’re so heteropessimistic that last year, Vogue asked, “is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” Actually, it’s been ick for years. Barbie and Ken, and Peter Quill and Gamora, parted ways in 2023’s biggest blockbusters Barbie and Guardians of the Galaxy. No one would blink if Barbie or Gamora described themselves as “boysober” or “self-partnered”. Or if the guys consoled themselves that they’re “kenough”.
We’ve apparently found a third way between the tragedy (everyone dies) and the comedy (everyone gets married): marriage carks it and everyone lives their best fake single lives online. Freya India is blunt in GIRLS®, her account of the inner online lives of Gen Z women: our culture is increasingly one where “marriage and families [are seen] only as traps instead of something to be treasured”. No one (except Nagi, perhaps) looks that happy, though.
Maybe our dilemma is mythic? Susan Faludi just wrote in The New York Times that we’re in “a zero-sum struggle over which gender gets to own the hero’s journey”, convinced that “whoever owns the myth owns the culture”. But the idea that one sex has to end up “on top” is a failure of imagination. What if the real prize is each other?
2026 has given us two pro-marriage moments: Taylor Swift’s fairytale wedding to Travis Kelce and the ending of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Maybe Taylor and Odysseus are the ones with main character energy in their relationships. But one person revolving around the other isn’t the ideal of marriage, or shouldn’t be. Rather, two people might face in the same direction, together.
As Odysseus says in Homer’s epic, “There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends”.
Not that marriage should outstrip all else. But we’re so downbeat about romantic love, we’d benefit from more pro-sex, pro-marriage material.
How did we start with that couple’s carpark sexcapades and end with marriage? Treating sex and marriage interchangeably is a quirk of my Christian sexual ethics – not everyone’s thing, clearly, and admittedly, traditional relationships frequently fall short of the ideal of lifelong love, sex, fidelity.
Still, the extremes haunting our cultural imagination of sex and relationships are worse. Online, the sexes seem mutually hostile, while sex in the news feels soiled by abuse, entitlement, indifference. Freed from the shackles of religion and tradition, the future was supposed to be extremely sex positive. It can’t be if the sexes retreat from each other instead.
That young couple had public sex. But even sex that takes place in private is public because sex always has spillover effects for our common life. These days, good sex resists the growing divide between men and women and our habit of looking at a screen rather than another human face. Sex like that isn’t just good, but great.
Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity.
Justine Toh is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and the author of Achievement Addiction.
