Unlimited Virtual Sex Ironically Proves the Value of Sexual Boundaries

The frog-in-boiling-water metaphor has become increasingly relevant as we have seen culture rapidly changing around us for the past 10 years, with surprisingly few people noting how drastically moral lines have been redrawn and how wildly different the world of our young people is compared to previous generations, enmeshed as it is with online unreality.

Stranger still is the dullness with which older generations particularly seem to treat the threat that constant and unlimited availability of sexual content poses to the health of young people. Its prevalence has not experienced slow and steady increase over the past generations – no, we are not so fortunate as that. Its availability skyrocketed with the dawn of the internet and hurtled through the stratosphere in the age of the smartphone. And while we all know on some level that this is happening, I get the feeling that, when it comes to how we think about porn, there is a real generational divide between those who came of age in the pre-internet age versus those of the post-internet age. Older generations fail to grasp the seriousness of the technological changes around us, especially regarding their effect on sexuality.

My high school years were in the Myspace era, so I do not know what it was like to come of age completely offline. But here’s what I imagine what growing up in, say, the 80s was like: While of course hormones coursed through veins then just as much as now, there were far fewer outlets for that explosive energy. A teenage boy really had to do some finagling to get his hands on a dirty magazine. And when it came to pursuing the real thing, they had to muster the bravery to approach a girl in person, to confront the likelihood of rejection face-to-face. Succeed or fail, there is at least character-building in this venture.

Because sexual outlets in the pre-internet age had to be pursued offline and in-person, they were integrated into human society, and so they retained a stronger element of humanity. The natural norms and expectations of social life were still in play to provide boundaries. Risky though it might be, the inevitable sexual exploration in this era could more easily be seen as salutary, and attempts to purge sexuality from the lives of young people was more easily labeled puritanical. Much better back then for adults to offer a wink and a nod and allow a bit of fun on the fringe. There were practical and social barriers that kept things from going too far off the rails.

This is no longer the reality of young people in the smartphone age – those natural barriers are gone. What was once “fun on the fringe” now frequently envelops the adolescent mind entirely and leaves them addicted to a nonstop cascade of novel experience. Sexual exploration is no longer a mere liminal fascination or a naughty rite of passage. They can submerge themselves in an endless swamp of immediate gratification – one that gladly escorts them further down the trail of the fringe, hardcore, and even dangerous manifestations of desire – and they can do it every night of their young lives in the privacy of their bedrooms. Many seldom emerge from that swamp.

Teenagers today are not scheming to get their hands on a dirty magazine; they can nightly peruse an infinite supply of pictures, videos, and explicit chatrooms. If they don’t want to muster the courage to talk to a girl at school, they can access a cavalcade of commodified matches on dating apps until they find one willing to reply to their anonymous advances. If all else fails, they can find a picture of their local crush and use it to make a deepfake porn video that suits their precise fantasy. Again, sexual exploration in the digital age is no longer “fun on the fringe” – it is a dehumanizing threat to functional adulthood.

My fear is that those who did not have to contend with the corrupting power of the internet until later in life have no sense of proportion of the debilitating effect it has on young people now. I wonder if they fear waving any of the red flags now popping up around the sexual behavior of our youth because they fear becoming the unbearable puritans of their youth. This is a failure to appreciate the extreme rising temperature in this arena. And by failing to respond we risk becoming the frog that boils to death.

I am shocked whenever I see a parent give their teenager internet access with no restrictions or supervision. Especially now that we have repeatedly proven the correlation between social media use and anxiety, depression, and suicide, or the rising rates of porn addiction among young men. I can perhaps understand the parents’ vicarious fear of their kid being uncool or overprotected, but that’s no reason to hand them the modern equivalent of a carton of cigarettes. Fear of puritanism might have been appropriate in the 80’s, but it is not puritanical today to fend off a mental health epidemic from your own children.

Awareness of this risk has increased as millennials advance into parenting. Anecdotally at least, I see a far more proactive stance towards guarding against the risks posed by internet access, a willingness to protect our children with heavy restrictions on devices or even limiting them to using dumbphones, regardless of how uncool they are. This is not luddite aversion; it is necessary adaptation. Their caution was earned through personally experiencing the detrimental effects of digital sex. Millennials, more than previous generations, feel the water boiling and are ready to make a radical change to how we allow our children to engage with sexuality. However awkward it may be to engage in the topic, it is no longer something to which we can afford to turn a blind eye.

What sexual deluge online proves more than anything is that, in order to preserve a healthy order in our lives and our relationships, the boundaries around sex need to be re-erected. Sure, we don’t need to revert to a Victorian aversion to sexuality full stop, but neither is sexuality a marginal place where immediate interest should run wild. It is not a place where consumer preference should reign, where fascination should pursue desire like a dog chasing cars. Sexuality is not a hobby, it is central to the self, human dignity, human value and meaning. By extension, it is central to the health and stability of culture.

What that means for us in the internet age is conscientiously creating boundaries around sex that digital pleasure pursuit dissolved. It means appreciating the fact that, if anything is meaningful, sex is — or at least believing the word of someone who has nearly drowned in the floodwaters of boundary-less sex online, that there is no bottom to that abyss, there is nothing that will be left unscathed once you go down that road. Our only hope for a healthy and stable future, for the individual and the culture, is to re-invest our sexuality with meaning, and rebuild the boundaries around it that meaning implies.

Ironically, the infinite availability of meaningless sex online is bringing us to a unique fork in the road: either we can chase our desires into oblivion or turn back in the other direction and appreciate the sacredness of sex that our grandparents believed in. I think millennials and certainly those after us can sense the abyss that life online threatens, and many are ready to make a conscientious choice for self-denial and set themselves on the path toward a kind of cultural reversion. We can feel the water boiling, and we’re ready to jump out, even if it means turning our back on the sexual liberation that modernity promised.