WELL, PROGRESSIVES ARE KOOKS AND MORONS, SO. . . Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now. “It’s not just that the arguments for “no sex in movies” are unconvincing to me. It’s that I don’t even believe that the people making them are convinced by them. Instead I think that it’s pure visceral emotion being sold as actual argument – most of these people are simply scared of sex. They find it icky and frightening. The good news is that they are of course free to avoid sex in their own lives, to whatever degree they choose. The trouble is that they want to consume pop culture and, because sex is a big of life and narrative art must be free to depict all elements of human experience, they often find themselves confronted with the existence of sex in movies and TV. And it appears that, because they’ve been brought up in a social and political environment that has taught them that their momentary psychic comfort is the only thing that matters, they assume that all of the rest of us have to accept sexless and sanitized movies and television.”

Why we listen to the ravings of self-centered neurotics is a mystery. But as a culture, we unaccountably do. More mocking and shaming of self-centered neurotics would help.

Plus: “I just find it so bizarre, where we are as a culture when it comes to sex – there’s a lot of explicit “sex positivity” married to a society full of people who find sex scary, in a way that’s connected to a broader fear about human experience and its many risks. The result is a culture where a young woman starting an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and immediately filming herself performing sex acts for cash is seen by many as a matter of feminist empowerment, but where there’s perpetual controversy about whether it’s OK to talk to a stranger on the street. (You know, the reason a lot of us exist, because our parents or grandparents struck up a conversation on the street.)”