The Rise of Masturbation, the Decline of Sex

Why prostitutes are heroes and OnlyFans girls aren't

The last few decades have seen two parallel developments that are usually considered naturally at odds with one another.

1. An increase in the acceptance of masturbation. This means more options available, less social stigma on the practice, and a decline in any cultural or legal restrictions on engaging in self-pleasure.

2. An increase in real life sex-negativity. When it comes to cisgendered heterosexuals at least, fewer conditions under which people are supposed to have sex, and increasing taboos on more kinds of relationships: namely age gaps and those involving power disparities, particularly bosses and their subordinates. Even behavior that might lead to sex like aggressive flirting is seen as more problematic.

In Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Kolitz recently wrote about communities of men who meet online and masturbate together. The details are shocking and disgusting, but there is no hint that there are any obstacles in the way of the subjects fulfilling any fantasy they have, as long as it comes in virtual form. There was a time not that long ago when states tried to ban sex toys. Ted Cruz in 2007 defended one such law as solicitor general of Texas, but by 2016 this had turned him into a laughing stock. Legal restrictions on adult self-pleasure are practically unthinkable.

Perhaps 2% of American women between the ages of 18 and 45 are or have been OnlyFans creators.¹ I looked for data expecting to see evidence for an increase in pornography consumption, but at least one survey shows that the number of American men and women who report having “seen an X-rated movie in the last year” was stable between the mid-1980s and 2012. Nonetheless, there is relatively little moral panic about porn, in the US at least, even as there are increasing worries about what social media does to minors. The attitude is generally live and let live.

Meanwhile, sex has been increasingly made problematic. Age gaps between consenting adults are stigmatized. The desire to protect minors reaches the height of absurdity when we lock up adult women for having sexual relations with teenage boys. We did this in the 1990s too, but there was a cultural understanding that the only reason this happened was because the law needed to treat the sexes equally as a matter of principle. Now it is not that unusual to see these lucky young lads referred to as victims of “pedophilia.”

A generation ago, much of the mainstream press brushed off the president’s affair with an intern; now any relationship between a boss and a subordinate by necessity involves an abuse of power. Young men complain about not knowing how to approach women in the post-MeToo era, and although this attitude can be exaggerated and self-defeating, it is true that norms have changed. When I was growing up, the main criticism of someone like Hugh Hefner came from religious conservatives. The fact that a man would leverage his fame and power in order to get sex was not itself seen as all that problematic, since the women obviously got something out of the exchange, as they often do in situations like this. As fate would have it, Hefner died in late 2017, mere weeks before the MeToo hashtag went viral, leaving the question of whether he would have survived the new cultural milieu forever unanswered.

You would think that with the rise of OnlyFans, prostitution might become more morally and legally acceptable. And it is true that the libertarian logic of the time seems to demand such an outcome. Yet this hasn’t happened as, more and more, what used to be called prostitution is labeled as “trafficking.” The idea that consenting adults can do what they want has won out over traditionalism as a general matter, which creates complications for continuing to criminalize the selling of sex. A new word is needed to be able to pretend that prostitution – a term which implies that the woman has agency and is a willing partner in the transaction – doesn’t exist. Once a woman has declared herself a victim, it is considered indecent, if not re-traumatizing, to question what actually happened to her.

Law enforcement conducts sting operations in which undercover agents are offered happy endings so they can make arrests. Cops and federal agencies close down massage parlors and the media credulously reports that the women working there were trafficked, without any clarification regarding whether this is true or what it even means. In 2006, Jeffrey Epstein was charged with the solicitation of prostitution. People who now wonder why his treatment seemed so lenient at the time have trouble understanding that this was before the era of pedo and trafficking hysteria. As Michael Tracey points out, politicians and the media now regularly refer to Epstein “victims,” without any regard for whether they met him before or after they had reached adulthood, or the exact nature of the relationship. Epstein being richer and older than women in his life was enough to make him guilty of something. Tracey has also done an excellent job documenting the rise of the “anti-trafficking racket,” a big money movement going after activities that are either imaginary or not that serious and that has the backing of government, large corporations, and religious institutions.

Our language has gotten increasingly vague in order to stigmatize more and more kinds of behavior. The definition of prostitution is pretty straightforward. The point of terms like grooming and trafficking is to obscure what is going on, and make it impossible to even conceive of a woman voluntarily engaging in prostitution in the same way she might open an OnlyFans account. Survivor implies that she’s lucky to even be alive and the least you can do is be quiet and not ask any inconvenient questions regarding how consistent her story has been, or whether she had a financial incentive to change it. The trafficking craze has all the classic signs of a moral panic, including hysterical rhetoric, lots of money going to alleged victims and those who purport to advocate on their behalf, few willing to use basic standards of evidence to check extreme claims, and the silencing of dissent from the dominant narrative. It combines with other fashionable political causes, like when a writer who wants minors to spend less time on social media repeats nonsense claims based on fake research about human trafficking on Facebook.

Young people are having less sex, forming fewer intimate relationships, and having fewer children. As we give men an increasing number of masturbatory options, barriers have been placed on every road leading to experiencing the female body, whether or not money changes hands. Even when the man is not paying for sex, he may be accused of grooming, with news stories reporting on cases in which adult women were subject to this fate because their coworkers wanted to sleep with them.

Florida police protecting society from the danger of adult women possibly touching adult men.

How to explain these seemingly contradictory developments? Such parallel trends do not fit a framework in which society has been getting more socially conservative or liberal. Rather, what unites them is an increase in safetyism. Masturbation is the safest sex of all. Putting aside those who accidentally asphyxiate themselves, pleasuring yourself ensures that no one gets emotionally or physically harmed. With pornography, another person might be involved, but they’re far away where they are much less likely to be able to hurt you.

Sex, of course, has many more risks, the standard ones being that you might get pregnant or contract an STD, and discourse about “safe sex” in the 1980s and 1990s focused on those concrete harms. Increasingly, however, we are more and more intolerant of potential emotional pain. A woman might feel regret or taken advantage of. If the man was older, or richer, or in a position to help or hinder her career, can we even say that the relationship was “consensual”? Better to be safe and forbid any relationship unless the two sides are equal in status.

To see the problems with this, we can make an analogy to the economic realm. Imagine if we said that there is something suspicious about one party entering into a voluntary transaction with another if there is a power disparity. I would not be able to buy things from Amazon, or any major corporation. At the other end of the spectrum, I probably could not hire someone to clean my house. Obviously, economic life would ground to a halt. Yes, we have labor laws meant to address power disparities between businesses and workers, but those are very dumb and our prosperity depends on not letting them get out of hand. Not allowing or stigmatizing economic interactions between vastly unequal parties would eliminate the ability of firms to deal with most consumers.

The situation is similar with sex. In fact, it’s even worse. I don’t want to deal with Amazon because it has power per se, but because the company delivers goods to my home cheaply and quickly. In contrast, women are often attracted to men precisely because they have power and money, and men are attracted to women on account of youth and beauty. So Americans are allowed to escape into the fantasy world of Fifty Shades of Gray or the page of an OnlyFans model dressed as an anime character, and enjoy whatever they like in the privacy of their bedroom. But the actual things they’re attracted to in flesh and blood human beings are stigmatized if they form the basis of relationships. Even men with more “acceptable” tastes – think the Platonic ideal of the 2020s guy moral enough to want a woman who is his equal in every way – are more likely to be shunned or called into an HR office if he approaches someone at work, the place where many adults spend a third or more of their waking hours.

I’m not doing the rightoid thing where I exaggerate and say “liberals have made sex illegal”. Obviously, many people still form relationships. But on the margins, culture, law, and institutional practice are pushing us towards less sex because real life intimate relationships are unsafe.

The change in attitudes towards different forms of sex mirrors what we’ve seen in scientific and technological progress. It has become more expensive to build things in the real world like housing and transportation infrastructure, while innovation in software continues at a rapid pace. In part this is because the world of software has been largely unregulated, while rent seekers and safetyists have piled one restriction or regulation on top of another elsewhere. We’ve learned that phone apps can also be pretty psychologically damaging, but this wasn’t obvious at the beginning of the internet era, and unlike zoning and other areas, there hasn’t been enough time for clutter to accumulate. Something new comes along that doesn’t require moving around a lot of material in the real world, and you avoid the kludgeocracy problem. Civil rights law and norms around dating, in contrast, have had a long time to develop, and more than ever we seek to protect women from psychological damage or career harms even at the cost of them potentially missing out on romantic opportunities.

There is a trend in society as a whole towards a retreat from meatspace and life moving into the digital. I’d rather live in a world where more young men went to prostitutes and fewer made masturbation a regular hobby. Before we thought it was possible for him to be a victim of female pedophiles, we used to talk about a young male going to a brothel and “becoming a man.” We don’t say that about the first time he pleasures himself. Actually being exposed to a woman in the flesh is a transformative experience. Moreover, visiting the brothel requires you to get out of your room. Even if the only person you see is the woman herself, you’ll probably be compelled to put on some clean clothes, brush your teeth, and learn to make eye contact. If she’s good at her job, she’ll make you feel like you know what you’re doing and increase your confidence. All of this builds good habits that are transferable to other areas of life! What does masturbation get you? Why is this the thing we embraced, while problematizing sex?

In the gooning profile, Kolitz writes the following about one young man who prefers pornography to seeking real women to date.

Spishak gave me a few stated reasons for his pornosexuality. One is a fear of STDs; another is standard-issue performance anxiety. These both make a degree of sense: gooning compilations can’t give you chlamydia; a zip file can’t impugn your virility. But what a zip file also can’t do is lie to you—and it is this element of Spishak’s pornosexual philosophy that seems to me most striking, and most emblematic of the Gen Z gooner mindset writ large. It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

In a piece that is full of disgusting passages, this one really stands out. A guy is not only afraid of what women think, so much so that he has retreated from life, but he also apparently finds nothing wrong with admitting this. What is uniquely contemptible about people in an era where we are too non-judgmental about mental health problems is how they often don’t see anything wrong with themselves in situations like this. Young men need to be forced out of their shells, anyway it has to happen. Prostitution is probably not the best way to interact with other human beings, but it is certainly preferable to gooning communities, and probably even necessary in an age like ours.

The prostitute is a hero. For natural reasons, men lack confidence and feel inferior if they don’t have any sexual experience. But most women don’t want to be as promiscuous as men would like them to be. The sexes have divergent interests here, and this is a dilemma that will never be wished away. So, for a market price, the prostitute elevates men while protecting her fellow women. Due to her unique psychological makeup and the fact that she treats it as a job, she is able to decouple sex from emotional involvement. Yet the prostitute, unless she plays the role of victim, is subject to political prosecution in our society, while the enablers of masturbation face few legal restrictions and ever decreasing social stigma on account of their behavior. This is unjust, and indicative of what has gone wrong in a culture that is increasingly retreating into the digital, so much that it is having trouble reproducing itself.

1. I thought this statistic seemed unlikely, but the underlying analysis doesn’t strike me as crazy. Note that the category of “creator” includes people who started an OnlyFans account and then posted very little or even nothing at all. Nonetheless, I would take the 2% estimate with a grain of salt.