Why Sex Sucks...Now
"They" finally did it. "It" being the systematic murder of sexy time, but how, why and who benefits from such a horror? Maybe the mirror might have an answer.
The Godfather had just come out and my great-grandmother, in one of those master strokes of great-grandmotherly indulgence took me to see it, despite probably having gotten instructions from my mother not to. She was absolutely wonderful and it was no mystery that I’d come back from spending weekends with her five pounds heavier: we did whatever we wanted, would eat whatever we wanted (and whenever), and it was splendid.
The scene though where Tom Hagen had been instructed to find Sonny Corleone, only to find the married Sonny screwing one of the bridesmaids against the inside of an inside door, had me having questions. Specifically: “what are they doing Nana?”
This was not smart-ass-itude. I genuinely had no idea and had not started climbing into dumpsters in search of “girlie” mags for at least another few years yet. So when she said “I’ll tell you later” I hadn’t the interest or curiosity to follow up when that later came.
But fucking was very much on the mind, the American mind at least by my reckoning, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, pre-AIDS, pre-herpes even. And not only for zonked out hippies, or boundary pushing beatniks either. It was in the air with the advent of the Djerassi birth control pill, and the loosening strictures around traditional gender roles.
Years later while chopping it up with a Vietnam vet friend he had even explained it thusly: “the officer class in Vietnam had not gotten laid like they were getting laid in Vietnam so the idea of coming home to a straight-laced hand-holding future with some fiancee was out,” he said.
When Bianca Censori shows up nude and we make a celebrity out of a young woman who…mimicked spitting on an aroused cock on video…we are making our homes, comfortably, in a place called Nowhere.
“You suggesting that they chose to both not win the war and not lose the war just so they could stay there and get laid?” I asked him by the pool where we were hanging out and where he was teaching me to scuba dive.
“Some would,” he said.
Crazier things had happened and while there was an expansion of sexual consciousness there was also a consciousness of the invisible guardrails. At least some of them.
So while women like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem were questioning whether or not bikini-clad women were necessary for selling STP (a motor oil at the time), cars and cigarettes, men were also fucking their daughters. I interviewed one such woman who put her father on blast while she was in college and called on him to explain at a Thanksgiving dinner and his explanation, according to her, was “hey…it was the ‘60s. Everyone was experimenting.”
And best-of-times/worst-of-times style mores were loosened, but with those loosening mores came a new generation of entrepreneurial predators. Stag films, early porno had always been part of American male life, but using the crowbar of peace and love, the mafia had gotten heavily involved in the ‘70s and this combined with Me Generation excesses turned what was kind of cool into what had once been cool but was now shitty.
On the surface, women like Linda Lovelace, arguably the first porn star of the multimillion dollar grossing Deep Throat, were the toasts of the town. Behind the scenes she would later claim rape, and maybe more significantly for capitalists, not a nickel of those multimillions made it her way.
People also hadn’t figured out that cocaine was bad for you. Yet. And there was also what could now uncomfortably be called The War Back Home where after the cessation of the Vietnam War the state department pulled thousands of soldiers off of battlefields and 72 hours later dropped them back into their old lives with a grand disregard for how well those lives would fit them given the horror that they had been party to.
So let’s recap: post-the Summer of Love, Me Generation, the uptowning of cocaine as the aspirational drug of choice, Mob ascendancy, the damaged tribes of men who had served their country who were home trying to make sense of that country and what Erica Jong called “zipless fucks”, or easy sex sans significant attachment.
A prescriptive for disaster? Almost.
The point now is that in 2025, the Age of Epstein, a president who was convicted of sex crimes, Harvey Weinstein, P Diddy, and on and nauseatingly on sex, the acts and the ideas around said acts, feel increasingly desperate and shopworn.
“Hey Eugene…what are YOU doing here?!?!” When you get invited to an orgy, 30 seconds after coming through the door of the orgy you’ve decided to attend, that’s really the last thing you expect to hear. Much less from your mechanic.
“I guess just what we’re all doing here!” he answered before I had a chance to.
I launched into some sort of stuttered speech about the benefits of secrecy and the benefits of secret societies in an effort to get him to keep his mouth shut which, in total, was not at all necessary as I was clearly more weirded out than he was.
The owner of the house, let’s call it a mansion, was well-heeled and on the periphery of all of this, shit was just getting stranger and stranger. The Son of Sam killings a decade earlier, for example, were, indeed, the product of crazy but not the kind of crazy reported. David Berkowitz, the so-called “lone” lunatic made the same claim that later investigative journalists did: they were filming snuff films. Snuff films were, for those who need a refresher, films where the unsuspected were actually killed in the making of the movie.
People heard about these, wanted to see these and enterprising young lunatics decided to fill a market niche. When it was rumored that these flicks had an A-List clientele who knew exactly what they were paying to see and how they had been made, Berkowitz became the patsy.
That’s not the point though. The point now is that in 2025, the Age of Epstein, a president who was convicted of sex crimes, Harvey Weinstein, the Mormon rapist Danny Masterson, P Diddy, and on and nauseatingly on sex, the acts and the ideas around said acts, feel increasingly desperate and shopworn.
Everything is cheap and dirty and not even in that fun cheap and dirty way. Like Las Vegas at 9 am…wasted and wounded.
When Bianca Censori shows up nude and we make a celebrity out of a young woman who in a moment of nighttime exuberance mimicked spitting on an aroused cock on video, forever now known to whatever progeny spring from her loins as the Hawk Tuah girl, we are making our homes, comfortably, in a place called Nowhere.
Is it any wonder that people in their 20s are fucking less? Or that the preponderance of porn is incest related with most men macking on Moms (Moms I Like to Fuck, or MILFs) or stepmoms? We’ve become edge sensation addicts for edgy sensations that seemingly are never enough. To keep us from the edge, or keep us from going over it.
Which is precisely how we ended up this hothouse week of being told by the Justice Department that there was no Epstein File, so named after the suicided pedophile, CIA operative and friend of Bill Gates, Prince Edward, Bill Clinton and our sitting president, Donald Trump.
And just the prospect of there being a file, along with purported videos, sickens as it emboldens what feels like the deadest of enterprises. It’s not just Trump either. The whole MAGA, man-o-sphere, anti-woke, incel, he-man women hating club trip is so causally connected, that in full Lysistrata fashion, women are opting out. It’s just too much. It’s all too fucking much.
Articles abound regarding women over 50 who have given up dating. Then divorced women who have given up dating. Then women in their 20s, who have given up dating. All tossing in all the towels. And across the aisles men complaining that they can’t get something they really can’t even be bothered to act like they care about anymore. It’s all just so much easier than dealing with whatever aggravation comes from dealing with real people, who happen to be women.
LGBTQIA+ folks are not immune either but their concerns, in 2025 at least, are totally existential. Which makes sense. It’s hard to think a lot about love when you’re surrounded by hate.
So that’s where we find ourselves now. Too exhausted to care and too caring to try to navigate our collective ways through what ceased being innocent a looooong time ago. Everything is cheap and dirty and not even in that fun cheap and dirty way. Like Las Vegas at 9 am…wasted and wounded.
It’d be nice to think that this is just a cyclical turn, a shift of the gyre, that the Trump presidency will end and so will “all of this” but he’s not the progenitor, he’s just a symptom of the meretricious ruination of what we used to call “sex”.
“They say that the best things in life are free,” was a song lyric I once wrote. “But everything around here comes with a fee.”
Jesus Christ. Yes it does. And is there no way out?
If it took us decades to get to the commodification of fuck, and fucking, and all of the attendant sex crimes we leapfrogged to get here, I would guess that it’s going to take that long to get out. Which means? If you’re reading this now? Not during our lifetimes.
So…um…welcome to hell. And totally no need to ask, “what are YOU doing here?”
WAIT WAIT WAIT…if you’re in Austin a few days from now? Please feel FREE to attend…
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
You mentioning Linda Lovelace and veterans returning from Vietnam made me think of that film Forced Entry starring Harry Reems. Dark stuff.
What do think about all the internet fuck sites/programs? Are Tindr and Grindr surrounded by mist?