the new sex

explained

Have you heard? Sex is back.

Hoo yes baby, it’s offish.¹ Everyone says so. Not just David Cronenberg, Miranda July and a handful of creeps on Tinder but The New York Times, The New Yorker, even The Guardian.

But here’s the Subreddit: Sex has had a sex change. It no longer identifies as itself, or it didn’t but now sex has come full circle. Detransitioned. Whatever. The new sex is same as the old sex basically, but different. The OG box office formula! Plus it’s sex, which means it can’t lose because sex always wins.

And what can you do with this information? To begin with you need to forget everything you thought you knew about sex (irrespective of how much sex you have or had not had in your life up until this point) and above all, keep an open mind. Allow me to explain.

Sex is has evolved. Nothing you know or thought you knew about it before actually matters. It’s more sensitive and thoughtful than before but just as randy (sex is sex after all). It’s definitely not boring. The new sex is into… other stuff. Off-beat stuff. Open relationships and polyamory with AI-spectrum kinks.

According a recent TLS cover feature on the Future of Sex, humans will be dating — and thus competing with — robot lovers as soon as 2050. If you are happily partnered-up you will no doubt find this hilarious and creepy. But if you’re single like me it might make you feel a bit anxious. My only practical robot-love-era prepping advice (apart from the obvious: panic!) is to get in your bikini laser sessions in before you go all silvery down there (laser requires skin-to-hair colour contrast — as a fair mouse-blonde I never had a chance). Robots have the enviable advantage of being naturally depilated and are thus unlikely to be tolerant of mammalian quirks like pubic hair. On the upside, robots don’t have feelings so they won’t care if you cheat on them, which is good because according to the oracle of snark that is Twitter/X, polyamory is the new wild-swimming.

What is polyamory? Basically it’s like free love or swinging (multiple partners, openly fucking around — call it what you want) except the twist is that now it’s super-ethical because it was invented and patented by childfree Millennials who go to therapy.

I’m not knocking it. I really do think there’s something to it, the whole poly thing. There’s always been something to it. Like every other thinking woman I have worshipped at the shrine of Mary Shelley and Tilda Swinton. But I’ve also followed the young Joan Didion into the San Francisco flophouse in the early 70s and chatted with the little girl on acid and thought… hmmm, so this is where it all ends?

But let’s bracket historical context for a moment (how easy was that?). Poly is predicated on the idea of emotional honesty and openness, agreed-upon boundaries and rules. So it’s transgressive and boundary-pushing but also, rather confusingly, super rules-y at the same time. The difference is that the rules of poly are set by the individual people (or groups of people) involved in the relationship(s) rather than the collective, a.k.a. society. So while the hippies were out there trying to change to world by promoting free love and world peace in an effort to bring down the military-industrial complex, poly people are more like, ‘how does this make you feel?’ (On the niche end of things there is also lots of debate over whether polyamory is a sexual- or relationship-orientation, and if the former, should poly people be recognised and given diverse status in queer community, but that’s not hot so let’s dispense with that topic for the moment.)

The main thing you need to know about poly is that the rules can change at any time and they are, broadly speaking, fluid and inclusive. Inclusive of what you might ask? Well everything within legal boundaries. Primarily gender and sexuality differences but also feelings, which is reassuring is you happen to be a emotional imperfectly-depilated mammal, like me.

I grew up in Canada, a country of freezing cold fresh water rivers and lakes. Long before wild-swimming became a great panacea we had our own Nordic word for the ancient human wellness practice of jumping into freezing cold lakes and rivers. We called it, ‘swimming.’

My attitude to poly is basically the same: Go for it, have fun, live and let live! Tell me all about it. If the mood strikes I might even join in. But don’t ask me to join your boring club. And don't tell me it’s good for me just because it feels good to you (feelings are important but they’re not science). Sub-cultures are fascinating but the idea of being in one makes me feel trapped and tetchy. Having said that I am seduced by poly emphasis on emotion. I have so many feelings at times my own can be quite overwhelming and they constantly change. I like the idea of a relationship philosophy that makes makes room for this.

I do wonder about the whole inclusivity/tolerance thing though. Poly people will tell you their version of free-love is the solution to climate change and structural inequality rolled into one, but the suspicious un-clubbable part of me suspects that maybe, just maybe, at bottom it’s really just about the privileged getting to fuck whomever they want with impunity.

I have one good poly friend. Let’s call him Joe. Joe is absolutely lovely, handsome, an executive type, father to three daughters, in a happy and stable, long-open marriage. I worry about him a bit (he knows this). You see Joe and his wife are high-minded poly-pioneers, fully committed to the social experiment long before it became a social trend — it was literally written into their wedding vows two decades ago — but here’s the thing: Now that Joe and his wife are in their early 50s, she’s still getting loads of ‘outside action’ while he, for the most part, is not. So she’s out a lot, or travelling, and because of this he’s taken on the bulk of the parenting/family labour. He’s overworked and exhausted and for the most part, sex-starved, which in my view is the short end of the poly stick.

I’ve told Joe this, many times, and he just laughs it off. Joe’s a poly idealist, you see. It’s like a religion to him. His commitment to the social experiment is touching in many ways. He’s such an earnest male feminist it makes me want to hug him and carry him around in my pocket. He made an equitable deal and he’s sticking to it, calmly and patiently, managing himself his needs calmly even though the deal isn’t really working in his favour at the moment. Joe does have occasional lovers, but he lacks the thing he has afforded his wife: Time. I do sometimes wonder if the genders were reversed, whether Joe would have stayed in his marriage. God knows countless women have in the past, but those women weren’t feminist intellectual poly women living in London in 2024.

Joe is into ‘compersion,’ meaning he gets off vicariously by hearing about his partner’s sexual adventures. He says he’s happy for the record. I should take his word for it, I know. After all, other people’s marriages are land-locked foreign countries, as unknowable to outsiders as Albania in 1978.

What I find deeply disconcerting about the conversation around poly at the moment is the way it’s cast as a coherent off-the-rack philosophy — an equal opportunity lifestyle choice that single and married men and women alike can choose to participate in or not according to their whims, like joining a tennis club or fantasy football league — when in fact it means completely different things to different people, and what it means now might change tomorrow or the next day. There are just infinite variables when it comes to relating with/being intimate with another human being (let alone more than one) so if you decide to open it all up, how can you realistically guard against the threat of emotional chaos?

Maybe you can’t, even in monogamy. Maybe exploding this central cultural delusion — that conventional committed relationships make us somehow invulnerable to despair — is the whole point.

1. But first a small caveat: If you’re part of the 98.7% of the population that didn’t actually realise sex even left the house, you’re obviously forgiven (I was also both pre-pubescent and married once — not at the same time, you weirdo — the point is, I feel your pain) but now that sex has finally wandered in past curfew, dropped it’s coat on the floor, kicked off it’s shoes and sprawled lazily on the sofa without so much as a ‘Hey babe,’ here is what you need to know before making it a sandwich.