The original draft of the email below was sent to University of Minnesota psychology professor James Lee, whose op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal speaks to the troubling moral and ethical questions that arise from fast-evolving medical technologies, which could someday soon make asexual reproduction and scale-tilting genetic selection common among those who can afford them. But Prof. Lee doesn’t seem to realize that the potentially sexless future he foresees for America’s elites has already arrived.
Dear Prof. Lee,
As unsettling as the prospect of technically-assisted asexual reproduction and genetic selection among the well-to-do may be, one needn’t “Imagine a Future Without Sex,” as your WSJ op-ed invites readers to do. Because, at least as far as America’s upper crust is concerned, that largely sexless future has already arrived.
Long gone is the rollicking orgasm-seeking that once characterized libidinously joyful college campuses, as womyn’s studies departments—dominated by Carole King devotees—have convinced many young ladies that their nagging feelings of being disrespected in the sober light of morning are now grounds for rape allegations, especially if signatures are missing from the sequence of makeout-session consent forms many schools require these days.
For younger kids, the cancerous proliferation of social media has, in many complicated ways, pushed to the brink of extinction the innocently monogamous boyfriend-girlfriend relationships that once provided formative junior-high foundations for healthy and happy adult sex lives. Not surprisingly then, several recent surveys and studies show that young adults are having far less sex than their parents did. And it’s probably no coincidence that they’re also far more likely than were mom and dad to be treated for anxiety and depression.
Sadder still is youngsters’ steadily rising suicide rate. And I’ll leave for another day the tangentially related issue of suicides-by-cop that often follow disturbingly violent acts against innocents by angry, involuntarily celibate young men who call themselves INCELs.
For the older elites who’ve already secured their exclusive graduate degrees, the nonstop signaling of woke virtues, pursuing new credentials to burnish résumés, the social and financial climbing—sometimes over the backs of former friends and lovers—and the constant lying needed to facilitate all this striving is utterly exhausting. So how long do you suppose it’s been since, say, Tony Blinken and Jen Psaki have even thought about sex? And I don’t mean with one another.
In any case, while most grownups can agree there’s much the anti-establishment free-thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s got wrong, Erica Jong was mostly right about the simple, liberating and relaxing joy of guiltless, no-strings sex, or the ” zipless f – – –,” as she coined the now all but forgotten phrase.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.