On the traditionalist side, a loose assortment of classical conservatives, terminally online reactionary trad types, and the odd dissident feminist have coalesced around the idea that the sexual revolution has led to widespread malaise in society generally and among women particularly, for which marriage is the — or at least, a — cure. The more reasonable pundits point to the benefits of wedlock when it comes to our health, happiness, and ability to provide a stable family structure in which to raise children. The kookier tradfolk suggest that modern women have been hoodwinked by feminism into a barren existence, squandering their potential — that is, their biological imperative to become wives and mothers — in the frivolous pursuits of career, pop culture, and cat ownership. As conservative commentator Matt Walsh recently complained, the women who imagine themselves to be single and content are just “too stupid to realise how depressing this is”.

On the progressive side, meanwhile, marriage has become synonymous with misery: an institution that demands women sacrifice their professional ambitions and passions alike, putting themselves second — and picking up some unappreciative schlub’s dirty socks — for the rest of their lives. This perspective was recently articulated in The Cut by Rebecca Traister, who lamented that “hard-right commentators and politicians” were championing marriage not for the betterment of society, but to worsen the prospects of women who finally had equality within reach: “reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage”.

In a worldview where men are portrayed as burdensome creatures who ask too much, offer too little, and inevitably fail to deserve the female companionship they crave, to eschew marriage becomes a form of feminist empowerment, the only path to a fully actualised life. At its extremes, this perspective is accompanied by the sense that men in general are a waste of one’s time and hot girl potential, and that any woman who thinks otherwise just hasn’t found the right television series and/or brand of vibrator.

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The result is a zero-sum rhetorical hellscape in which marriage is one of two things. For its supporters, it is the last, best hope of a society on the brink of decline and disaster. For its detractors, it is an insidious ploy by reactionary dinosaurs to catapult us back to a less enlightened paradigm, just as we were nearing the utopian promise of a brave new world.

It’s hard not to notice a certain amount of horseshoe effect in play here, not just in each side’s notion of marriage as first and foremost a proxy for power, but also in their equally rigid ideas of what happiness actually looks like. The picture of female fulfilment is a caricature in either case. The anti-marriage camp celebrate the high-achieving, stiletto-heeled girlboss. Their opponents are in thrall to the barefoot, pregnant homesteader. And in either case, the proffered vision of womanhood has a pre-packaged-for-social-media feel to it: it is a lifestyle, rather than a life.

Perhaps this was inevitable at a moment when the basic tenets of human existence are not just politicised, but public and performative — and hence subject to endless hacking, tweaking, and optimisation. To participate in the attention economy requires treating your own life as not just a search for personal satisfaction but a source of content to be consumed by other people; you are writing, directing, and starring in a story about yourself, the main character of the universe. And when marriage becomes part of the plot, then of course we begin to think of potential spouses not as partners but supporting actors, bit players in the journey to becoming one’s most majestic, fully actualised self.

Obviously, this has certain implications for heterosexual women, for whom living with a man and living one’s best life are so often presented as mutually exclusive. But men aren’t immune from it, either: not long ago, I witnessed a friend in his 30s unhappily contemplating the ways his life had changed after moving in with a girlfriend, his complaints an unwitting and uncanny echo of so many feminist takes on the burdens of having a man around. The girlfriend’s presence in his life meant compromise, interruptions, distractions; another person’s needs and desires suddenly had to be factored in. It felt like a loss, he said — of time, energy, productivity.

But was it? Is it? Is it actually the ne plus ultra of human happiness to live unattached, the better to do exactly what you want exactly when you want to? It seems so juvenile, a child’s idea of fulfillment: to do whatever you want, and none of the things you don’t want, forever and ever, until death. Part of growing up is the realisation that a unilateral life is also a lonely one, that there is value in attachment. To be needed by another living thing — a spouse, a child, a pet, a plant — is a curb on absolute freedom, but there’s joy in it, too.

Progressives tend to cite women’s liberation and the rise of non-heterosexual couplings as positive factors fuelling the decline in marriage rates; less discussed but perhaps equally salient is the contemporary sense that marriage is square and stodgy and hence incompatible with the carefree state of perpetual adolescence in which it is now possible to live long after reaching the age of majority. Millennials aren’t even having midlife crises at the same rate as previous generations, at least in part because they aren’t settling into marriage, parenthood, home ownership — in short, into the kind of commitments that trigger existential dread about the road not taken.

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Of course, every entry into this debate — including this one, at least up until this moment — tends to ignore the practical issues that prevent people from getting married. Some of this, like the unaffordability of housing, is an economic problem. But some of it, I think, is fear. The fear of growing up, and getting old. The fear of doing something so serious it can’t be easily undone or written off as a childish error. The fear of building a whole entire world with another person, and all the terrible vulnerability that entails — a vulnerability which has always been scary, but perhaps particularly so for a generation that equates emotional discomfort with being unsafe.

It’s telling that even the most pro-marriage arguments tend to be data-driven, hanging on the pragmatic rather than the romantic. Much has been made of a study by economist Sam Peltzman, which charts American happiness levels against declining marriage rates. The benefits of wedlock are presented as a matter of simple mathematics; the marriage sceptics, meanwhile, say that its proponents have simply mistaken cause for effect. “For those who have money, marriage is likely to help them to have even more of it; for those who find a good match, there are many emotional and societal rewards of partnership,” Rebecca Traister writes. “But you need stability first; you need the money, jobs, housing, and health care first.”

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Notably, there’s not much room in this paradigm for love, nor for the couple who has nothing figured out, and no idea what kind of life they want to live, except that they’d like to live it together. The progressive idea seems to be that even in the best-case scenario, marriage should still be understood as the decorative flourish on top of a life, rather than the foundation on which to build one. But to understand marriage in terms of this cost-benefit analysis — What’s in this for me? — is to misunderstand it. Even the more conservative arguments in its favour — that married couples can expect better health, greater happiness, and a more stable environment in which to raise children — skate across the surface of the institution instead of plumbing its deeper meaning.

The pro-marriage camp has become associated with its loudest and most deranged voices, demanding an end to no-fault divorce, or a return to the dark ages of domestic misery — so that even more moderate commentary, such as Melissa Kearney’s recent book The Two-Parent Privilege, is prone to interpretation by critics as a call for forced cohabitation and legal entanglement for parents who do not want this. But one needn’t endorse those proposals to imagine a world in which that entanglement is something more people do want, and in which its deeper meaning is something we acknowledge in earnest. Enough pretending that we’re all too cool and ambitious and self-actualised to care about falling in love and building a life with someone; enough with the app-driven illusion that human connection is cheap and easy to find. A better conversation about marriage would be one that recognises how much of its value lies in things that can’t be measured or legislated, in the realm of the intangible. Intimacy. Companionship. The presence and rhythm of another heart beating beside you in the dark.

His date (Sandra Bullock) recoils: “Ew! Disgusting! You mean…” — she can barely say it without gagging — “…fluid transfer?!”

This scene isn’t exactly pivotal to the movie, but with time it’s come to seem significant. “Rampant exchange of bodily fluids was one of the major reasons for the downfall of society,” Sandra Bullock says, explaining that the practice — which includes not only sex but kissing — has been outlawed in the name of safety. In our future, human touch has been deemed a luxury no enlightened society can afford.

Obviously, our own attempts at social engineering haven’t reached the point of outlawing physical contact, although the height of the Covid pandemic brought us remarkably and sometimes hilariously close. Remember when a Canadian Center for Disease Control recommended that couples have sex through glory holes to avoid breathing on each other? And yet, that instinct towards safetyism is one to which human beings have always been susceptible — and one that’s visible today in our ongoing attempts to streamline, organise, automate and make frictionless all the parts of life that used to be messy.

The vacuum left by the decline of old-fashioned dating and relationshipping, the kind that involved meeting someone in person and experiencing the exciting chemical process known as “hitting it off”, has been filled by a fair amount of explicitly anti-social behaviour as people eschew, or even fear, the possibility of making a connection without the intermediary of a screen. Meanwhile, the lure of the online world and its peculiar system of rewards has upended the etiquette surrounding romantic entanglements, particularly when it comes to being gracious with and about rejection. It is not frowned upon, for instance, to publicly share and mock the awkward messages men send to hopeful matches on dating apps.

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The more we delegate to the apps and the algorithms, the more we swipe and tap our screens, the less we ever actually touch anything else, including each other. In lieu of connection, what we increasingly have are services, which offer a safe, controlled facsimile of the real thing. A lot of these are also online: there are the camgirls who perform for a faceless crowd of observers, all competing for their attention through donations. There are the OnlyFans performers who offer the illusion of an intimate online connection in exchange for cash. There are virtual chatbots who will role-play as your girlfriend and talk to you for hours; some of them are even AI clones of real people.

But most interesting, and most controversial, are the services that simulate intimacy face-to-face and skin-to-skin. In the past, a person aching to be touched by another human being would make do with massage or having a stranger shampoo her hair; now, there’s a booming cottage industry of professional cuddlers who will hold you (or just hold your hand) for about $100 per hour. One, recently profiled in the New Yorker, has a menu of 80 different positions to choose from and says that the country is suffering from an epidemic of “skin hunger” in the wake of the pandemic — though he skirts the question of whether said hunger can truly be satisfied by this sort of transactional intimacy. All he knows is, his clients keep coming back.

A professional cuddle is safe and certified, but also explicitly non-sexual. For those who want more, who desire the intimacy but not the risks or vulnerability or self-doubt of a sexual relationship, there’s a whole new category of sex therapist, one who will not only discuss the physical act of love, but actually do it with you — at least sometimes, at least for a while. Their patients are people who struggle with physical intimacy, perhaps due to disability, military injury or gender transition. They call themselves “surrogate partners”.

A New York Times article about the practice is at pains to explain that they are not prostitutes, but nor are they just therapists. What they offer is something like psychology with a dash of sex work, with elements of self-improvement and skill-building. To me, they seem like a sort of sexual sensei, the equivalent of a fencing coach who has to spar with his client to help them improve their game. But also the word, surrogate, means substitute or replacement, and a central tenet of these relationships is that they’ll eventually end — that the surrogate partner will be replaced by a real one.

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Here, there seems to be something of a catch-22: how well do the teachings of a paid sexual sensei translate in real-world relationships? By the time you’ve hired one of these therapists to teach you how to have a normal sex life, don’t you sort of definitionally not have one? When you find a real partner, do you tell them about the sex therapy you’ve had, as you might discuss your sexual history — or keep it to yourself, as you might the intricacies of your medical one?

But the question of whether surrogate partners are effective is less interesting than the question of how they came to exist, what societal void they’re filling. Obviously, there’s always been a market for people who are willing to trade sex for money — but again, these are not prostitutes. (As one of the profiled therapists notes, sex workers do not generally require you to attend months of therapy before sleeping with you.) Their appeal, their purpose, must be something else. Maybe it’s this: they make formal and transactional what is, by nature, unpredictable and messy.

A surrogate partner will never ghost you, never blindside you with an “it’s not you it’s me” breakup; “sessions,” the New York Times notes, “are typically held weekly, in one to two-hour meetings until all three” — that is, the client, referring therapist, and surrogate —”agree that the therapy is complete.”

In this way, surrogate partners seem to be a product of a broad cultural desire to organise every emotionally risky endeavour into a rules-based framework that makes it safe — from refereeing the conflicts of children during their parent-organised playdates to making spontaneous flirtation taboo (“I didn’t consent to being asked out!”). We’re not quite at the point of finding the unbridled human experience revolting, or trying to make it illegal, but there does seem to be an emerging consensus that fumbling around in the sexual realm, be it literally or figuratively, is dangerous.

The controlled, controllable, bought-and-paid-for version of intimacy offered by professional cuddlers and surrogate partners is arguably one example of mitigating that danger. Another, perhaps, is the incursion into ordinary relationships of therapy-speak, which simultaneously obscures and exacerbates whatever actual conflicts a couple might have. A scroll through TikTok or Instagram reveals that normal dating and relationships have been all but pathologised, the conversation surrounding them rife with “red flags” and “triggers” and “boundaries” — the latter often used to describe things that might have once been called “preferences”.

In one recent and remarkable example, the actor Jonah Hill was accused of “coercive control” (note: still more therapy-speak) after his ex leaked a years-old text message in which he described his desire for her not to post bikini pictures on Instagram as one of his “boundaries”. On the one hand, the whole incident was just a piece of not-particularly-salacious celebrity gossip; on the other, it does reveal the mechanisms by which we try to protect ourselves from our own human messiness. To speak of boundaries in this context implies a sort of moral righteousness — the kind associated with the phrase “doing the work” — even as you seek to exert undue control over another person’s choices. It also implies that this is a high-stakes conflict in which the very integrity of one’s person is at risk. Yet scratch the surface of Hill’s so-called boundaries, and what do you find? Jealousy, plain and simple.

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Of course, it’s not hard to figure out why someone would prefer to frame this as a conversation about boundaries instead of one about jealousy. Boundaries are enlightened, elevated, therapeutic. Jealousy is ugly, and unpleasant, and ordinary.

And so is loneliness.

Here is where, I think, the worlds of therapy-speak and surrogate partners and professional cuddlers collide: people don’t want to feel bad. They especially don’t want to feel bad about themselves. And channeling our feelings of humiliation or loneliness or jealousy through a different framework, be it therapeutic or transactional, allows us to pretend that they’re something other than what they really are. To hold them at a clinical distance. To experience them as an inoffensive copy of a copy of a copy of the real thing.

It’s an understandable impulse, not to want to wade around in the mess. And maybe for some people, the ones who might never otherwise experience intimacy at all, the ones who fear losing control too much to ever allow themselves to be vulnerable, these risk-free relationships — or the illusion thereof — are as good as it gets. But it’s hard not to notice that, like the VR sex helmets in Demolition Man, the safe and transactional version of intimacy has a way of making everything a little bit less human — including ourselves.

What might be most remarkable about this document, and the cultural moment in which it exists, is that this final data point doesn’t necessarily make much difference. The spreadsheet in question belongs to an internet personality known as Aella, who views the physical act of love with the detached curiosity of a scientist and the strategic eye of a statistician. She’s a rare bird, not just in her approach to sex but in how she’s successfully parlayed it into a miniature empire: Aella is a former camgirl, now escort, and an elite member of the 1% on the amateur porn-subscription site OnlyFans, where she once netted six figures per month sharing self-produced photos and videos. 

But while it’s not unusual for someone in her line of work to be good at decoupling heart (and hormones) from mind, when Aella appeared in conversation with sex educator Laci Green at last week’s “Hereticon” thoughtcrime conference in Miami, the presentation revealed less about the niche mindset of the sex worker than it did about how ordinary people struggle to connect in a gamified dating landscape driven by data before passion. In the era of the algorithm, the personal brand, the Tinder marketplace, perhaps all sex carries a whiff of transaction, whether or not any money changes hands. And in a world where young, single people are increasingly taught to be frightened of any threat to their safety — emotional, not just physical — the prospect of true intimacy grows ever distant, ever more impossible.

What’s happening in heterosexual couplings now is also, crucially, about what isn’t happening: a sexual famine amongst Gen Z, who are upending the entire romantic landscape as they come of age. There is less sex, but also less dating, less social interaction writ large without the intermediary of a screen.

This isn’t the free love of the sexual revolution, nor the sex positivity espoused by the commitment-free hookup culture that reigned in the early Noughties. It’s something new, and also something post-#MeToo, and perhaps not entirely unrelated to our contemporary obsession with consent as the primary (sometimes only) framework for determining if a given encounter was good or not. Meeting strangers on the internet went in a generational spasm from being maximally unsafe to the only way to do things, as the existence of dating apps rendered the old ways of connecting not just quaint, but creepy.

Our pre-internet rituals were especially fraught with the risk of approaching someone who didn’t consent to be seen as a romantic prospect. Now, every interaction is preceded by the assurance that your crush has contractually agreed to be lusted-after, that no boundaries are being violated.

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At the same time, the idea of sex as something people do for fun seems faded from the public consciousness, perhaps a natural consequence of too many millennial women having discovered that the utopian promise of feminist sex-positivity was laden with hidden negatives; that being able to have sex free of stigma or slut-shaming still comes with costs nevertheless.

For years, women had been thrust into the role of the bad cop, assigned the unpleasant duty of forever resisting the advances of horny men who couldn’t be expected to exercise restraint or good judgment on their own. But having been released from the social obligation to say “no” lest you be labeled a slut, a new pressure emerged to say “yes”, lest you be tarred with the stigma of the sex-negative prude. The result was a generation of women engaging in sex that was, yes, consensual, but also not much fun, especially when it was happening at the behest of a generation of men whose idea of sex was heavily influenced by internet porn. Women cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually, of course.

When you consider how many women have been foundering around for years in the vast grey chasm of sex that is technically consensual but not remotely enjoyable, it’s no surprise that the act itself took a reputational hit. The emerging perception now is that sex is dangerous, dicey, probably not worth the risk — especially as concepts like “trauma” and “abuse” have expanded to include everything from the sting of a lover’s betrayal to the heartbreak when a consensual relationship ends. (See also: the increased use of the word “grooming”, once reserved for the sexual predation of children, to describe flirtatious relationships between consenting adults.) Under this rubric, the idea that someone might engage in physical intimacy for fun seems practically absurd. Young women in the post-MeToo era are taught that they can’t let their guard down for one single moment, while young men are told that they’re always just one misread cue or mixed message away from committing a rape.

It’s hardly surprising under the circumstances that this generation would take refuge in the safety of dating apps, or, for that matter, in the certainty of transactional sex. Whatever the pratfalls of subscribing to a freelance porn star’s OnlyFans the way some people used to do with Playboy, paying for intimacy outright at least eliminates the dangerous ambiguity that plagues an ordinary dating relationship, where the line between asking and coaxing, or coaxing and coercion, might shift at any moment and leave you standing with your pants down on the wrong side of the line.

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Whether it’s settling for an imperfect match or turning to OnlyFans to fill your needs, human beings have always appreciated the security and promise of a sure thing. And when an entire progressive messaging apparatus insists that prostitution is the new empowerment, there’s little to dissuade young women from leveraging the minefield of sexuality into a remunerative side hustle — or young men from gravitating toward it as a safer form of sex.

We may not have quite reached the point where making freelance pornography is a rite of passage akin to attending the prom (even if anecdotes from Green suggest that “Do you have an OnlyFans?” might soon become the new “Will you go out with me?” among the school-age set). But will anyone be surprised when some young, enterprising, self-identified male feminist suggests that subscribing to OnlyFans is the only way to ensure proper consent, actually? Are we, perhaps, already halfway there?

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a radical shift in how we conceive of sex, sexuality, self. In the age of social media, sexual orientation is something you identify into, a public performance that requires no partner and no physical follow-through. (Consider also the odd proliferation of straight-married women who identify as “queer,” based on what seems mainly like a conviction that they’re just too interesting to be plain ol’ heterosexual.) It’s all identification, no action, a complete decoupling of sexual identity from the act itself. If this is a sexual revolution, it’s the chastest one we’ve ever had.

At the same time, the battle of the sexes has been arguably won by women, who are outperforming men in everything from education to investment. They best boys in high school and outnumber them on college campuses. They go to grad school in greater numbers and earn the majority of PhDs. And while they haven’t yet flooded boardrooms or executive suites, women are increasingly likely to outearn the men they marry — all of which adds up to a total inversion of the old dating dynamics wherein women with slightly less education or earning power made ideal mates for men with slightly more.

Instead, a whole lot of accomplished, educated, highly-paid ladies are competing in a dating pool that contains a scant few high-achieving men — and if they can’t land one, then their options are to date down, or not at all. In this reality, it’s the women jostling for position, optimising their dating profiles, trying to look good to the algorithm that will in turn serve them up to someone as a desirable catch. And the odds are stacked against them: for reasons that will some day make fascinating fodder for evolutionary psychologists, women are far harsher judges of male desirability than vice versa. Studies suggest that about 80% of women on dating apps are in competition for about 20% of the men.

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The whole enterprise highlights the distinction-without-much-difference between selling yourself in the dating marketplace and just, well, selling yourself. Maybe you’re trying to make money, or maybe you’re trying to get married, but it’s the same hustle, more or less. If you’re not keeping a spreadsheet yourself, you’re just a data point on someone else’s. Except here, the disposability is a feature, not a bug. If your OnlyFans affair bores you, you can just unsubscribe; if your Tinder match fails to deliver, you can swipe the other way and vanish behind a block. No fuss. No muss. No breakup. Tinder, like Twitter, is not a real place.

This might make women like Aella the smart ones: if they’re savvy (and lucky), they can work the system to their advantage instead of fumbling around inside it like blind supplicants. Making metadata of human beings will always be better as a business proposition than as a strategy for human connection — which might explain why, despite the lauded safety and convenience of the apps, Gen Z is not only having less sex but also suffering from greater rates of depression and anxiety.

Dating apps, social media, the sexual marketplace where you can pay for parasocial affairs: all of this has been an attempt to organise not just raw data, but raw humanity, to contain the complexities of love and sex and intimacy in a set of neat little checkboxes. If it didn’t exactly make us happy, then at least (we thought) it would keep us safe. And it did, sort of — insofar as there’s a certain sort of protection in the avoidance of intimacy. If it’s all just a numbers game, if you’re getting what you paid for, if you never truly allow yourself to be vulnerable and naked, literally or figuratively, with another person, then nobody will ever get close enough to hurt you.

But they won’t get close enough to touch you, either.

And so maybe this is where the next sexual revolution will emerge: among young people who are tired of trying to connect with the contraceptive barrier of a screen between them. Who resent the hidden manipulations of the algorithm in messy human affairs. Who would rather risk the pain of an old-school heartbreak. Who understand the difference between being empowered and being a control freak. Who know, in their bones, that they would rather be sorry than safe.

Lockdown has disorientated everyone’s social life, with the indefinite suspension of the night-time economy — pubs, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, theatres and music venues. Of course, some pleasure-seeking inevitably has to be sacrificed temporarily for the sake of arresting the spread of the virus and protecting those most vulnerable. But the sacrifice has hit singletons and voluptuaries particularly hard.

The last year has been a puritan’s wet dream: social distancing has devastated all the industries that facilitate casual sex; some countries have imposed alcohol restrictions; the film industry even consulting the old priggish Hays Code for filming intimate scenes; universities restricting parties and hooking up on campus in the interest of public health. And now a third lockdown has once again cancelled all opportunities for us to go out and enjoy ourselves.

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Worse, it’s felt as if the risk of spreading the virus has been exploited to bolster an old prejudice: that spending time in these places is inherently immoral. The stench of puritanism, which H.L Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy”, has risen to the surface to pollute the nostrils of society. Official Western morality — whether represented by Plato, Christianity or Kant — has always regarded hedonism as fundamentally bad. The new Puritans, like the old ones, like to police the way other people get their pleasure.

You don’t need to have broken any rule to earn their ire: to even complain about what it feels like not being able to date or party, or even socialise with friends over a drink, is regarded as inappropriate, dismissed as inconsequential, in comparison to the noble goal of saving lives.

And so no one protests that the lifestyles of the lustful, the promiscuous, the sluts and fuckbois (“libertine men and scarlet women” as The Music Man refers to them) have been turned upside down. Some hopeful young romantics gave e-dating a go; others tried out “Zoom nightclubs”. The use of online porn has increased and OnlyFans has risen meteorically. But the pleasures of the flesh have been out of bounds.

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Even though I knew this state was temporary, in the early days of lockdown an irrational, paranoid voice inside me did entertain fears that the so called “new normal” would irrevocably abolish these pleasures. In stark contrast, the neo-puritans celebrated the current chaste state of affairs — even calling for it to continue. They imagine Covid-19 to be the nail in the coffin for the “soul-eroding” hook-up culture; they reminded us that there are dangerous “consequences” to casual sex again.

Thank science for the vaccine then. Not only is it a testament to human endeavour,  it is also a precious golden ticket to the return of a varied and exciting social life. Some predict, or rather salivate over, an explosion of decadence and debauchery — a “roaring twenties” of the 21st century. Epidemiologist Dr Nicholas Christakis certainly thinks such an era is on its way, arguing in his recent book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, that the rest of the 2020s will be defined by “sexual licentiousness” as people will be “relentlessly seeking social interaction”.

During the peaks of pandemics, he argues, people tend to be more risk-averse, frugal, abstemious and socially reserved. Afterwards, all of these trends reverse, and people spend and socialise more liberally than ever before. The most obvious comparison, of course, is the Jazz Age following the Spanish Flu and the First World War that witnessed “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. The era was made legendary by the Flappers and Greenwich Village; it developed new social and cultural freedoms, especially for women, who turned against stifling domesticity (as so many of us now long to.)

During the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the belief that the end of the world was near was so popular that survivors became wildly hedonistic, organising lavish parties and feasts in ale houses, simply to celebrate the fact that they were alive amidst the spectre of death and misery all around them. “They spent day and night moving from one tavern to the next, drinking without mode or measure…engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure”, observed the contemporary writer Boccaccio on the excesses of the era.

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There are even accounts of survivors going to their local graveyard for a quick shag before repenting in church to laugh in the face of death, which later led to the Papal office threatening fines and excommunication. Moreover, the plague saw the de facto institutionalisation of prostitution, with brothels providing a new source of income for the authorities and arguably ensuring social stability by serving as an outlet for riotous lower class men, especially in areas where they outnumbered young women.

In the 1980s the HIV/AIDS epidemic was supposed to have been the end of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. It was viewed by religious fundamentalists as cosmic karma for the promiscuity of gay men. The epidemic contributed to the demise of the gay-centred bathhouse culture and shifted campaigners’ focus from sexual liberation to gay marriage. The porn theatres that were once a hallmark in Time Square, New York were gentrified in favour of “family values and safety”.

Still, the HIV/AIDs epidemic was succeeded by the sex positivity of the 1990s, during which the West was drunk on the rather shallow liberal optimism of the ‘end of history’ following the end of the Cold War. That era saw the Spice Girls, the golden age of lads mags and the rise of queer culture, kink/BDSM and Tantric sex in mainstream pop culture — and their steady integration into the consumer economy.

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A pattern is apparent: human beings are pleasure seeking-creatures. After a period of retrenchment, sacrifice and austerity, an orgy of decadence and debauchery isn’t too far away. All that pent-up energy and desire just waits to express itself. Why? Because it feels good. Don’t underestimate the sheer endurance of the human libido, and the lengths we will go to, even in unbearable situations, to satisfy it.

For the neo-puritans who are surreptitiously giddy that Covid-19 will somehow put an end to casual sex and hook-up culture in favour of marriage or at least long term “emotionally committed” relationships: if even HIV/AIDS couldn’t do it, then Covid-19 sure as hell can’t. Humans have always hooked up despite what traditional morality said — and will continue to do so. Once this third — and we can only hope final — lockdown comes to an end, lust will be in the air.

One key motif of modern politics in the past decade has been the recurrence of the antinomy between individualism and communitarianism. This has especially been the case in the Covid-19 pandemic, during which activities like partying have been condemned as individualist selfishness in contrast to our communal obligations to “protect our NHS”. It is important to stress, nevertheless, that hedonistic proclivities aren’t simply about satiating individual desires, but about forming bonds, connection, even intimacy with others.

The “anarchy of the flesh” is an essential part of social life: we drink, eat, party, dance and screw with other people. There is a particular intimacy that one can experience on a dancefloor or in a concert that can evolve into a transcendent experience. This is something to be valued and cherished as part of the human experience — and something to invest and indulge in, when the pandemic is in the past.

I’d be inclined to rate my mother’s birds and bees talk as a five out of ten, if it weren’t for one key aspect. When she described the intimate business of making love, we three made the usual protests of, “Yuck!”, “No!” and “I’m NEVER doing that!”, at which point Mum said, “You’re wrong. It’s the most beautiful feeling in all the world.” I was watching her face and, 43 years later, still recall a fleeting moment of ecstatic reverie. It was clear to me she was telling the truth (her truth, in any case) and from then onwards I nurtured the idea that the end game of sex should be rapture.

Which takes us — as all discussions about sex do at the moment — to the Netflix series Sex Education. The local academy my sons attend thought it necessary to send a memo home a couple of weeks ago from their “PSHE Coordinator” (Personal, Social and Health Education) warning parents to be aware that their children were likely to be watching the new season, despite its 18 certificate, “due to its representation of a variety of different teenage issues and curiosities”.

Damn right. My 15-year-old had pretty much inhaled both seasons and was delighted to note that the main character’s mother, a sex therapist and writer played by Gillian Anderson, “is almost as embarrassing as you”. The chat also meant I learnt exactly when his classmates had discovered, courtesy of Google, that I’d edited two erotic magazines and appeared on programmes with titles like, “100 Greatest Sexy Moments”.

The geography teacher who wrote the school’s letter went on to say, “Personally, I will be making sure I watch the series to ensure I know what is being shown and therefore to support questions should I be approached at school by pupils.” Judging by Series 1, I hoped she was braced to discuss rimming, scissoring, alien-themed erotica and how to suppress the gag reflex while performing fellatio. Of course, many of the show’s themes are more universal: performance anxiety, consent, the perils of sexting, body dysmorphia and the pervasive influence of porn culture.

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There’s no doubt Sex Education has usefully broadened the debate about the kind of sex scenarios we might reasonably expect our teens to encounter. There’s wide acceptance outside religious lobby groups that current sex education provision at UK schools is woefully inadequate. Worse than that, it’s not even compulsory by law. That will change this coming September, and even then “parents and carers may withdraw their children from sex education until three terms before they are 16 in secondary school”.

But even when children do exit school knowing a modicum about consent, the clitoris, gender fluidity, masturbation and full-on intercourse, there are significant gaps. It’s one thing for a teacher to say oral sex is perfectly normal, and quite another to explain how it’s best performed. And they’re certainly not braced to argue whether sex could or should have meaning beyond being a pleasurable horizontal workout.

To return to my late lamented mother’s thoughts on sex, what none of the current educational provision deals with is the beauty. Or to misquote Woody Allen: is sex beautiful? Only when it’s being done right. This erasure of erotic value in our sex ed affects many people, whatever their age or level of sexual experience. If you don’t expect an ecstatic sexual experience, you’re more likely to accept the mundane or disappointing.

Take a friend of mine in her 50s, who’s just exited a long marriage to a stolid businessman who cheated on her with his tennis coach. She has just taken up with a sexy chef and their lovemaking is the stuff of revelation. She told me: “It’s a cliché to say it, but I didn’t know sex could be like this — an out-of-body, electrifying, almost religious experience.” Then her voice became wistful and slightly accusatory: “You knew this, didn’t you?” I had to admit, yes, I did. Not on a constant, smug or failsafe basis, but definitely as something to aim for.

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Of course, it’s hard to the point of impossibility to talk about the sublime in sex. It either sounds absurd or boastful — just dwell for a nanosecond on Sting talking about Tantra. The forces that have shaped our culture, from Protestantism to the Enlightenment and capitalism, aren’t too wedded to transcendentalism. And then we’re British, so inclined to snigger.

Our natural instinct is not to take sex too seriously. Some years ago the classified ads manager at Private Eye told me the most popular lonely heart in the entire history of the magazine was a woman who described herself as, “Lady doctor, who likes laughing in bed.” It’s a brave person in western society who tries to put sincerity and meaning back into sex. Naomi Wolf had a go in her book Vagina, which took as its starting point the author’s sudden diminishment of sensation at the point of climax. When the full force of her orgasm is finally restored to her she writes:

“Sexual recovery for me was like that transition in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas to colorful, magical Oz. Slowly after orgasm I once again saw light flowing into the world around me. … I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something.”

Cue a chorus of critics cackling like hyenas. To my mind, that passage was the best bit of the book: an unabashed acknowledgement that there’s something about great sex that resets all your dials, knocks twenty years off your face, and — yeah, let’s go full woo-woo — makes you feel at one with the planet.

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But wider society often seems far keener to embrace the spirit of porn culture — namely that sex is primarily a frenetic but largely meaningless shag-fest — than to imbue it with some form of greater resonance. Screen depictions of intercourse are almost invariably of the thrusting, pumping, sucking variety. Which is tedious if there’s no counterbalance — no sense that time can seem to slow down when you’re totally absorbed with another person’s heartbeat.

No one seemed perturbed that the first episode of Sex Education — to return there for a moment — opened with a sex scene depicting a young woman having an orgasm from doggy-style sex while receiving no clitoral stimulation whatsoever. I felt compelled to lecture my poor 15-year-old son (“Mum! Shut up!”) on the fact that it’s quite rare for women to experience an orgasm through penetration alone and research suggests that almost 80% of women rarely or never have a climax that way. According to TV drama, around 95% of women achieve vaginal orgasms with no problem whatsoever.

Perhaps I protest too much. Is sex really that sublime? Olivia Fane doesn’t think so: she’s written a book called Why Sex Doesn’t Matter— reviewed for UnHerd by Zoe Strimpel — despite or, perhaps, because of having an open marriage in her twenties. Sarah Vine has written that she values sleep over erotic intimacy, and Suzanne Moore has been bored for some time now.

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I understand their arguments and that it’s the columnist’s art to be provocative. Our culture is over-saturated by tedious images of mindless rutting and ersatz passion. When you’re married for many years — as Fane and Vine have been — erotic hunger fades and companionability is often more highly rated.

Still, it feels like a terrible swizz to complain from your 50s and 60s, when libido has often dampened, that sex is overrated. Imagine spinning that yarn to a younger self back in the days when you yearned for nothing more than to become one with the beloved. No citizen of a Latin American country would every say such a thing — to them it would be like saying you can dispense with food or water (but then they’ve never had to suffer Luther and a cold climate).

To disparage erotic intensity is to disown the most powerful feelings most of us (alright, not nuns and asexuals) will ever experience on this planet. Our love for our children tends to be more steady and steadfast. We would willingly die for our offspring, but we wouldn’t be so cavalier as to risk our livelihood for them. It’s erotic yearning that precipitates moments of madness that bring presidents to the brink — as so strikingly illustrated by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Sexual passion is unpredictable, unfettered and often takes on the quality of obsession, which leads to fear and censure. But living without boundaries in a stupor of the senses can give us some sense of the infinite and the unobtainable. The language of rapture belongs equally to lovers and God and it’s a dim-witted vicar who doesn’t acknowledge this. You can be sure they haven’t read the line, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God…”

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How can I back up any of these assertions? Not with statistics, as they’re notoriously unreliable on the subject of sex. That’s why the topic is such an alluring land-grab for anyone with a theory to pedal. But there’s plenty of persuasive evidence in myth, legend and literature — which is why novels, classic films and art should be employed in contemporary love lessons.

Since the dawn of narrative storytellers have known one thing for certain: sex matters. It really, truly matters. It’s the reason Paris of Troy started a war with the Spartans, having abducted and seduced the Spartan queen Helen. It’s why the Greek and Roman Gods were always quarrelling, finding themselves unable to resist illicit love affairs with stray nymphs, or mortals. Apollo had an impressive array of male lovers for starters. It’s why King Arthur was betrayed by his wife and the knight he most trusted. It’s why Scheherazade told so many erotic stories in the Arabian Nights, knowing few other themes would prove quite as compelling.

It’s why Romeo and Juliet defied their feuding families and why Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina enthral us a century and a half after publication. It’s why we return to Wuthering Heights despite Heathcliff’s barbaric behaviour that we’d now term domestic violence. There’s something numinous that speaks to a profound, hungry part of the reader when Cathy declares of Heathcliff, “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”.

It’s why Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People met with such widespread critical and popular acclaim and is about to hit our TVs as a drama series. Few writers since Emily Brontë have captured so acutely the sense of jeopardy, ecstasy and narcotic intensity that results from two young people baring bodies, minds and souls.

And it’s why readers of all stripes delight in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty: the recognition that desire transcends gender and heterosexual clichés.

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There’s something all those bards, storytellers and novelists know as they turn their own experience into fictional narrative — that there are heightened times in most people’s lives when nothing matters more than the desire to drown in the physical perfection of the longed-for lover.

Commentators are always telling us we ask too much from sex, but I think it’s possible we ask too little. Why crush physical connection into a small space and say daft, but socially acceptable guff like, “I’d prefer a cup of tea,” or “Chocolate’s better than sex”? It’s impossibly hard to assert that there’s nothing wrong with seeking profound physical connection that leaves us quivering with rapture.

A good friend calls this uncanny bond quantum entanglement: the sense that if you and best beloved mate are on opposite sides of the planet your atoms will be moving in tandem, twinned across time and space. This may be more poetic than strictly scientific, but at least it transports sex to the realm of the imagination where all the finest human endeavours are nurtured. I can’t help feeling a great metaphysician like John Donne would embrace the concept. This Valentine’s Day, it seems only appropriate to quote the most sublime lines from the most sublime poem in the English language, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys.

This is the erotic education I return to more than any other, because Donne’s sentiments are always freshly minted: reborn in the rapture I glimpse around me and anticipate for my sons when they come of age; relived in the beauty I have sometimes been fortunate enough to experience myself.

For the past four years, I’ve been keeping a careful eye on the sex robot market, researching the technical, ethical and legal landscape these artificial lovers inhabit. The concept is catnip to tabloid journalists seeking salacious and ultimately scary visions of sex robots that could herald the end of sex and replace and/or steal your women. The reality is more staid and nuanced.

Arguments against sexual companion robots hinge on the worry that sex robot-human relationships will be detrimental to society, damaging human-human relationships. There is also concern they will reinforce or reproduce existing inequalities, especially given their incredibly gendered appearance. Will our sex robots spill our data and our secrets to the world? And what happens, people ask, if child sex robots are manufactured?

These are all valid points and there are no easy answers. While we should be conscious of the potential pitfalls of sex technology, we also need to avoid moralistic knee-jerk responses. Stigmatisation and taboo around sex and sexual practices has caused untold misery for many people down the centuries.

There’s no evidence to suggest that human-human relationships will be damaged. Indeed, it may be a chance for people to experience feelings of love that they are otherwise denied, for any number of reasons. Whether or not that love is considered valid by society is a different matter. And while objectification is definitely an issue, it may be an avoidable one. Security and privacy breaches are a worry in any smart technologies, which puts a whole new spin on safe sex.

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As for child sex robots – an abhorrent image – people have already been convicted for importing child-like sex dolls. But we shouldn’t shy from considering whether research might deem them useful in a clinical setting, such as testing rehabilitation success, as has been trialled with virtual reality.

While non-sexual care robots are already in use, [1. Companion robots have proved a great success helping with healthcare and providing therapeutic companionship. Manufacturers are well aware that people might turn to their creations for services that could void the warranty. In fact, Pepper, a companion robot built in collaboration between Aldebaran Robotics and the SoftBank Corporation, comes with terms and conditions that forbid the use of it for “the purpose of sexual or indecent behaviour”] it was only three months ago, that the race to produce the first commercially-available model was won by an lifeless sex doll with an animatronic head and an integrated AI chatbot called Harmony.[2. Abyss Creations is developing a male robot called Henry — but that’s a much smaller part of their business.] She might look the part but she doesn’t move from the neck down. We are still a long way from Westworld.

Naturally, a niche market will be delighted at the prospect of bespoke robot pleasure to come. But many others are worried about the impact these machines will have on our own, human relationships. These concerns aren’t dispelled by the fact that the current form of the sex robot is a reductive, cartoonish stereotype of a woman: all big hair and bigger breasts.

Why, though, does a sex robot need to be an exaggerated version of the human bodies we are so familiar with? The technology is giving us the scope to bring intimacy into the lives of people who may lack it, or to enhance existing relationships, and I don’t believe that our sex robots have to take humanoid form. In fact, I think it’s much better if they don’t.

In 2016 and 2017, I ran sex tech hackathons at Goldsmiths, University of London, where over 50 people from all walks of life formed teams to prototype new forms of technology for intimacy. The ideas that the teams came up with were far more interesting and abstract than a life-size doll.

Instead, they envisaged blankets with sensors to stimulate you, and inflatable tubes to hug, pulse and hold you; tentacle-like soft robotics that could curl around the body, and vibrators powered by mid—air hand gestures. The emphasis shifted from sexual activity to sensuality. The technology they envisaged wasn’t just to replace human lovers but to bring people closer together.

The people who currently buy sex dolls – the people who are most likely going to buy sex robots – often cite companionship as their reason for doing so. Matt McMullen from Abyss Creations, describes his customers as “a group of really nice people who just happen, by choice or not by choice, to have difficulty in forming relationships”. It’s the AI that will make the big difference in his dolls, adding the longed-for animism. Harmony’s AI is designed to exist outside of the body too, as an app on your phone or tablet: the perfect pocket girlfriend.

So sex robots don’t need to look like us, nor do they necessarily need to be designed to have sex. The rise of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa has brought basic forms of AI into our homes like never before. And you won’t be surprised to know that lots of people try to talk dirty to their artificial helpers. Some are just testing the boundaries, but others are secretly hoping for a hot reply. Perhaps they took Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with an operating system in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film /Her/, a little too seriously.

That instinct to see more personality — and even sexuality — in our robot partners is pretty understandable. We humans are social creatures with an in-built tendency to anthropomorphise, projecting our own traits onto the plastic lump or genderless helper bot working with us, presuming a personality even if one hasn’t been programmed into it. We will map our expectations onto the technology, just as we see elaborate personalities in our pets.

There’s a safety in the artificial lover: a programmable partner who is always there for you and who will never let you down. The path of human love never did run smooth but the programme of a sex robot can run entirely to your liking. It’s a difficult tension – the appeal of artificial adoration but the natural human fear of technological change.

If we are happy using machines to offer companionship to older people and to improve care in hospitals, then it seems contradictory to not allow it in to our own bedrooms. There are already some incredibly inventive designs on the market taking their cue from the health industry which are indicating where technology can go in the future — machines that can learn what we want and respond accordingly; robots that don’t look like us but know what we like. That’s why the notion of humanoid sex robots replacing sex workers or destroying marriages is far fetched – not least because it’s so difficult to make a robot look, sound and act convincingly human.

It’s all too easy when talking about sex and technology to become entirely obsessed with the pure mechanics of the process. But there’s more to it than that. This technology can reduce distance between lovers and enhance what our bodies and even our brains can do in intimate encounters. Rather than thinking of machines as other, we should be considering how best to integrate them into our lives: enhancements, not replacements.

Most people aren’t that shocked by someone owning a vibrator anymore. Introducing greater levels of technology into our sex lives will be the same. As long as we’re careful to consider the ethical development of these innovations, we have nothing to lose except our inhibitions.