Last December, I learned that I will be having a son in May. Before I became a parent, I always thought I’d make a better boy mom than girl mom. My husband has likewise always struck me as the sort of man who’d make a good role model for a boy. And we already have two delightful little girls. It seemed only natural that I should be hoping for a boy—I know most of our family was. And yet, when the confetti cannon our friends bought us exploded into a fluttering cloud of blue, I found there was a nervous edge to the way I felt. Some of it, I’m sure, is that I know having a boy will inevitably bring with it new boy-specific parenting challenges, ones I’ve been blissfully ignorant of over in girl momhood. I’m a little worn out by the prospect of feeling like a rookie again. But I think my fears go a bit deeper than that.
On that point, I’m hardly alone. It seems everyone is a little worried about the boys these days, and not without reason. The challenges of raising boys in the modern era abound. But the one I find myself most daunted by is one I never anticipated. It sounds almost silly to articulate: How, in the age of the internet, can I raise a son who feels attracted to and enjoys having sex with women? Real women, that is—the sort of living and breathing women that he’ll encounter in everyday life and have a real shot of dating and marrying—rather than an imaginary composite of the digital renderings of women he’ll encounter online.
In short, my goal is not to raise a cyborgsexual. And I’m not sure I’m up to the task.
I suppose the easiest way to explain my concerns is to start with Sidney Sweeney-gate. For those who missed the drama, in December, just one week prior to our gender reveal, some unedited paparazzi photos of Sweeney sunbathing were published by the New York Post. To me and many others, she looked as you might expect: still very attractive, just not as bronzed, smooth, and snatched as she usually looks all dolled up in the well-lit, edited footage of her walking red carpets or posing for photoshoots. Nevertheless, the photos set off a torrent of criticism from (mostly) men on the internet who were decidedly unimpressed with her figure. This is only the latest version of this style of discourse: men expressing smug dissatisfaction with the appearance of the world’s most beautiful and shapely women. Margot Robbie is “mid,” evidently. Pamela Anderson, who has grown older about as gracefully as any of us can hope, has aged “like milk.” Tate McCrae is “plain looking.”
When I have expressed pity for the men disappointed by Sydney Sweeney’s unphotoshopped body, people often respond with some version of “you’re making too much of this”: This tiny cohort of the Extremely Online doesn’t represent the average male. Many of them are just looking to trigger people. And most of them are likely, well, full of it. If they were ever so lucky to find themselves in the presence of Sweeney, they’d go weak in the knees before they ever got close enough to touch her.
I think there is a lot of truth to these responses. I don’t want to make the same mistake I’m accusing others of: allowing the internet to distort my perception of reality. What’s more, I suspect that young men have always held silly ideas about women’s bodies. When I was in high school, a boy that I liked once joked that if he ever found out that his wife pooped he would divorce her. Part of growing up is reckoning with the messy reality and practical functions of women’s bodies. This can be an adjustment for women, too. I remember once, when I was in middle school, I attended a “puberty talk” hosted by a couple of the female teachers at my school. The girls in attendance were encouraged to ask any questions we had about our changing bodies. At some point, one of the older girls asked if it was okay to shave one’s pubic hair. One teacher, the cool one, told us that it was quite common to do a bit of grooming down there. Then the other piped up and admitted that she never bothered and that she didn’t think her husband had ever so much as noticed, let alone cared. I don’t think anyone has ever been an object of greater disdain than that teacher was by that classroom full of adolescent girls. From the standpoint of a group of girls preoccupied with being seen as desirable, the idea of letting oneself go in such a manner seemed utterly pathetic.
So this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Yet I do think that there is something new to worry about here—namely, that the internet is warping the sexual expectations, behaviors, and preferences of young people in deeply troubling ways. How could it not be? When I reported a piece about the rise of sexual choking last summer, I was surprised by how readily every researcher I spoke to acknowledged that sexuality—and by that I mean, what sort of things one finds sexually arousing and pleasurable—is, at least to some degree, shaped rather than discovered. The process of exploring one’s sexuality is socially guided. “Teens are not being raised in a vacuum, and they are exposed to a variety of images and messages and song lyrics and pictures and magazines and TikToks and social media and friends,” Elizabeth Morgan, a psychology professor at Springfield College, told me. All of that is shaping their understanding of what, when they get to be alone with someone, “they’re supposed to be doing.” What’s more, while one’s sexuality is no doubt biologically disposed, the notion that it is fixed is a fiction. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people “can learn to connect physical pleasure with all sorts of different things: people, objects, places, parts of the body or whatever else,” Morgan told me. And sexuality is inevitably culturally bound, which helps to explain why there is such huge variation in sexual behavior across generations and nations. There is a reason that ankles were eroticized during the Victorian era, or that small feet were fetishized when foot binding was common in China, Debby Herbenick, a researcher who has spearheaded much of the research on the emergence of this phenomenon, told me. “Every culture has these things where you can see how sexuality has been shaped by norms, by religion,” or other various “social scripts,” Herbenick said.
There is simply no denying that the internet now has a lot of sway over this process. Increasingly, it is the medium through which young people are exposed to both the nude human form and sex. Indeed, there is no way to explain the rise of sexual choking without the internet, Herbenick told me. The smoothed-over, posed, airbrushed, and facetuned imagery we are exposed to online has undeniably shaped our understanding of what the human body should look like.
It’s not hard to see how this would result in what the Substacker Mikala Jamison has dubbed “beauty standard brain rot.” Perhaps many of those men dismissing Sweeney’s body are bluffing, but after the uproar, the writer Jeremy Mohler penned a thoughtful essay in which he admitted feeling sorry for his own disappointment at her unphotoshopped figure. While reporting a piece about the declining popularity of nude beaches a few years ago, I found that some suspect this sort of “brain rot” is partially to blame. Constant exposure to perfectly sculpted bodies online renders the sagging, dappled and jiggling bodies you might see on a beach not only unimpressive but actually sort of icky.
The downsides of all this for women are obvious. How are they supposed to compete with the ageless women online? They are overwhelmingly on the receiving end of the aggressive, violent sex that has steadily come to be seen as the norm. And yet, when I think about the romantic options my children will have as adults, I find myself more worried for my son than my daughters.
When your sexual desires are molded by the internet, you can end up with a set of expectations and tastes quite far removed from what a real human woman can easily satisfy. Last year, I stumbled on a Reddit post in which a young woman asked whether it was normal that her boyfriend didn’t like it when she walked around topless. It was a strange post, and I was relieved to find that the comments were filled with men and women telling her that, yes, that’s pretty weird. As commenters continued to pry into OP’s circumstances, she revealed a series of bleak details. Her partner had, it turned out, very particular, aggressive, and elaborate sexual preferences that were shaped by an “unhealthy relationship to porn,” as she put it. Sex with him was lengthy, but also “fast and hard and a little extreme or else he can’t get there.” As a result, she often couldn’t muster the energy for it—even if she was in the mood. It was simply too exhausting and too painful to do regularly.
I felt sorry for the woman, of course, but her partner’s fate seemed downright tragic. Porn had so distorted his sexual impulses that to see his partner’s naked body was a distressing experience. He couldn’t enjoy sex that didn’t push the bounds of what she could handle physically. Yes, I know, it’s Reddit. It’s impossible to know how much of the post is accurate or real. Still, assuming for a moment that the woman’s story is true, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the two of them went on to have children. Caring for an infant would inevitably deplete the immense energy reserves that it must take for her to act out his extensive, aggressive fantasies. In my experience, sexual satisfaction during the early years of parenthood is correlated with how content one is to have low-effort, not-so-dirty sex, during less than ideal times when neither of you has had an opportunity to shower, let alone shave or otherwise primp. It’s strange to feel lucky to be married to a man for whom that sort of sex is still very much a welcome thrill. And yet I do. It feels silly to say, but I want to raise a son who, when he’s 35 years old, married, and raising a young child or two, can enjoy vanilla sex with his aging vanilla wife.
To be perpetually unimpressed by the unadorned bodies of regular women is to be cut off from the possibility of a fulfilling lifelong romantic relationship. It means that some combination of Photoshop and pornography has stunted your capacity for attraction to the opposite sex, trapping you in a permanent adolescence, in which the only sort of woman that can satisfy you is one who doesn’t poop, has no cellulite or body hair, and never ages. In other words, the partner you seek is not a woman but a cyborg. You’ll never find her in the flesh.
In some ways, what I want for my son is not so different from what parents have wanted for their kids for ages: I want him to find the woman of his dreams. But for that to happen, he’ll need to dream of real women.
