Have you ever wondered if people make small talk at an orgy? I have the answer for you: they do. Ali, 30, recently attended her first sex party and found herself as socially at sea as most of us feel at a work party: “I remained fully clothed,” she says. “At one point, at about 2am, the guy who had taken me asked what I was thinking and, before I could censor myself, I blurted out, ‘That I’m never going to be prime minister now.’”
Ali, who has recently come out of a long relationship, decided she wanted to explore S&M and sexual power play. She began by joining the fetish app KinkD, to connect with a like-minded community, but found the number of messages she received fairly overwhelming. “I am not judging anyone,” she says. “It should be a safe space to find someone who shares whatever specific interests you are into, but my favourite was definitely the blunt opening line: ‘Would you rub me with raw bacon?’”
Welcome to a generation that is apparently having wilder sex than any of its predecessors, a group for whom kink and sexual deviance are as de rigueur as Beatles albums and Biba boots were for the baby boomers. New research shows that millennials are having more adventurous sex than those who came (forgive me) before them. The analysis of the latest National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, showed that more than 1 in 10 millennial teenagers said that they had tried anal sex by the age of 18, and among 22- to 24-year-olds, more than three in 10 said they had tried it.
The most obvious place to lay responsibility for this would be the internet, the overwhelming presence of which marks the main difference between the young adult life of millennials and that of generation X. A popular theory for this change in sex lives is that the nature of pornography now available free online — ranging from the extreme to the grotesque and the absurd — is reshaping the desires of our unconscious minds. However, more recently, it has been suggested that it is not the content of pornography that has changed wildly in the past 10 years, but rather the widespread access to it, a phenomenon explored in Jon Ronson’s acclaimed Audible podcast series The Butterfly Effect. Long gone is the furtive brown paper bag of perverse or obscene imagery purchased down a dark alleyway in Soho. Porn streaming sites such as YouPorn and Pornhub have made every niche and kink of pornography as easy to access as the latest episode of The Great British Bake Off on All 4 (arguably both are likely to feature a soggy bottom).
What is certain is that the people who enjoy having kinky sex are feeling increasingly less shame. Sex positivity is a growing movement both on- and off-line, advocating a non-judgmental, open-minded, inclusive and celebratory attitude towards sexuality, in which consent and honesty are paramount, and shame or embarrassment unwelcome.
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Vix Meldrew, a sex-positivity advocate who blogs at Vixmeldrew.com, credits the open-forum and supportive communities of the internet for a shift in attitude. “More people are discussing sex openly via social media or blogs and websites,” she says, “which, in turn, makes people feel more confident speaking about it in real life. People behind computer screens began to feel free to explore and share their sex lives, and their followers and readers then felt empowered to do the same.” She also believes mainstream millennial idols are making a huge difference to sex positivity. Stars such as Rihanna and the Kardashians seemingly relish nudity on their own terms and talk about their sexuality in a way that is unapologetic. “A lot of YouTubers are also beginning to break the boundaries,” Meldrew says. “Millennials can look up to these celebrities as people who are not ashamed of their sexuality.”
Whatever the inspiration, sexual ingenuity is certainly filtering down into the humdrum world of the squeezed-middle courtship. I have a friend who has been single for the best part of a decade and claims that she can draw a line dividing her single, twentysomething life into two acts. The first was characterised by polite mojitos and polite missionary sex. Then, overnight, everything changed. On the third date, she’d go home with a man who worked in insurance and lived in Clapham Old Town, and he’d initiate a frenetic seduction with “more position changes than a Cirque du Soleil performance”. More than once, she went back to a man’s house only for him to produce a bag of sex toys — a sort of Ann Summers Santa sack.
Another single friend — exceedingly loquacious in the pub, but who finds herself taciturn between the sheets — is incredulous at how commonplace dirty talk has become. She says it makes her nervous and gives her performance anxiety, as if she has to take to the mic like an up-and-coming stand-up as well as focusing on the physical task at hand. Again, she notices a marked change over the past few years: at the beginning of her twenties, dirty talk was a fetish that took a confident and experienced pro; now, nearly every bloke she beds likes to give a dynamic John Motson-esque commentary on the proceedings.
The behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings is dubious about how much this new study tells us about the sex lives of millennials, emphasising that its main finding is specifically about anal sex. “There has always been a certain pressure to try it, over many generations,” she says. “I still think there is some anxiety about it, but rather than focus on that, we live in an age where it is easier to say, ‘Of course we do it,’ which encourages and puts pressure on those who haven’t tried it yet.” In other words, perhaps there is an element of bravado at play in these new findings. Perhaps anal sex to millennials is what conservatories and kitchen extensions are to the baby boomers — simple a case of keeping up with the Joneses.
They say it is the prerogative of every generation to believe they invented sex — we sort of have to, if only to pretend it’s something our parents never did. But as nice an accolade as it would be for our collective CV, I’m not sure millennials have discovered kinky sex. Like eating avocado on toast or drinking a negroni, I’m certain people did it before us. We’re just the first ones to talk about it all the time.
