Can you remember the sex education you received growing up?
Perhaps it involved putting a condom on a banana. Maybe a few photos of genitalia exhibiting symptoms of STIs. You probably didn’t hear much about how consent works. Perhaps you left with the belief that consent is a one-off yes/no that takes place at the start of a sexual encounter. You likely didn’t hear about pelvic pain or pain during sex. Nor did you probably hear anything of relevance to the LGBTQ community. The list goes on and on.
If you have found yourself googling questions about sex and struggling to find reliable, accurate information about it on the internet, then this new book might be right up your alley.
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Losing It by Sophia Smith Galer investigates the harmful myths and misinformation caused by poor sex education, and unpicks and debunks some of the most damaging untruths we’ve absorbed about sex. Each chapter explores a different sex myth, delving into virginity, the hymen, vaginal tightness, penetration, male virility, ‘sexlessness’, and consent.
Smith Galer, a senior news reporter at VICE World News with a 388K-strong following on TikTok, allows readers to reflect on the real-life impact these myths have on us as individuals. “If I do my job right, you will finish this book armed with knowledge around sex, relationships, and society that you have been both actively and passively denied,” writes Smith Galer in the introduction.
Credit: Luke Jones
Reading this book, you’ll wish it had been published decades ago so you might have been able to grow up equipped with a solid foundation of knowledge about sex, minus the dangerous misinformation. But, Smith Galer takes a forward-looking approach and in her final line, states that future generations will know they have no ‘virginity’ to lose, because virginity is a social construct.
Here’s an extract from Smith Galer’s Losing It chapter five, “The Virility Myth.”
Originally, the ‘shag list’ was supposed to be ironic. Ben, Hildon and their housemates had written the names of conquests on their fridge’s whiteboard, the nucleus of their daily life. Every time they needed milk, or butter, or a beer, they’d see where they ranked; more names meant more prestige. Given that two of the housemates were in longterm relationships, the shag list was never intended to pit the men against each other. It was supposed to be harmless fun, a small way to memorialise the hedonism of student life.
But that’s not how those who visited their house saw it. When mates came over, their eyes would focus on Ben and Hildon’s names as the two firmly single men of the house. This was where action was to be had – a real competition. The checking of the whiteboard every time friends came round became ritualised. Ben hated it, and repeatedly wiped the list off. But whenever they came round, it would be there again.
‘I’d come back the next morning from dates and the questions were never “was she nice?” or “did she have good chat?”’ Ben explains, having graduated a few years ago now. ‘It was more along the lines of “was she fit?” Otherwise, the shag didn’t count.’
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Ben would try to avoid answering questions, uncomfortable with the idea that dates were being scrutinised and, if deemed worthy, reduced to names on a whiteboard. Hildon, mocked by his blank list every time he needed to eat something, eventually called a girl from home and invited her to stay for the weekend, just so he could say that he had slept with someone. He ignored her nearly the entire time she was there. ‘He acted like he was ashamed of her,’ said Ben.
Ben says now that he didn’t mind being the butt of jokes; he was confident that his were funnier anyway, and didn’t degrade anyone in the process either. When they left the house, the whiteboard was presumably wiped clean for one last time, and the shag list was never updated again. ‘The message should be clear – attributing sex to masculine success is extremely unhealthy. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself. I know from speaking to Hildon, who’s also in a relationship [now], that he was fully aware too and admitted to being embarrassed about it. So, I guess, that’s growth?’
Come on, be a man. Grow a pair, don’t be a pussy, and get laid. Go hard or go home. I heard all of these masculinising refrains growing up, but especially at university, where I was thrust from the cattiness of an all-girls’ school into the far more rabid environment of my student halls.
I met many sensitive, intelligent men at Durham, but I met plenty of insensitive, intelligent men there too. In the UK, we both celebrate and criticise our lad subculture. But at university it didn’t feel like a subculture at all. It felt like the culture. As heterosexual women, my friends and I would have to operate in its orbit, sometimes mimicking it, sometimes hiding from it.
Wherever you live, there is an equivalent social structure that young men participate in. The British lad is the American bro frat boy. If you feel this doesn’t apply to you, that is hopefully because you grew up in an environment where you were exposed to healthy ideas around masculinity. You may have had additional life experiences and identities such as being part of a queer community, which have allowed you to escape this myopic worldview.
But many men feel like they’re stratified into two groups: men who can’t get any, and men who can. Just like Ben’s student house, whether you want to be part of it or not makes little difference. Visions of virile assertiveness are considered the masculine ideal – and either you successfully perform that ideal, or you fail. As one young man tells me, ‘We are taught to fuck without feeling.’
Where women have long been harmed by the virginity myth, in which sexual inexperience increases their desirability, men have been harmed by the opposite idea – that sexual experience, prowess and success improves their status: the virility myth. Not only is sexual activity a positive, it’s what you need to actively qualify as a man. Deriving from the Latin word vir, meaning ‘man’, virility serves as a byword for masculinity; sexual success is very literally written into our definition of male identity.
In order to achieve sexual success, mass media makes men feel that they must perform certain behaviours or obtain characteristics that we are socially conditioned to think of as masculine – gains at the gym, a strong jaw and a well-paid job. At Durham, that also included downing the most pints. While most heterosexual women would say that many things other than looks and power can make a man attractive, dating reveals uncomfortable truths that reinforce these gender scripts. As early as the 1930s, American women wanted their husbands to be more sexually experienced than them. Across three studies, Lauri Jensen-Campbell and her colleagues found that women do go for ‘dominant men’, but crucially, not dominance alone; they go for dominance with pro-social behaviours such as being agreeable or helping others. A survey of 7,000 Australian online dating users found that women aged eighteen to twenty-five placed a significant weight on age, education, intelligence, income, trust and emotional connection, in contrast to men of the same age group, who assigned higher priority to attractiveness and physical build in female partners. All the older respondents cared less about aesthetics than younger ones, so while looks aren’t everything for women, there remain many factors that influence a power dynamic – such as an older age, higher intelligence or financial stability – that would thwart younger, financially unstable male suitors. A number of small surveys by dating sites consistently find that straight men are more likely to be open to date unemployed partners than the other way around.
“The virility myth, and the fact that men and women continue to buy into it, is colliding with a world where social dynamics are in dramatic flux.”
The virility myth, and the fact that men and women continue to buy into it, is colliding with a world where social dynamics are in dramatic flux. Global unemployment is increasing, and just before the pandemic hit, trends were suggesting that the number of men who hadn’t had sex in the past year had increased threefold; it is likely that spending longer periods of time in education and living with your parents is having an impact on young men’s ability to perform virility. Women entering the workplace means that not only are the ‘dominance’ stakes often higher, but that women no longer rely on the institution of marriage to be economically stable. Being pickier is something that dating apps encourage, which we need to take seriously given that 32 per cent of relationships started between 2015 and 2019 began online, compared to only 19 per cent between 2005 and 2014. Self-proclaimed ‘Worst Online Dater’ is an internet figure who has conducted social experiments to try to demystify dating algorithms, and his conclusion on Tinder, the world’s most popular dating app with 55 billion matches to date, is that it ‘can actually work, but pretty much only if you are an attractive guy’. He worked out that the bottom 80 per cent of men in terms of attractiveness were competing for the bottom 22 per cent of women, and that the top 78 per cent of women were competing for the top 20 per cent of men. Women swipe right less than men do and because of the way Tinder’s algorithm works, a man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1 per cent of women.
There is reason to worry about this. A U.S. study of 600 men found that men who perceived themselves to be less masculine according to traditional gender norms could be more prone to violent behaviour. It’s not that all men who feel that way become violent, it’s just that for those who get actively stressed out about it – something that’s called ‘masculine discrepancy stress’ – that stress can lead them to substance abuse, binge drinking, reckless driving, weapon carrying and violence. It is tempting to deploy the word ‘incel’ freely here, especially when the security threat that involuntary celibate ideology poses seems to be increasing and when it feels like governments aren’t taking it seriously enough, but this chapter demands nuance and radical empathy in a polarised social media climate that often deprives us of them. Before we use the word incel, we need to understand what it means, who it is exactly we are criticising and – vitally – who it is that needs help.
Losing It is out on Apr. 14, 2022, published by HarperCollins Publishers.
Disclaimer: Rachel Thompson provided a blurb for the cover of Losing It.
