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This article originally appeared in The Declaration on 22 April 2004.

Recently the Cavalier Daily bounced its business page (this was reasonable: no one read it, fewer wanted to edit it) in favor of a health and sexuality section. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and for the most part it is. There are articles about STDs, condoms, drugs–stuff that the average college kid should be paying attention to, but isn’t. And then there are the sex columns. They are titled with bad puns that would make even the Dec blush: “The G-Spot,” “How Come?” And they are filled with supposedly cutting edge information that just about everyone already knew.

There was an old Poodah joke about “Lee Camp’s Original Comedic Thought of the Week,” which slimmed the former CD humorist’s column down to four words of unoriginality: Men don’t like shopping! Amusement parks are crowded! Similarly, the new sex columns are just as banal: Men who ejaculate too early are bad in bed! Women may or may not enjoy the taste of semen! Relationships are hard! As the urinal said to the sink, “No shit.” For fuck’s sake–this is supposed to be edgy?

I remember being in high school and voraciously reading every one of Susie Bright’s columns over at Salon.com. This was a heady time, in the late days of the Clinton administration, when just about everything seemed to be focused on sex, money, and how people, from whom you didn’t expect it, were getting sex and money. So on the poster child of the new journalism, you could read about dot-com start-ups and sex columns and a serial novel by a former call-girl.

The novel was okay, and it was certainly better than either “Silicon Follies” or that new Dave Eggers one that I haven’t read past the first couple of paragraphs. And Bright’s column was, to this high schooler, fucking awesome. The logic worked along this line of reasoning: “Hey! Girls! Having sex! And I can read it in the computer lab of my all-guy Catholic school! ALL RIGHT!” Her column wasn’t that bad; often times it touched upon things other than sex. I enjoyed it. I also liked to consider myself fairly sexually liberated, despite the fact that I was a virgin.

Bright writes about sex intelligently, with the aim of enlightening her readers and maybe, maybe getting them slightly aroused at 4 pm on the fifth floor of a Manhattan school, although there’s a few things she missed in retrospect. Here’s Bright, writing about her plans for a new book in a Salon essay:

I want to examine the dark side of sex, and ask just how much deliverance we can expect from the sexual revolution. I’m going to look at the connection between beauty and eroticism (they’re not the same thing, you know). I’m going to tease out the role of envy in sexual repression. (link)

Bright understands that the whole issue of human sexuality is anything but simplistic; that it’s not a one- or two-sided issue, or even a spectrum, but a whole multi-dimensional mess that would make M-theory physicists get lost (and most do). Even sexual orientation is completely up in the air. There are so many facets to the human personality, so many different ways we get turned on and off, that it’s not a simple issue of “here is a hot [object of desire], go nuts.” These are good questions that need to be asked, and answered intelligently. In her columns, Bright would dissect the etiquette of a porn shop, or maybe how to sleep with a hotel concierge. She always understood, though, that this wasn’t for everyone, but that some people would benefit from her writing about it.

I fail to see, though, how anyone benefits from the over-simplified situations written about in the CD’s sex columns. The first one I read–Katja Schubl’s article about “one-minute men”–isn’t written to enlighten, but rather to scare the poor boy into doing a good job. She talks about longing for sex while in Germany, only to come back to a boy who doesn’t satisfy her; she dumps him without a second thought. Way to strike a blow for deep, lasting relationships, Katja. Even if one accepts that her goal was just to get her rocks off, Schubl’s article is the opposite of erotic or instructive. Instead, it gives the fear to the poor boy taking a girl to bed for the first time: it doesn’t matter how witty or compatible you are, it only matters how you are in the sack (and for God’s sake, you better be a demon). Moreover, it assumes that there is only one type of relationship on the planet, that sex is simple. (Her column this past Monday only further reinforces that she can’t comprehend, or at least write about, more than one style of dating.) Cut-and-dried “advice” like this, or the article about how men can improve the taste of their sperm, take away the joy and discovery of sex: they leave you robotically pumping and sucking away, wondering why you aren’t having sex like everyone else.

In his essay “Books in Bed,” Jonathan Franzen reveals his own anxiety about sex writing (or, to be more specific, writing about sex). He takes on Bright (unfairly, I believe), Dr. Susan Block and a host of other sex writers with the same ferocious intensity that Penn and Teller reserve for feng shui experts. “Their work creates the bumbling amateur,” he writes. “Their discovery of sexual technique’ creates a population bereft of technique.” Taking something private and making it part of public discourse doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly have amazing sex lives; it means that everyone has higher expectations than they can handle. It means that sex becomes another measuring stick, laying right besides your car, your clothes or your stack of cds, for what you are as a human being. The one thing that should have remained outside the American desire for normality has, paradoxically, become the center of it.

Although Bright understands that sexuality is complicated, she is also of the school that our SEXUAL REPRESSION needs to be broken through to a glorious world of hot nights and hotter days; here’s Bright again, this time from her personal webpage:

Sexual expression is THE most repressed form of American speech. You can rail against capitalism in this country, you can tele-evangelize from a pulpit that only exists in your mind, you can be gross, gratuitously violent, and just plain insane, but in this country, you cannot say certain words in public because they are SEXUAL, you cannot look at certain pictures in public because they’re SEXUAL and you cannot articulate many ideas to the mainstream because their SEXUAL nature deems them inadmissible. (link)

This is true (if a little bombastic), especially in these heady years of the waning Bush administration. But, at the same time, it ignores that we are swimming in so much sexual obsession that it’s impossible to get away from. It’s hard to say that there are pictures you can’t look at, due to their SEXUAL nature, when billboards of slim models in skimpy underthings cover Times Square; when Victoria’s Secret ads (Is that you, Bob?) and specials are all over TV; when a show like The Swan gets airtime on Fox; or when the flimsy dress of a singer falls apart on national TV and the entire nation convulses.

But because of this notion that all sexual expression is “repressed,” many people mistakenly think that sexual expression is “edgy.” Any time sex is talked or written about, it’s shocking, or it’s immoral, or it’s transgressive. Howard Stern is a “shock jock” with a lot of job insecurity at the moment. And MTV and Virgin Records were prepared to ride the wave of edginess following the Super Bowl halftime show to record sales and profit. None of these things are edgy, whatever “edgy” means. They’re pedestrian. I couldn’t care less about a middle-aged woman’s pierced right nipple. Or the adventures of a woman getting evaluated on Stern’s show (that’s less edgy, more sad). Franzen’s against all sex writing, for reasons I can understand if don’t agree with. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an honest examination of sex–or rather, the stuff that happens around sex (i.e. dating)–but when it becomes tinged with the touch of edgy or transgression, it’s got something to prove. The writing has an air of desperation–please find this arousing and interesting and exciting! Christ. Instead , it has the same tiring quality of writing that liberal use of shitty cussing has. (Are you tired of the cursing in this article yet? Good. I’ll stop.)

Granted, it’s this edginess that sex writing is supposed to erase. Writers of sex columns will tell you that their intent is to get rid of this feeling, to make talking about sex normal and acceptable dinner-time conversation. So why does Gretchen Zimmerman discuss her sexual history and self-identify herself as a slut? Did she really think she was reclaiming the word for millions of “sexually liberated” women around the country? No. She could have said “sexually liberated.” Instead she used a word with a negative connotation to catch the eyes of her readers, not to mention reinforce the whole Madonna/whore thing that everyone in this country seems to have trouble with. It appeals the prurient interest more than the rational parts of the brain, which makes sense, because there’s no rationality to sex. The brain may be an erogenous zone, but sex is just the pleasurable banging of parts against each other like mammals have been doing for millions of years. To talk about sex, and only sex, is to limit oneself drastically in one’s subject matter, one in which it’s impossible to say anything new.

More importantly, it’s almost impossible to make it interesting or essential. Reading about someone else’s sex life is like listening to your roommate talk about that dream he had last night: it’s long, it’s rambling, it makes little sense and has no point. It can be somewhat amusing, if done well, but you’re not going to walk away with a better understanding of your roommate or humanity in general. Who cares that he found himself chased by little three-foot tall H2s while running on the surface of the sun? Who cares about someone else’s sexual history? I’m not better off knowing these things about a complete stranger (who, with my luck, I’ll have a discussion with next semester). I am, in fact, worse off, because the private details of his or her life are now a part of the public sphere. I have to put up with them, regardless of whether or not I want to.

I’m going to make a bold statement here: we shouldn’t really talk about sex. I don’t just mean in columns, I mean on cell phones, in coffee shops–anywhere. We can talk about dating all we like, because dating is about relationships between people and therefore infinitely fascinating and infinitely complex. But sex is the most private of acts, one that people should keep to themselves. There’s no need to open the blinds and show our naked selves to the worlds, because it’s hard enough to show our naked selves to the one we’re sleeping with. We gain nothing but a quick smirk in the back of Wilson 402. We lose nothing but a respect for intimacy and a sense of discovery that is our birthright as college students. If you don’t mind losing that, go nuts. Just don’t tell me about what you find.

According to the New York Times, lately magazines are increasingly using less and less written content, focusing almost entirely on graphic elements (i.e. photography). This isn’t really surprising to me, having stared at other magazines like Nest and Nerve for hours at a time during the Dec redesig (I also have been known to peruse Stuff on occasion). The most interesting part of the article was this, right at the end:

The assumption is that readers raised on a media diet in which they are presented with a new image every few tenths of a second are not about to wait 3,400 words for the upshot. The glossy publishing industry will continue to serve as the back fence for mass culture. But in these days of postliterate publishing, few in the neighborhood seem to have time to stop and tell stories.

One of the things you have to wonder about is, how much of this can be blamed on the web? If there’s one thing that all the usability guidelines for the web agree on, it’s that you shouldn’t have too much content on any given page. Usually, the amount of text on a page, according to these guidelines, should be between two and four screens on a page (the Times article is roughly five and a half on my computer). This isn’t too exact, especially with all the differences in monitors today, but it’s really not a whole lot of text.

It’s true that you can link together multiple pages for longer articles, but what sites really do that? The Times and other newspapers do so; the New Yorker and other magzines; salon.com and one or two other sites. Most of these sites have real life counterparts; only salon is a web publication. Feed and Suck, which specialized in the longer-form articles, no longer exist. And salon’s articles typically aren’t normally that long on a day-to-day basis (although it’s possible that the premium articles normally are, but I don’t pay for Salon Premium so I wouldn’t know).

Whether it’s a matter of bandwidth or a matter of time for writing and production, most sites can’t afford to put up these longer articles. Those that do, eventually burn out (we all know how many times I’ve stopped updating websites). People who work for one of these sites, or try to run their own, could have developed a dislike for the longer form article. It’s tough to write 4,000 words on a daily–or even a weekly–basis, especially if you need to get other things done. Websites that focus on longer, more literary articles often don’t even want to try for articles as long as the old magazines would carry. McSweeneys specifically asks for articles not more than 1,000 words (though only if you want to be published on the website; the print magazine takes longer works). So writers get used to writing shorter articles; designers get more used to preparing shorter articles for web publication. To believe that there’s no overlap between web and print workers is foolish, so it’s not hard to imagine that web tendencies carried over into physical media over the past six years. Even if any designer that works on the web never returns to print, there’s a more than even chance that print editors would be influenced by stuff happening in an Internet Explorer window.

There’s also the fact that the web is, inherently, a visual medium. Just about every site has some graphic elements, reducing the text to a small column that can be quickly scanned. This isn’t unusual in the print world either; it’s just that, on paper, you can have multiple columns stacked next to each other. You can’t do that very easily on paper. So even a magazine that has a very simple, non-graphical layout in the real world is going to have sidebars, title graphics and banner ads on the website. Again, assuming that designers occasionally work on the both websites and magazines, you’re going to see this type of design flourish in print as well. (Personally, I wanted a sidebar in the Dec’s scene section, but I didn’t get my wish.)

Finally, there’s the influence of weblogs and discussion sites. Slashdot (which is, essentially, a weblog about technical issues) usually has content no longer than a paragraph or two; much more written words are available from the comments, but they are often repetitive and read less often. Metafilter’s entries are typically just a sentence or two. Weblogs vary greatly, from short little blurby things to, well, long essays like this one, but definitely lean towards the former. Now: it’s true that most people probably don’t read Slashdot or make the rounds of weblogs every day. It’s also true that these sites primarily point people to other sites where there is, presumably, more content. However, these “glorified captions” have gotten an entire population to the point where they like to read little blurbs versus long, detailed articles. Is this population directly responsible for the slow evolution from text-heavy to picture-heavy magazines? Personally, I don’t think so: I highly doubt that most of the people who read these sites don’t occasionally pick up and read a magazine or a long article in a newspaper. But for pleasure reading, who knows? Certainly, web readers are picking up a new attitude of “better entertain me in a few screens or else I’m going back to that other site,” and there are a whole lot of people that read the web.

In the end, I’m not entirely sure how much the web is responsible for shorter articles, but I’m convinced we’re somewhat responsible. The Times article doesn’t specify it, but this is a trend that has been carrying on for years. Televison, then Cable, then MTV, then Entertainment Tonight and People (I think I’ve got that order mixed up…whatever, it’s four in the morning)–the shortened pieces have been developing for years, and the web has only hastened it. Web content is almost always shorter than 4,000 words; this article is probably only around 800 or so. Can we say the web hasn’t made our attention spans run out quicker? Can we say it hasn’t adapted us to wanting more graphics around our text? Can we say that we aren’t going to want these qualities in print publications as well?

I don’t think we can. We all knew the World Wide Web was going to change printed media in an unprescidented way; I just wasn’t expecting it to happen by dumbing-down our magazines into glorified picture books.