The end(s) of abstinence
Ethan Kaimana
Platypus Review 179 | September 2025
ZOOMERS ARE NOT having sex. Sexual activity among young people is lower than ever.1 The expansion of online hook-up and dating apps has not changed this trend. While around 50% of 18- to 29-year-olds reported using dating apps in 2020,2 Generation Z seems poised to continue the decline of sexual activity since the mid-20th century. Really, this extends to all social activity: we drink less, go out less, transgress less, and socialize less than our parents and grandparents.
Why are we abstinent? Why do we fear love and its consummate expression? Popular consensus draws up external factors: the isolation of the COVID pandemic, fears of encroaching climate change, financial instability, an interest in “discovering” and “developing” one’s sexual identity, and so on. These answers are not as comprehensive as they might seem. None are isolated from social transformation; all are phenomena of a fundamental change in our desire to love and to be loved. Cultural cynicism, evident in the anxiety (or desire) for impending doom, smears and confuses the expression of love as a bourgeois social relation. Love is no longer recognized as a mutual transaction: Kant’s “mutual self-possession of each other’s sexual capacities.” The over-categorization of sexual expression — predator and prey, sexual and asexual — is much more pessimistic, avoiding the freedom of sexuality in favor of setting its limits.3
Young people today are expected to pin down their desires through strict self-management. They police themselves, and each other, for “problematic” behavior, placating questions of desire with a fear of punishment. The inappropriate expression of desire, or the problem per se, is defined by one’s sexual identity. This is thought of as both immutable and inherently political, comradely and barren.
As sexuality becomes desexualized, as the personal becomes political, the impossibility of both sexuality and politics bears down on us. Asexuality presents itself not just as a permanent sexual category, but an expectation in our culture. In the half-decade leading up to the COVID pandemic, it seemed as though we could no longer bear seeing naked bodies on camera: while sex has returned to film, it is neutered and self-conscious. Filmmakers force bodies against each other like naked, smooth Barbies, trapped in the sub-erotic. Trauma abounds. Touch cannot be depicted.
A childishness underlies all contemporary treatment of sexuality. This is pre-Oedipal, trapped within an incomplete self, staring in the mirror. Zoomers are fixated on precisely defining the distinction between child and adult because they fear the fact that one cannot become either.4 We endlessly trace the pinpoint, searching for the hidden child-lover in all of us. The rabbit hole runs deep. A 22-year-old is beaten by a mob for meeting an 18-year-old.5
As sexuality and politics grow further out of reach, only violence presents itself as a meaningful alternative. We are expected to annihilate ourselves. Even suicide must be political: after all, if all else has failed, then something must be done. “Martyrdom” — whether through self-immolation or prolonged court proceedings — is a submission to death, a rejection of the possibility of becoming. We have not even given ourselves the chance to love, let alone live.
How then, can the authoritarian nihilism of contemporary sexuality be overcome? Sexual conservatism might seem obvious. That too, dodges the question of history. Our sexual unfreedom is the fulfillment of the (post-?)Fordist “healthy sex life.” Adorno called this “sexuality disarmed as sex.”6 For Marxists like Adorno, sexuality was not merely degeneracy — not just badness or goodness — but an expression of freedom unfulfilled. Sex and love constantly transform alongside society itself. The emancipation of labor, as championed by the Bourgeois Revolution, was intrinsically tied to the free pursuit of happiness. Love is part and parcel here: not a necessity, but something we are compelled to do while seeking our happiness. Society has already broken down the barriers surrounding sexuality or at least points toward their overcoming. As Thomas Cannon wrote in Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d (1749), the English language’s earliest published defense of modern homosexual behavior, “Unnatural desire is a contradiction in terms, downright nonsense. Desire is an amatory impulse of the inmost human parts: are not they, however constructed and consequently impelling, nature?”7
To understand the significance of this today, we must first understand how it presented itself historically. We must clear away taboos surrounding the history of sexuality. Most importantly, we must deconstruct what John D’Emilio called the “myth of the eternal homosexual”8: the idea that any sexual identity is as it has always been. Sexual identity as a natural, biological state is really an evacuation of society; contemporary identification with the gendered castes and regimented sexuality of the ancient world points toward this. Marxism laid the groundwork for this vulgar satisfaction by abandoning the idea of sexual expression as malleable and social.
Modern sexual repression came into being alongside the development of the Bonapartist state. These laws, developed, structured, and enforced alongside the burgeoning crisis of society, defined homosexual behavior as deviant, antisocial, or an expression of mental illness. Before the mid-19th century, sodomy laws in the United States were largely unenforced: similarly, after the 1828 repeal of the 16th-century Buggery Act, homosexual activity in Victorian Britain was in legal limbo. In Britain, the 1885 Labouchere Amendment expanded the prohibition of anal intercourse to general gross indecency, threatening life imprisonment for crossdressers and men engaged in homosexual acts. In Germany, the center of the Second International, the Bismarckian state replaced and strengthened prohibitions against sodomy and crossdressing with Paragraphs 175, 360/11, and 183.
With the decline of liberal revolutions and the consolidation of the state as society’s crisis manager, liberals themselves frequently advocated for the intrusion of the state into private life. Henry Labouchere, the British amendment’s namesake and one of the pre-eminent British liberals of his day, incorporated his dogged combat against social deviance into muckraking reform and an opposition to Victorian imperialism. Marxism, then, initially defended sexual expression after it had been abandoned by liberalism: it pushed for the completion of the revolution.
Under this context, Marxists strongly opposed the deviancy laws that regulated sexuality. In Germany, socialists like sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld organized institutions like the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the Institute for Sexual Research, and the World League for Sexual Reform, fighting for the legalization of sodomy, prostitution, and crossdressing.
Through these institutions (and his work with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)), Hirschfeld defined the terms “homosexual,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” — not as identities, but as political categories. Each represented an activity that his patients were barred from carrying out as outlined in German law. Paragraph 175, which criminalized “unnatural sex acts between persons of male sex,”9 prevented the free expression of the “homosexual,” who finds a love object of the same sex. Paragraphs 360/1110 and 18311 penalized public crossdressing as “gross mischief” or a “public nuisance,” corresponding with Hirschfeld’s definitions of “transvestite” and “transsexual.” “Transsexual” was further defined by the usage of unregulated medical procedures to appear as the opposite sex.
Hirschfeld struggled to clear these barriers: the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee put forward petitions to the Reichstag in 1898, 1922, and 1925 to repeal Paragraph 175. These earned the support of Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, and many other orthodox Marxists. Hirschfeld and his comrades worked on both the national and municipal level, negotiating with nearly every level of the German government.
This, as with many other issues in the early 20th century, raised the question of the relationship of reform and the preparation for political revolution. Marxists agreed that the discontent with these laws (as with many others) embodied the emerging crisis of the relationship of the state to society — discontent with the dominance of the state. Reform itself came to demonstrate the limits of its potential in a society wracked with contradiction. Only political revolution, then, could overcome and fulfill the possibilities of freedom.
What was the party’s role? Lenin saw it as a mediating tool for the wider socialist movement, allowing for political education through self-reflection on socialist activity and its relationship to revolution. Rosa Luxemburg argued that the advancement of capitalism created endless potential for new crises. The party, then, connected reform with the “necessity, possibility, and desirability”12 of revolution.
However, this relationship also came into crisis, and with it, Marxism and its relationship to sexual liberation. The growth and entrenchment of international socialism precipitated divisions within the Marxist movement over the form and possibility of revolution.
Following World War I, the SPD, once self-consciously separate from society, took up its leadership and eventually controlled the German government. With this, the Party abandoned the Revolution, managing the crisis of Germany (and of society) with an iron fist. In the same year that the SPD crushed the Spartacist uprising, it championed Hirschfeld’s newly-founded Institute for Sexual Research as an integral part of the new state bureaucracy. The Institute codified sexual transition procedures and lobbied to alter municipal codes, equating the recognition of these groups as full citizens with complete liberation. Hirschfeld defended these reforms on the basis that these conditions were biological and natural — explanations which were later seized upon during Nazi Germany’s recriminalization of homosexuality and alternative gender expression.
The early Soviet Union, by contrast, merely abolished tsarist punishments for sodomy and crossdressing. Rather than actively intervening, they opened the door to the free expression and discovery of sexuality in private life. When sexuality or gender presented itself as a political problem — the legality of marriage, the lawfulness of sex-change operations, etc. — these were decided case-by-case, with a convening of medical and juridical expertise. In 1922, a female-to-male transsexual named Evgenii Fedorovich had his marriage to a woman declared legal by a Soviet Court. While not a definitive decision, the Expert Medical Counsel of the Health Commissariat expected the future clarification of their rights.13
The breakdown of this early openness reflects a regression in the Soviet Union’s ambitions — and, by extension, the regression of Marxism itself. The failure of international socialist revolution brought the role of Soviet governance into crisis. Stalinism (and by extension the Soviet state’s sexual policies) was a response to this. As the party integrated itself into the state, its politics came to represent bottom-up demands — an aspect of the stabilization of the Soviet state, concessionary in the same sense as the SPD. The recriminalization of homosexuality, the banning of sex-reassignment surgery, and the adoption of a stance against “bourgeois decadence” as state policy were all aspects of Stalinization. These were products of a revolution unfulfilled.14
The Left has not progressed beyond sexual politics as the regulation of private life: the fact that the history of sexual expression seems so obscure is only another symptom of this process. The Left today projects pastiches of Stonewall or Combahee onto the entire history of human sexuality. Demands for sexual freedom were not awakened by a single riot or group of intellectuals — they are an integral aspect of society. There can be no sexual freedom in an unfree society, nor can society be freed without political organization. The party, historically, allowed us to critically reflect on the history of sexual liberation: in its absence, its possibilities have only become less clear.
Today, the contemporary Left pursues sexual liberation as resistance — resisting gender, resisting heterosexuality, resisting “woke” sexuality, etc. This resistance is little more than identification with those same concepts — or, worse, an inversion of them, pinging between libertinism and puritanism without digesting their meaning. This amounts to little more than influencing policy, expanding and integrating into the Democratic Party. We must remember that the point is not merely to resist the world, but to change it. |P
1 Scott South and Lei Lei, “Why are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?,” Socius 7 (2021), <https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023121996854>.
2 Monica Anderson, Emily Vogels, Erica Turner, “The Virtues and Downsides of Online Dating,” Pew Research Center (February 6, 2020), <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/06/the-virtues-and-downsides-of-online-dating/>.
3 See D. M., “#MeToo and the Millennial Sex Panic,” Platypus Review 111 (November 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/metoo-and-the-millennial-sex-panic/>.
4 Children should not raise children, and yet they do anyway.
5 Tim Stelloh and David Douglas, “‘Mob’ of college students attack man in TikTok-inspired trap, police say,” NBC News (January 6, 2025), <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/6-arrested-man-was-lured-campus-beaten-tiktok-inspired-attack-police-s-rcna186502>.
6 Theodor Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 73.
7 Thomas Cannon, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d (1749), in Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook,ed. Rictor Norton (2017), <http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1749cann.htm>.
8 John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 101.
9 “§175 StGB: Straftaten gegen die sexuelle Selbstbestimmung. Paragraf 175” (1871), <https://lexetius.com/StGB/175,7>.
10 “§360 StGB: Straftaten im Amte. Paragraf 360” (1871), <https://lexetius.com/StGB/360,9>.
11 “§183 StGB: Straftaten gegen die sexuelle Selbstbestimmung. Paragraf 183. Exhibitionistische Handlungen” (1871), <https://lexetius.com/StGB/183,7>.
12 See Chris Cutrone, “1917,” in Benjamin Blumberg, Chris Cutrone, Atiya Khan, Spencer A. Leonard, and Richard Rubin, “The decline of the Left in the 20th century: Toward a theory of historical regression,” Platypus Review 17 (November 2009), <https://platypus1917.org/2009/11/18/the-decline-of-the-left-in-the-20th-century-1917/>.
13 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 169–70.
14 See D. M., “Transgender liberation? A movement whose time has passed,” Platypus Review 111 (November 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/transgender-liberation-a-movement-whose-time-has-passed/>.
