Australian author Rachel Hills has spent seven years interviewing young people about their sex lives – and the disconnect between their lived experiences and what they were expected to experience. Her book The Sex Myth was published by Penguin this week.

Brigid Delaney: You talk about your early 20s as a confusing time for you where you felt yourself to be a “secret sexual loser” yet also an extroverted girl about town. Do you want tell us a bit more about that?

Rachel Hills: Those two things didn’t coexist easily for me. There was definitely a tension between those things. I thought – or well I hoped – in my early 20s that I presented to the world as someone who was fun, interesting and physically attractive enough, but also just an attractive person to be around. Likeable. We live in a society where if you are a young woman or a young man who is all of those things then it’s assumed that you will be sexually active because that’s part of the package. But on the other hand I wasn’t sexually active and thought that if people knew that about me they would be shocked and would see me differently. And if they knew that my sex life didn’t fit that part of the package then everything else would count for nothing.

BD: You write for teen and women’s magazines. What role do these magazines play in what you term the “sex myth”?

RH: They were definitely very informative. I learned a lot of what I know about sex before actually having it, from women’s magazines.

From the teen magazines, what I learned was that sex was really important and really special and that you shouldn’t do it unless you are in a serious relationship, which having been defined as going out for at least six months and saying “I love you”. The message was that sex is scary and it’s something guys will try and get out of you. You have to be constantly vigilant to make sure that you only have sex when you want to have it.

The reality is many people go for long stretches of time without or between having sex, especially if they're single Rachel Hills

When I graduated to women’s magazines I learned that everyone was having sex and you have to be good at it because you don’t want to embarrass yourself when it became time for you to do it. I recall more subtle things I would see in those magazines as well – a trend story or a relationship story and the people they would chose to feature who were a little older than me and sex was very much a central part of their lives. I remembered thinking that it didn’t reflect my life, but it must reflect some people’s lives out there.

BD: We’ve got magazines like Rookie now, which have a different tone and are less prescriptive about sex. There’s more choice for young women and there seems to be a pushback at the messages we get from the glossies about being very sex-focused.

RH: Definitely. Teen and women’s magazines are changing, particularly online, particularly in the US. Cosmopolitan has poured a lot of money into online and there is so much content that varies widely – but a lot of it is a good, critical approach to sex. Part of the reason mags like Cosmo are doing this is that there is so much other critical content for young women out there such as Jezebel and Rookie. In order to compete for that audience, you need to get a bit smarter.

I write for Girlfriend magazine [in Australia] and over the past few years I’ve written about trans issues, bisexuality and asexuality. I did an article recently on “five reasons you may not want to have sex yet” – but they were not the typical teen magazine reasons.

For example you haven’t met anyone you want to have sex with yet, you haven’t got passt kissing yet so it doesn’t make sense to go straight to sex … There is definitely a change in narrative happening.

BD: So let’s get to the crux of the book. You’re saying that the barriers – moral and cultural – have changed, and sex in our culture is a positive thing that brings social status, yet for many young people sex is elusive. There’s a whole heap of “secret sexual losers” out there.

RH: Exactly. We’ve moved from a culture in which we were told that sex is bad and dangerous and should only be had under very particular circumstances, to one in which we’re told that sex is pretty great, really – and if you’re not doing it, something must be wrong with you. The story we hear about younger adults in particular is one in which sex is constantly on tap. Because why wouldn’t it be if there are no barriers any more, and if you’re vaguely attractive – right? But the reality is that many people go for long stretches of time without or between having sex, especially if they are single. That’s not to say that no one’s having sex any more, or that we’re not having good sex. Most of us do, at least some of the time. But the standards by which we evaluate our sex lives – and the things that make us anxious about sex – have changed. We’re less likely to worry about being “perverted” or “slutty” and more likely to worry that our sex lives aren’t good enough.

The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality. Photograph: Penguin books

BD: The book was inspired by a friend of yours who was going through a “drought” – someone you assumed was having lots of sex, who confessed to you that it had been two years since she’d had sex.

RH: Among people I know personally a drought seems to be just what happens when you have been single for a while. They would rather have sex with an acquaintance who they find attractive than someone they don’t know very well that they have met through Tinder. You’ll often see jokes in sitcoms where the character hasn’t had sex in three months and they say “That’s appalling! We need to get you laid immediately.” But it’s beyond a common occurrence for people who are single. It’s not like everyone is out there having droughts but people have at least one drought in their lives.

BD: Maybe it would be better if people talked about their droughts more rather than have social shame or stigma.

RH: We are told that our desirability and likeability is tied up to our sexuality. Talking about it would help. We talk about the times we did have sex rather than the times that we don’t.

BD: Such an interesting social shift to where being sexually active is prized and being inactive is shameful.

RH: That’s not happening across the board. Particularly in the US there is still tonnes of conversations around purity culture and slut-shaming that is tied to the idea that to be a good woman – which is a phrase some of my interviewees used – is to be circumspect about your sexuality, someone who basically doesn’t have sex unless they are under particular circumstances.

BD: What sort of circumstances?

RH: Either she’s in a relationship or she’s married. And I think those ideals definitely still abound. The ideal of waiting until marriage is really only common among very religious people and it’s something they struggle with.

I don’t think I aspired to be pure but that ideal did influence me, because that ideal was in the teen magazines. The good girl waits until she’s in a relationship but this ideal now coexists with a self-actualised, sexy, confident woman who loves sex, knows what she wants and fearlessly goes after it.

The young women I spoke to wanted to be the second type of girl, partly because it is more fun to be that girl but it also presents a set of rules and regulations of what you have to be doing. That way of being isn’t going to be right for everyone and it’s not going to be available for everyone every time. The key rule if you are liberated is that it automatically means you’ll be having lots of sex. But it’s possible to live up to that ideal, to be a fun liberated person and go for months or years without having sex because a good opportunity didn’t come up.

When I wasn’t having sex, it wasn’t necessarily my choice. If I had my choice at the time I would have been sexually active but it was preferable to other choices – to have sex with people I wasn’t attracted to, didn’t trust or wasn’t interested in. My choice in that non-ideal situation of limited options was not to be having sex.

Rachel Hills in New York. Photograph: Supplied

BD: You talk about lack of options or limited options, but dating app Tinder has become a major disrupter. If you don’t want to go out every night of the week and trawl bars – you can do it at home. It’s an easy way of hooking up because you suddenly have a lot more options.

RH: I see how in theory Tinder is radical. I did most of my interviews in 2012 and there was a whole bunch of media conversations about how the internet is changing sex, but Tinder wasn’t a thing then. But one of the things that was interesting to me was that the internet didn’t really figure at all in my interviews. I mean they brought it up when they were talking about accessing information [but] people weren’t really using the internet to hook up and date. I was talking to quite young people, many of whom were in communities like college or school, where there was a pool of people to date. Now people are definitely using Tinder. One of the things that is potentially appealing about Tinder, particularly in Australia and British culture, is it cuts through the lack of communication about whether or not you are attracted to someone. We prefer to do things in coded ways. So you can sense that someone is attracted to you but until you actually hook up you’re often not sure. What I like about Tinder is it takes the confusion out it.

BD: It’s almost an Americanisation of hooking up whereas the Aussie and British way is to get really drunk and fall on someone and kiss them.

RH: The panic about the hook-up culture in the US was connected with things being done in a more British or Australian way.

Does Tinder create more options? It does in theory, but sometimes people do want more sex and that’s fine but what if people want sex that’s attached to a person they like? Someone that they actually like or connect with? Or with whom they can hang out with or go to dinner with occasionally? That’s the kind of sex I was looking for and that’s harder to find than the totally casual kind. Tinder could have got me on a bunch of dates with a guys I thought were hot but doesn’t completely solve the issue.

BD: Moral panic over so-called hook-up culture in the US was something that sparked the ideas in the book. Want to tell us about that?

RH: I started thinking about the ideas in the book in 2007 and 2008 because of the media environment at the time – a lot of discussion about hook-up culture and raunch culture. Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005) explored raunch culture, which was about the idea that women were emulating particularly styles of dress and behaviour that were previously seen as being objectifying, and treating it as empowerment. And she didn’t think it was empowering. But her arguments got reduced and I don’t think the commentariat at the time were worried about it being anti-feminist but instead being vulgar and slutty.

Hook-up culture, which is different but emerged around the same time, was panic around young people having sex outside a romantic relationship.

Actually most hook-ups happen with people you already know. The most common person to hook up with is your ex. What people were worried about in the US was that young people were hooking up without going on dates. I thought to myself, this is how Australians have done it for a very long time.

American dating to me sounds very unappealing. You go out with someone you don’t know and have to make an assessment about them – ideally on the first date or in a few dates and whether or not you want to have sex with them. Whereas at least in the Australian model, you spend time with someone and decide whether or not to have sex with them.

I don’t think what we have at the moment is freedom … but I don’t want to go back to the past. Rachel Hills

BD: Which model works better?

RH: I am biased because I like what I know. I am socialised to prefer the Australian model. But I’m married now and so I don’t date any more. But I’m struggling to imagine Australians asking each other out and calling it a date.

BD: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach captures that moment in time before the sexual revolution – and it’s heartbreaking. All the things left unsaid, and the misunderstandings. But then you have a movie like Shame – which is set in the now – and it’s all sex and it’s all porny, soulless, dystopian and grim. A middle ground would be a good place to be.

RH: I don’t think what we have at the moment is freedom … but I don’t want to go back to the past. I want to go to the future where people can have lots of sex if they want to, lots of sexual partners, where they can go through a drought and not worry about being a loser, where they can be asexual and not worry about being soulless.

With the world that Shame depicts it’s sex as consumption – the way that consumer goods are sold to us. It’s sold by tapping into this need for validation. When I talk about consumer sex, I mean sex becomes part of the apparatus to prove yourself to be confident and desirable. It’s the dystopian part. But it’s not that way for everyone. Casual sex can also be joyful. But it’s not like we live in a world without love. People fall in love every day. We just also live in a world where sex is weighted down with a huge grand significance for who we are and how we fit into the world.



