Activist Says We Should All Have "A Right To Sex" And Suggests We Decriminalize Sex Work
The amount of young people not having sex has increased dramatically over the last decade and this has led many people to wonder what can be done to change this fact. An activist named Alexandra Hunt has a suggestion: she believes we need to move toward people being given a "right to sex."
According to research, the number of men under 30 who aren't having sex has almost tripled in the last 10 years. There are a few speculations as to what the reasoning could be behind this, such as the ever-increasing popularity of pornography, the decline of young marriages, and the number of young adults who are living with their parents still. Whatever the reasons may be, activist Alexandra M. Hunt has offered a solution.
Activist Says We Should All Have "a Right to Sex" and Suggests We Decriminalize All Sex Work
Alexandra shared a thread on Twitter in which she highlighted how little sex men under 30 are having. In 2008, roughly 10% of men under 30 were having no sex, and now that number is 28%. However, she points to an odd reason: "our society criminalizes sex & sweeps it under the rug." This is apparently the reason why there are so many young men who aren't having sex.
"The consequences are straightforward - there is more violence. Since platforms like Craigslist were banned from advertising sex, serious violent crimes against all women – not just sex workers – has increased by nearly 1/5," she continued.
This sounds more like correlation than causation and she doesn't provide any evidence as to how Craigslist removing sex ads would somehow lead to more violent crimes against all women. Additionally, she fails to point out the fact that our society is more obsessed with sex than ever before. If you look at movies, TV, music videos, and music in general, it's pretty easy to find steamy sex scenes lurking around, even amongst characters who are supposed to be minors. Our society doesn't sweep sex under the rug. It puts it out in front of our eyes in visible ways that make it impossible to ignore.
Alexandra continues on to say that the MeToo movement "accomplished so much," but it needs to be taken a step further. She advocates for "normalizing having healthy, positive, consensual sex" and "decriminalizing sex work, funding sex education, & creating outreach programs that help young people develop healthy sexual habits."
Then she ends with insisting that "we should be moving toward a right to sex." She believes that people "should be able to have sex when they feel they want to" and that our society should "develop services that meet people's needs without attaching the baggage of shame or criminalization."
While she may have good intentions, the messaging is a bit off. The fact that she believes decriminalizing sex work will result in more men having sex suggests that the only way these men will have sex is if they pay for it. Most sane people would want young men to have more sex because they're married or in a committed relationship with a woman they love, but Alexandra would rather men pay for sexual encounters.
The premise of people having a "right to sex" is also odd at best. Having a right to sex would mean you have a right to someone's body, and that's certainly not a road we want to go down. Our culture is broken when it comes to sex. We have completely desensitized the sacred act of sex, which has resulted in rampant pornography and sex work, which has resulted in less intimacy than ever. We don't need to move toward more sex work, we need to move away from it and instead normalize loving someone and achieving a sexual intimacy with them.