Affluence, Debauchery, and Decline

Why everyone is suddenly queer

“Hunched over your laptop, you type with a familiar intensity: someone on the Internet has made you angry. It’s a thing that happens more and more these days.

‘Being transgender is not a sexual thing,’ you say, without looking up. You’re ‘educating’ someone who thinks otherwise.

‘But your identity is related to your sexuality,’ I say. You’ve talked about it. You’ve blogged about it. Perhaps you believe a little white lie is justified in the service of your PSA.

‘It’s not like that,’ you mumble.

‘What about the tranny porn?’

You look up, your face a wounded animal’s. ‘I was trying to find people like myself represented in the media,’ you say, softly.

‘Oh come on. To jack off to.’”

- From 18 Months

Per Pornhub's “2022 Year in Review,” searches for transgender porn grew 75% between 2021 and 2022, bringing the category to the third most popular in the United States. This trend's been building momentum since before my divorce, when I stumbled across a Google Trends report showing a sharp increase in searches for “sissy porn.”

Journalist Rose Montoya worries these porn searches signify an “oversexualization of trans bodies.” I wonder if Montoya understands how many self-identified trans people are performing those searches themselves. At the Genspect Conference in Denver earlier this month, speaker Erin Friday told us about her young daughter, whose journey to trans identification was rife with pornography—from receiving it from an older girl to being encouraged to produce it herself. Parents tell many similar stories; detransitioners often confirm them. As one article puts it, the connection between transgender identity and pornography is “undeniable.”

I believe it was Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae that first introduced me to the oft-repeated claim that civilizations that start to experiment with homosexuality and gender-bending—like the Roman empire—are often on the verge of collapse. There seems to be a good deal of evidence supporting this claim, though correlation doesn't equal causation. Since I fully support those who are same-sex attracted and/or gender nonconforming—as both, myself—I've often wished to better understand the link.

Just recently, historian and political pundit Doug Stokes led me to that aha moment. He was speaking of the ancient Romans, perhaps on this episode of Triggernometry. The Romans were affluent, he said. They were bored.

Boredom. Of course!

The affluence that provides Western kids with the spare time to invent bespoke identities is the same affluence ushering in the decline in mental health and the competence crisis (a terrifying development—more on that in the near future). It is the effects of extreme affluence that destroy a civilization, the laziness it engenders, its detrimental impact on motivation and grit, the decadence, sexual and otherwise. Decadence is no chunk of dark chocolate, I learned while writing my book. It’s “moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.”

Some number of people, which is probably more or less stable over time, are primarily same-sex attracted. Some additional number, surely, can be swayed to participate in homosexual behavior. By culture, by peer pressure, by lack of options, by thrill seeking, by boredom. Those powerful Roman men who kept pubescent male sex slaves weren't homosexuals, as we know them; they sought sexual variety. Nor should the fact that LGBTQ identification is “doubling every generation” be viewed as increased comfort with disclosure. As Bill Maher notes, “if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2054.”

Consider the Marquis de Sade, discussed by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on episode 365 of The Rest is History podcast. The French author and sexual degenerate from whom the term “sadism” is derived, Sade was known for his “libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography.” I knew, from Sexual Personae, that Sade had written of eviscerating a boy and a girl and swapping their genitals—an uncanny image in our social and medical landscape. What I didn't know is that Sade was an enthusiastic crossdresser. Shall we call him trans? We mustn't suggest that gays or the gender dysphoric are perverts, of course. But is there any reason to believe that perverts indulge in everything but homosexual and transsexual behavior? And what of the slow normalization of fringe sex via porn? It’s caused an increase in “surprise choking.” Why couldn’t it cause an increase in queerness?

“An idle mind is the devil’s playground,” my ex-husband’s mom once said. Like internet addiction and dependence on Grubhub, our proliferation of sexual and gender identities is a first-world, late capitalist phenomenon.