Why Religion Went Obsolete, page 23
Overall, the New Atheism had five distinct effects. First, it energized the already anti-religious minority, emboldening increasingly outspoken critiques and solidifying their identity through the backing of bestselling intellectuals taken seriously by the media. Second, it provided convincing references and justifications to those who already felt negatively toward religion but had not known how to express their criticisms. For these, the Four Horsemen functioned as “vicarious thinkers” who figured out why religion was bad so that they did not have to on their own. Third, the New Atheists convinced some readers who were religiously ambivalent before September 11 that religion really is bad and ideally should just go away. These were the “swing voters.” All of that reinforced the negative associations with religion. In these ways, the New Atheism was another jolt in public culture that helped trigger what became an avalanche of cultural change that eventually buried religion.
The fourth and fifth effects are less about influencing individuals and more about altering the cultural environment. Even for Americans who were not up to speed on the New Atheism, those ideas had still become particulate matter floating in the cultural atmosphere, which could affect everyone breathing it, whether they knew it or not. The New Atheism was also an ideological pathogen for religion. It literally attacked and tried to kill religion. Thus, fourth, the New Atheism “controversialized” religion in new ways. It redefined traditional religion as a matter for debate. It forced a contest, an argument, a conflict. It made religion fight back. Since one of the characteristics of “good” religion in Americans’ minds is that it promotes peace and harmony, the mere fact of religion scuffling as a contestant in a controversial, public dispute disadvantaged it. Sometimes mere accusations of crimes damage reputations, regardless of how true or false they may be. Last, the New Atheism partially swung the burden of proof onto religion to demonstrate its goodness. By shifting the default position closer to its perspective, the New Atheism made it harder for people to assume religion is more good than bad. It created a new cultural atmosphere in which religion was the accused, on the defensive—one in which Hitchens’s extreme claim that “religion poisons everything” and Dawkins’s suggestion that religion is the “root of all evil” had sensitized even those it did not fully convince to the darker sides of belief.19 All of that was reflected in some of our research interviews, for example:
When I started researching religion, the first person I read a lot of was Richard Dawkins. He’s well known as a vocal atheist. Through him, I discovered others. Daniel Dennett is one, Sam Harris another. I don’t really know many philosophers, but they have a lot of interesting thoughts and books, and I subscribe to some of their ideas for sure.
Another said,
I listened to a musician who was a Christian artist for a long time but then fell away from the faith and became an atheist. His album was like, “okay I’m an atheist now” kind of thing, just documented his fall from Christendom and things religious, and he makes a lot of really good points in that album. The first time I heard that I definitely did not have a developed enough worldview to incorporate those challenges. It was just like, “This guy actually has it right,” and Christianity is a total sham. It’s just something we buy and sell, just a function of our brains making meaning out of experience where there isn’t necessarily anything. That was a good three years of my life when I just completely rejected Christianity. That record then introduced me to more atheist writers, I got into Richard Dawkins for a while and there’s a lot of really good atheist critiques of religion.
And another,
I follow someone by the name of Sam Harris—he is an atheist, but he also believes in a capacity for human beings to have experiences similar to Jesus or the Buddha. A lot of people believe that comes from a god or a higher power. But he believes you don’t need those external sources to develop the qualities of love, compassion, kindness, wisdom. You can get that outside of religion. At this point in life, I would say I believe more in Buddha than the God of Christianity. I would say I believe in a higher power, considering Buddha a higher power.
A Third Sexual Revolution
The 2000s saw a major transformation in sexual culture—something like a third sexual revolution—that contributed to religion’s obsolescence. Historians locate the first American sexual revolution in the 1920s, when soldiers who had experienced more freedom while serving in Europe returned from World War I. This, combined with the growing rejection of Victorian moral sensibilities, the expanded privacy afforded by the increased use of automobiles, the spread of movies and advertising culture, and the influence of Freudian psychology, led to a major increase in sex before marriage and more libertine attitudes in urbane circles. The second American sexual revolution occurred in the latter 1960s and 1970s, resulting from the Boomers coming of age, the massive expansion of higher education, and the invention of the birth control pill. That revolution involved further increases in sex outside of marriage, the growing acceptance of casual sex, a reimagined view of women as sexually empowered and liberated, and a new public interest in people experimenting with “open marriage” and the “swinger lifestyle.”20
We can summarize the features of the third sexual revolution, which began in the late 1990s, with three D’s: diversification, democratization, and “de-shaming” of previously objectionable sexual behaviors and identities. Larger swaths of especially younger Americans became more familiar with a greater variety of sexual behaviors and relationships, resulting in the more widespread experimentation by ordinary people with sexual behaviors previously considered deviant. An added feature was a greater tolerance of ambiguity in intimate relationships. Millennials especially decided that close relationships did not have to be neatly classified as “friends,” “dating,” “engaged,” or the like. Life and experiences were more fluid and flexible than those categories allowed.
One expression of these changes was the blurring of the boundaries between sexual relationships and friendships. For many decades, being “just friends” meant not being romantically or physically involved, close perhaps, but platonically. So clear was that meaning that it was a standard way to break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend: “Can we just be friends?” The 2000s popularized new types of relationships that mixed friendships or acquaintanceships with intimate sexual relations. What was novel was not the sex being casual—nothing new there—but that it was with someone with whom one had an ongoing non-romantic relationship rather than someone one expected never to see again.21
The paradigmatic example of this new kind of relationship was “friends with benefits.” The first pop culture use of this term was Alanis Morissette’s 1995 track, “Head Over Feet,” in which she sang, “You’re my best friend, best friend with benefits.” The singer and “best friend” in that song, however, were in a romantic relationship. In late 1999, an Oregon University student group used the phrase as the title of a play they performed. By the 2000s, use of the term spread, with its meaning shifting to refer simply to two friends who hook up without the usual complications of romance and commitment. By 2011, Hollywood caught on and released two friends-with-benefits romantic comedy films, Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, which further popularized the concept.
A related term, “booty call,” referred to a phone call or message with a friend or acquaintance arranging a time and place for casual sex, and to the person to whom the call is made (e.g., “she’s my booty call”). The phrase’s origins are murky, but “Booty Call” first appears as the title of a track on the 1993 album of the hip-hop duo, Duice, followed by the Da Ko Boyz 1994 song, “Da Booty Call.” In 1997, the romantic comedy film Booty Call hit theaters. By the late 1990s, the expression was referenced on various popular television programs. It, too, proliferated in popular use in the 2000s.22 Other phrases that emerged in this era referring to similar relationships were “fuck buddy” and “no strings attached.”
Another aspect of this third sexual revolution was the growing awareness and acceptance as normal of sexual encounters and relationships involving more than two partners. Humans have engaged in various kinds of multipartner, non-monogamous sexual behavior throughout history. What changed in the 2000s was the democratization and normalization of these types of sexual behavior. They morphed from being culturally out of the mainstream to being almost culturally institutionalized, complete with their own identities, vocabularies, variations, communities, and ethics. One version of this was polyamory, or people engaging in multiple, romantic, usually sexual relationships requiring the consent of all those involved. A lexicon developed: polyfidelity, polysexual, poly family, polyamorous, and so on. Another version was ethical or consensual non-monogamy—a general term for relationships in which all partners gave clear consent to engage in romantic, intimate, or sexual relationships with multiple people.
The swinger lifestyle of the 1970s also re-emerged in new forms, the most familiar one being open marriage. This re-emergence gave rise to the term “monogamish,” that is, relationships that are romantically mostly monogamous but also allow for some agreed-upon outside sexual relationships. This larger environment generated many other approaches to multipartner and casual sexuality. They included “relationship anarchy” (fluid relationships with no defined rules), “unicorns” (single bisexual females who have intimate relations with couples, who are called “unicorn hunters”), and “situationships” (casual intimate relationships lacking definition, expectations, and norms due in part to the fear that clarity might make things awkward). Figure 7.8 depicts the complex possibilities of sexual relationships that emerged in the 2000s in a graphic created by Franklin Veaux, a polyamory advocate.
Figure 7.8 The complex configurations of third sexual revolution relationship types.
Credit: Franklin Veaux.
The era also gave rise to related urban legends bordering on moral panics. For example, in her 2002 book Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids, the Christian pediatrician Meg Meeker described the “rainbow party.” This was a gathering where middle and high school girls wore differing shades of lipstick and took turns giving boys oral sex in sequence, leaving multicolored bands on their penises, resembling a rainbow. That idea was the focus of an Oprah Winfrey Show in 2003, “Is Your Child Leading a Double Life?,” and the subject of a 2005 young adult novel called Rainbow Party that was met with much consternation.23 Rainbow parties turned out to be mostly fiction. Even as mere urban legends, however, they reflected something of the era’s larger cultural changes in the air.
“Hooking up” was another part of this 2000s sexual revolution. Hookups were not invented in the 1990s; they happened in practice long before they had a name.24 But, by the 1990s, that term became the common way to describe casual intimacies between strangers and acquaintances that were becoming normal among young Americans, especially college students.25 Indeed, a defining and alluring characteristic of hooking up was that it was intentionally ambiguous. Nobody knew exactly what it meant. Hooking up might involve making out with a stranger for 10 minutes in the hallway of a party before returning to one’s buddies. It might mean having sexual intercourse with someone you met in class. To tell your friends that you hooked up with someone the night before afforded the pleasure of both revealing and keeping a secret, of confessing to having been “naughty” without saying exactly how naughty one was. Many emerging adults who engaged in hookup culture in fact had bad experiences.26 By the late 1990s, though, it had become the new norm.
Yet another expression of this revolution in sexual mores was the “sex positive” movement. As the name suggests, it promoted every expression of consensual sex as a natural and healthy part of human experience, affirming sexual pleasure for its own sake and encouraging sexual experimentation and responsibility. The movement sought to eradicate society’s negative and shameful judgments and feelings about sex, freeing people from embarrassment and guilt. It opposed “prude-shaming,” “slut-shaming,” and “kink-shaming” of all kinds while supporting, among other things, sex-workers’ rights, legal public female toplessness, and comprehensive positive sex education for youth.27 The phrase “sex-positive” was first used in the late 1990s, associated with the founding of the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco and the Center for Sex Positive Culture in Seattle. The movement promoted its beliefs online, through social media, YouTube, festivals, dance parties, education centers, and more.
The third sexual revolution included widespread efforts to “de-shame” previously embarrassing and shameful sexual topics. Condemning “slut shaming” was only one part of this. College women who hooked up and stayed overnight somewhere other than their own residence had notoriously dreaded the “walk of shame” back to their dorms the following morning. The new sexual culture insisted that they had nothing to be ashamed of and should walk in public with self-confidence. Similarly, regularly viewing pornography, masturbating, using sex toys, and sharing nude photos of oneself became part of normal, open life for many. Ordinary emerging adults went into business with webcams at home, performing sex shows for viewers paying with credit cards to watch. Young women became older wealthy men’s “sugar babies” to help pay their bills and did not mind telling friends. Sexting—sending nude photos to others—became a phenomenon despite the risks of public exposure. Unknown numbers of young women answered Craigslist “Hot Girls Wanted” ads for a shot to have sex on camera in the hope of becoming porn stars.28 Participants in consensual erotic practices and role-plays entailing bondage, dominance, submission, discipline, sadomasochism, and sexual fetishes came out, confidently owning their sexual proclivities. Kink went mainstream. The point is not that most Americans suddenly embraced sexual positivity. The point is that there was a drastic decrease in the number of sexual activities or attitudes considered shameful by the broader culture. “On 1950s television, married couples like the Ricardos and Nelsons had separate beds; on 1990s television, shows such as Friends and Sex and the City featured unmarried women casually discussing their sexual escapades.”29
Media references to many of these terms increased across the 1990s and 2000s (see Figure 7.9). “Hooking up” is separated out from the other terms in Figure 7.9 because of its longer use in time and relatively greater reference frequency—combining them in one line would have muddled the findings. The term “hooking up” (counts indexed on the right side) appears to have been in use prior to 1991—getting about 500 references that year. The number of references to hooking up increased further during the 1990s and 2000s. The other terms that belonged to this third sexual revolution—“friends with benefits,” “polyamory,” “ethical non-monogamy,” and so on (counts indexed on the left) were also referenced in the 1990s but increased in the 2000s, especially in that decade’s latter years and into the 2010s. Combined, we see more than two decades of increased media discourse around liberalizing sexual practices.
Figure 7.9 Media references to hooking up and Third sexual revolution terms, 1991–2021.
Source: Nexus Uni corpus
We can see the same patterns in internet search terms between 1995 and 2010. Certain terms, such as “hooking up” and “sugar baby” were not possible to search because they scooped up too many references not related to sex—such as instructions for hooking up electrical systems and “Sugar Baby” watermelons. The search terms in Table 7.3 are those unambiguously related to sex. What we see is a gradual increase in number of Google hits in the 1990s as the early internet grew, followed by major increases in the 2000s, as the internet proliferated and as this sexual revolution spread culturally. Remember that these numbers are distinct Google hits added each year, which accumulated into the total numbers listed at the bottom of the table. The 2010s saw an additional explosion of these terms on the internet.30 The generations who came of age in the digital era and spent the most time of all Americans surfing the web were much more likely to be exposed to the ideas and images of the new sexual culture.
(I remind readers of the methodological point made in the previous chapter about the use of internet counts as data for my argument: the observation that much of the increase here mirrors the growth of all internet websites during this time may be correct but is also, for present purposes, irrelevant. Again, the point is not that internet references to these terms grew faster than the internet itself, but rather that the exploding internet provided a crucial means by which interest in the new sexual culture was expressed and promulgated.)
Table 7.3 Number of Google Hits per Year on Select Third Sexual Revolution Terms (1995–2010)
Year Open relationships Polyamory Friends with benefits Fuck buddy Sexting Sex Toys MILF
1995 22 11 11 8 20 331 3,900
1996 77 23 360 16 292 4,350 13,800
1997 124 22 115 13 575 4,790 15,100
1998 104 82 480 22 610 5,990 17,400
1999 180 202 212 28 638 11,100 23,100
2000 246 192 394 27 1,420 14,000 42,200
2001 635 926 631 649 5,610 47,000 107,000
2002 397 534 765 432 3,100 65,400 70,200
2003 395 555 765 432 3,100 41,800 61,700
2004 504 567 753 417 1,460 37,800 72,100
2005 896 475 1,240 841 2,870 52,900 155,000
2006 1,630 2,110 2,100 1,510 5,360 70,900 213,000
2007 1,920 2,030 2,530 2,140 30,300 80,500 2,110,000
2008 3,270 3,450 2,520 2,050 42,000 82,400 4,700,000
2009 5,100 5,890 6,670 3,920 43,600 124,000 7,930,000
2010 6,380 5,750 16,500 25,000 49,800 244,000 19,800,000
Totals 21,880 22,819 36,131 37,577 190,655 887,261 35,334,500
