The Nudes Internet

The internet may be, as the 2003 musical Avenue Q put it, constructed for pornography, but the website formerly known as Twitter has become overwhelmed by it. Almost any tweet, no matter how anodyne, generates replies that say “NUDES IN BIO” or feature actual pornography. I tweeted recently about the History Channel series Alone, a reality-television show in which people are left to their own devices and occasionally ward off bears, and among the responses was a spam image that displayed the entirety of one (extremely flexible) woman’s genitalia.

The constant and absolutely unavoidable nudes on X are partially the product of a spam operation, the purpose of which appears to be, as with any spam operation on the internet, to eventually separate some poor user from their money. But they also perfectly embody what I call the nudes internet: a space in which everything—every ad, meme, and argument—is reduced to sex. Not actual sexual intercourse, mind you. Not even the omnipresent “NUDES IN BIO” spam ads promise that you, the humble clicker upon the ad, will actually get to have sex with the woman in the picture. Rather, on the nudes internet, sex means power and worth, and the goal is to accumulate it, for no reason but to have it, like an expensive couch that is impossible to sit on. Thus, the procurement of sex, the display of sex, sex as a competitive market place, sex as an economic vehicle, sex as a cure-all, sex as a moral cudgel—the nudes internet is less about sex itself and more about what it symbolizes.

[From the December 2018 issue: Why are young people having so little sex?]

The problem with the nudes internet is not actually the nudes in my mentions, even though the nudes are incredibly, unspeakably irritating—if I tweet about the NFL or the Bible, my greatest wish is not to see AI-generated labia in the responses. Rather, the problem is the sexualization of absolutely everything that takes place within the nudes internet, which is now leaking out into the broader internet. You can find it in the comments section on an innocuous Instagram post or YouTube video. You can find it in the diatribes of conservative commentators furious that college students aren’t sexy anymore, or that teens aren’t having sex in the backseat of cars anymore. Or in the left-leaning publications that firmly believe we'd all be hornier if we just had sexier movie stars and mitigated the intervention of the market.

Where did this all come from? Interest in sex—even crass public discussion of sex—is hardly novel. I grew up in the 1990s, when the Clinton impeachment scandal, lad mags, girl power, and evangelical purity culture combined to create an environment in which female sexual availability was simultaneously desired and disgusting. But the nudes internet is different. As culture has moved online, the entrance fee for all kinds of cultural activity has become a kind of performance—not actually having sex, but it is imperative looking like, and sounding like, you could.

Over the past decade, three big changes in internet culture have had a particularly big impact. The first is the rise of OnlyFans. In 2016, the British entrepreneur Timothy Stokely launched the platform that connects creators of content (including sexual content) to people willing to pay to see it and occasionally interact with the creator. While some content creators on OnlyFans are YouTubers, sports figures, and influencers, many do create sexual content for their subscribers. The platform rewarded those content creators for commercializing their social-media interactions—and because they could be literally anyone, brought the marketing of sex into more mainstream spaces.

The second is also driven by a flourishing internet subculture that builds on old-school pickup artists. Pickup artistry gamifies getting women (referred to as “targets”) to sleep with men (referred to as “closing”). Eric Weber’s How to Pick Up Girls! was published in 1971. But a new breed of social-media influencer has discovered that peddling such advice can be extremely lucrative. They tell their followers that having sex with women is among life’s primary purposes, and that women themselves are easily manipulated at best and duplicitous schemers at worst. The object is not the sex but the pursuit and the outward performance of sex, getting to be viewed as the man who has sex with as many women as possible.

The pickup artists selling programs for men looking to have casual sex have developed a distinctive language: 5s and 6s or “mid” to refer to women whose appearance is passable (to them), Chads and Staceys to refer to the idealized, largely imaginary men and the women those idealized men are purportedly privileged to sleep with, and the popular “304” (the digits typed into a calculator then viewed upside down look like the word hoe) to describe any woman, doing anything, anywhere, ever.

The third and most recent change is Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He made changes to the platform so that virality paid actual money to users willing to purchase a blue check mark. Nothing goes viral faster than something about sex. As other users began to adopt the language of OnlyFans creators and pickup-artist influencers, the nudes internet reached escape velocity.

[Read: The ugly honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand]

No one is sexually freer or more sexually satisfied because everyone online is yelling about how the breasts of a young actress ended “wokeness.” Instead, sexiness has become yet another role that people online, and even offline, must perform. The internet is a place awash in the idea of sex as a scourge, goal, and a thing you Absolutely Must Get or Else You Are Worthless (unless you happen to be a young woman, in which case you must appear to be sexually desirable but ideally never have sex, but not seem like you never have sex, lest you appear “frigid”). Everyone should be hot enough for you to want to have sex with them, and everything—people, products, movies—should be sexy. None of this facilitates the having of actual sex by actual human beings; instead, the nudes internet is built on the belief that being sexy, or more important, being seen as sexy, is just how you keep score in life.

The cure for the nudes internet is to emphasize an alternative—an internet in which the pursuit and performance of sex and sexiness is not the primary purpose of being alive. As a young woman told a Los Angeles Times reporter who was writing about why Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations, “Maybe you don’t have to have sex all the time. Maybe if you’re doing other things in your life, and you’ve got other priorities, or you just don’t feel like it, that can be a good enough answer.”