No Sex and the City?

We New Yorkers are a randy bunch. Go on the Internet and you can scan countless ads by people looking for sex. Go out to a bar on any given night and you'll find multitudes of sharply dressed men and women -- bright young things "in the season of the rising sap" as Tom Wolfe would say -- meeting and greeting one another, honing in on finding some "action."

The evidence that people in NYC are trying to "get some" is overwhelming. It's all around you. Everywhere you go.

That's why articles like this recent one in the New York Observer annoy the hell out of me. 

Entitled Sexless and the City: Web Warps Libidos of Coked-Up Careerists, it draws some sweeping generalizations about the libidinal behavior of young New Yorkers based on a few anecdotes. The author, Nate Freeman, makes the audacious claim that "Young New Yorkers no longer care about having sex. It’s not the endgame, nor even the animating force of social interaction. Men and women still get dressed up, but not for the purpose of taking off their clothes in another’s company. What used to signify desire or the desire to be desired now boils down to narcissism."

Mr. Freeman apparently hung out with a bunch of young twenty-somethings snorting coke, who then all went home without getting laid, and he came to the stunning realization that all young people in New York are now disinterested in having sex and more interested in doing drugs, posting on Twitter and Facebook, and looking good.

Spare me. 

You don't have to a Freudian to believe that Eros is a powerful motivator, especially in a  meat  market like NYC. It's not surprising that a bunch of coked up people aren't interested in sex, at least not the time their doing coke. Now I've never done coke and don't hang out with people who do but, from what I understand, it actually dulls your sex drive and can, in men, cause temporary impotency. And I've gone to countless parties where people don't hook up. So what? Doesn't mean they didn't want to! I always did!

As for the narcissism charge, it's not like narcissism is anything new amongst young hot shots, either in NYC or elsewhere. Yes, we are a very narcissistic generation but I don't know anyone,  male or female. narcissist or not, who wouldn't rather engage in sexual congress with someone else (gender depending on their inclination) than stare at himself or herself in the mirror or browse the web. In fact, you might argue, getting laid is the ultimate act of narcissism: when someone submits to you sexually, that person is validating your existence, validating your sexiness and desirability, validating your prowess and physical power. Sounds pretty narcissistic to me!

Articles like this really make me despair for the future of journalism. Why write something like this when the evidence contradicting it is so overwhelming? The point of this article is so laughably, obviously wrong, so ridiculous on the face of it, that I feel embarrassed for Nate Freeman and the editors of the Observer. Just read the comments section of this article and you'll see how right I am.