chest hair shaped like a penis, not
a calm and collected woman.
There was a brief, anomalous, period
in the early aughts when it was
approaching acceptable for women to
talk about their horniness among
friends. But it came to a grinding halt
in February 2004, when two seemingly
unrelated yet historically significant
events took place within weeks of
each other: Mark Zuckerberg launched
Facebook and Sex and the City
went off the air. Over the course of the
intervening years, the frank sex
talk popularized by Carrie Bradshaw
and her horny harem was driven
underground, another casualty of tech.
As we built up our public identities
online, the performative nature
of relationships on social media—look
how perfect we are!—had a suffocating
effect on discussing our unmet
sexual needs IRL without looking like
a hypocrite. Technology cockblocks
horniness in more direct ways: You can’t
even post a photo containing a
woman’s nipple on Instagram without
getting banned from the site. Facebook
updated its “community standards”
recently so that our universal symbols
of horniness—the eggplant and
peach emojis—are now verboten. The
net effect has been to silo our horniness
from the public sphere, surfacing
only when people slide into each other’s
DMs or swipe right on hookup apps.
Like everything else, horniness has been
compartmentalized. Instead of
bringing us joy, it brought us shame—
so we KonMaried it.
Now here we are. A little over a year
after porn star turned national heroine
Stormy Daniels crisscrossed the
country on what she called the “Make
America Horny Again” tour, it appears—
against all odds—America is, in fact,
horny again. And the horniness knows
no bounds. It’s as if horniness in 2020
has consciously uncoupled from sex.
“It’s going to be weird explaining
to our grandchildren how horny we all
got about congressional hearings,”
tweeted television writer and podcast
host Erin Ryan. Supermodel Ashley
Graham explained to late-night talk
show host Lilly Singh why she is horny
for prayer. Lizzo is horny for K-pop,
according to Buzzfeed, while Ariana
Grande is horny for Christmas. In Apple
TV’s new original series Dickinson—
dubbed “horny Emily Dickinson”—
Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily is hot and
bothered for Death, embodied by Wiz
Khalifa in a smoky CGI horse-drawn
carriage. Other recent objects of
declared female lust: podcasts, grocery
stores (specifically Wegmans and
Trader Joe’s), the Joker, and justice.
Horniness has been applied to so many
nonsexual activities that it is getting
a little soft—and maybe that’s the point.
Today, being horny is about having
a lust for life in spite of all evidence
that we should dig a hole and hide in
a fallout shelter. It’s about being an
enthusiast and having hope in a time of
confusion and upheaval. These public
declarations on horniness are coming—
yes—at a time when relations betweenmen and women have never been
more fraught. More than two years
after the #MeToo movement exposed
a disgusting spectrum of sexual
misconduct infecting practically every
industry, a backlash is making it
harder for women to succeed at work.
Male executives in finance are reportedly
ripping a page from the playbook
of woman-fearing vice president Mike
Pence, resorting to de facto gendersegregation to mitigate what they
perceive as risky interactions. At the
same time, men who have been
credibly accused of sexual assault are
sitting on the Supreme Court and in
the White House. In her recent memoir,
entitled What Do We Need Men For?,
E. Jean Carroll describes a series of
horrific incidents—including getting
raped by Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman
fitting room—and offers a Swiftian
proposal: killing all the men, reducing
them to their atomic elements, and
selling them off for more worthwhile
products, like Birkin bags.
To be horny in 2020 is to be on
the front lines of a rebellion. After all,
the best way to win a debate is to
acknowledge and embrace the worst
thing that could be said about you.
That’s exactly why these horny-and-
proud proclamations are important;
they’re a rallying cry to defang a culture
of rampant misogyny.
To declare one’s horniness in 2020
is to perform a public service in a
time when displays of female desire
still remain risky for women. Just look at
freshman Democratic congresswoman
Katie Hill, who resigned from the
House of Representatives after nude
photos of her were published on the
internet without her consent. Freelance
writer and activist Leah McElrath
was horny-shamed on Twitter after
making a lusty comment about then
presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke
that went viral. (She later wrote
that her identity as the author of “the
Beto Sex Tweet” will likely end up
on her tombstone.) Even on television
it remains hard for women to own
up to their horniness. In Mrs. Fletcher,
the lead character, played by Kathryn
Hahn, holes up in her house to
feverishly masturbate to porn. And in
the first episode of Amazon’s new
series, Modern Love, based on the Ne w
York Times column of the same name,
a young woman drafts a text to a
new paramour to say she’s “feeling
horny,” then reconsiders, replacing
“horny” with “frisky.” What a letdown.
Because as we are discovering,
horny women not only win Emmys—
we shall inherit the earth. nLike
everything else,
HORNINESS
has been
compartmentalized.
Instead of
bringing us JOY,
it brought us
SHAME, so
we KonMaried it.