Brooklyn scene-mate Wesley Yang has a trenchant essay in last week’s New York Magazine analyzing the corpus of their recurring “Sex Diaries” feature. Having read every single diary (no mean feat in itself), Yang makes the observation that they’re not really about hedonism but rather about a whole host of underlying anxieties: about choosing partners correctly, about not being rejected, and so on. An excerpt:

7. The anxiety of appearing prudish.
The Diarists are eager to show themselves to have conquered modesty—as if anyone is still insisting they be modest. This is particularly true of the young women—and the Diaries are full of them—who operate at the weird place where male pornographic fantasies and their own fantasies of self-empowered pleasure converge:

11:39 p.m. Dance with a couple of my girlfriends. We spot some cute guys in the corner checking us out. Decide to give the guys a show and lock lips with one another. Watch guys’ jaws drop to the floor.

As for pornography, it plays a role in an extraordinary number of Diaries. Still, few Diarists of either sex are willing to betray any discomfort with it, per se. (“See, I have no issue with porn,” one Diarist assures us when discussing his friend’s enormous collection.) Instead they worry about everything related to porn. Its price, for instance. Or a partner’s overindulgence. Occasionally they do fear that the consumption of it may be wearing them out. This, it seems, is incontestable.

Do read the whole thing. What I love about Yang’s piece is that it manages, without being reactionary or prudish itself (that anxiety again!), to get at what’s so unsatisfying and (ultimately) unbelievable about so much of our discourse on sex.

For example, I’m an avid reader of Savage Love, Dan Savage’s great syndicated sex column. I really love it, and I don’t for a moment doubt either the veracity of the letters Savage gets (except in those cases where he himself calls bullshit on them), or the general wisdom of his advice.

But when you read Savage’s column (plus the Letters of the Day that he posts on The Stranger’s blog), you wind up getting a cumulative vision of human sexuality that seems a bit… skewed. “Utopian” is perhaps too strong a word for Savage’s sexual outlook, but it’s definitely universalist and it’s definitely sunny: in his vision, everyone’s got their kink, or at least a big healthy libido, and if you don’t, well, then repression or some other weird internal bugbear is probably to blame. Sex really is the end in itself, the thing to be pursued, the thing to be celebrated. It’s almost a modernist pose, wherein libertinism (within the reasonable limits of safety and fairness) is a straight line to liberation.

Yang, by contrast, thinks that questions of loneliness and belonging are deeper than questions of sex, indeed are informing all our sexual decisions.  His is a much darker view, obviously — maybe too dark, since he could have just as easily discerned dreams as well as anxieties in NYMag’s showy couplings. One might even say that there’s an aesthetics governing sexual and romantic decisions, and that it’s this aesthetics, and not necessarily a repressive (or moral) force, that leads some people to choose less sex over more. At any rate, I am definitely in the Yangian camp on this one, and look forward to more pieces from him.