The ‘Days Without Sex’ Meme and the Importance of Being Horny Online

If you’re not cruising for ass online, what are you even doing there?

Whether it’s a high schooler DMing their crush or a 30-something millennial who came of age in steamy AOL chatrooms (and is currently also DMing their crush), we’ve been emboldened by the internet to explore — and voice — our sexuality like never before.

When you’re a public figure, this can backfire: to be “horny on main,” openly thirsting via some official social media account, is considered a gaffe for politicians, celebrities and journalists, especially in cases where the horndog refuses to own their evident lust. But for everyone else, a healthy dose of carnal content is practically required. Horniness is our lingua franca.

https://twitter.com/MilesKlee/status/907838055578521601

While folks who get fucked on the reg have nonetheless shown themselves willing to express their horniest selves in a digital setting, no one is as purely horny as the person enduring a hookup drought.

Each passing hour sharpens their desire, and all that time spent alone (plus a smartphone) invites Twitter jokes about this plight. We begin to confuse our yearning for physical connection with our need for any connection at all, so it makes perfect sense that commiseration on this topic drives a lot of engagement.

The recent “days without sex” meme is a perfect model of that concept in action.

There is something both performative and competitive to these one-liners, a striving toward rock bottom. The gag is both a moment of radical transparency — a kind inherited from the first-generation blogger scene — and a blatant parody of that impulse to overshare.

We aren’t to believe that any of this actually transpired, nor even that the authors aren’t enjoying steady sex; instead we reflect on the strangeness that can swamp a mind deprived of collaborative orgasms. As hellish as it can feel when you’ve nobody to knock boots with, the thing to do is laugh, because failing to see the funny side of chastity leads to much darker places.

In involuntarily celibate or “incel” communities, men also share their sexual frustrations, but they channel these into resentful anger and calls for violence. Tellingly, they don’t talk (let alone joke) about aspiring to bedroom bliss with an attractive partner, only their rage at perceived rejections. Playful, positive and imaginative horniness takes a backseat to rote misogynist theory.

It’s not that pangs of horny sentiment are always welcome; they can be painful, which is all the more reason to vent in honest and humorously graphic ways.

The American climate being what it is, it can seem as if we all live on an emotive spectrum that ranges from “scared/mad/depressed” to “ready for the bone zone.” You might say the two conditions are mutually reinforcing, with naked intimacy one temporary solution to despair and horniness a neural pathway out of malaise to simple pleasure. In practice, then, our misery jockeys with the imperative to get laid, often to absurd effect.

https://twitter.com/internetcassie/status/1019768798319013889

There may be no method to reconcile this in our heads, but I do know this: Being horny online will help.

I don’t mean stalking, creeping or generally hitting on everyone with a hot profile pic; I’m saying that when you confess your cravings, unburden yourself of private fantasies and tweet “fuck me daddy” at the pope or Tony the Tiger, you add to the debauched sum of all human horniness. Your horny spirit mingles and cross-pollinates in this filthy, heavenly sphere, and no matter how long it’s been since you had last sex, you are not alone. There is no point in remaining a wallflower at this orgy. Make yourself at home.

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Miles Klee

Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’