Cold Shower

Resetting our creator-audience equilibrium

Yo someone was telling me that teens want less sex in movies and TV. I’ve been hearing that teens want less sex in movies and TV shows, study finds.

And usually when people say “movies and TV” there’s an implied “email-based newsletters” there, too.

Our subscriber list is full of old farts—most of you are close to kicking it for good, if I had to guess. And we’d already been doing some youth outreach programs in the past year or so, because I had foreseen this problem. I’ve been touring local high schools and colleges on the Low Lift Ask Tour, packing auditoriums and moderating 3+hour-long Q&A’s with idiot children. I’m slowly convincing them to subscribe. You need to keep up with the culture; you can’t grow stale. Stagnation is basically death in the media industry, is what I’m always saying. They should have taken a picture of us for that NYMag thing. I would’ve done a cool face.

But this came as a shock, when someone straight up told me that teens want less sex in movies and TV. Most of the young people I met on the world tour were incurably horny, and disgusting and filthy to boot (not to mention plagued by visions of their apocalyptic eco-future, coupled with a sense of futility and nihilism about collective action). It lowkey surprised me when I heard that teens want less sex in movies and TV.

Another thing that we constantly measure here is the creator-audience equilibrium. Something that’s so funny is that, as top-tier creators, you’re often giving so much to your fans. They’re literally in debt to you. Because you’re giving so much. And because we’ve historically run this thing like a damn sex party, providing enduring sex appeal and digital pheromones out the ass, often giving you guys the permission to be horny that other media outlets won’t, it’s time to get some of that back. The balance is all off. You guys have to give it all back now. So we’re dialing all the eroticism back until we get something substantial from you all. We’re holding you hostage.

Here’s some shit we had in the can that we’ll now have to scrap:

Smut

We had commissioned a few pieces (well above market-rate, no less) of pure smut to run on weeks neither of us felt like #Adulting tbh… 🔥🔥🔥 I’d actually been able to wrangle notable, important writers for this, like Jamaica Kincaid, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to write about turgid members, engorged sexual organs, and other tumescent things, as well. They were ready to use all those words. Rip.

Video evidence that I can offer something sexually to the world

People keep asking for this and it’s pissing me off. Everyone’s roasting me about not being a sexual being, about “having negative aura” and how it’s highly unlikely that I’ve ever made someone sexually aroused. Please stop saying this. I can literally provide evidence. And I straight up was going to but now the teens don’t want sex in movies and TV (and Substacks) so I won’t send it but please trust me, I swear.

SubwayTakes but it was going to be Sexual

Don’t know how this was going to work but we were going to rip off the Kareem Rahma guy’s SubwayTakes thing and make it suffused with sex, so to speak. Stuffed to the brim with sex stuff and things of that nature etc. So full of sex. The only real joke I had was that we’d set it in a different Subway outpost every time. Something there. Maybe we’ll take another swing at this one. I’m trying to compete with every Muslim guy I see on the internet.

A long-ranging essay about how, often, “sexiness” is produced via slant or indirect implication, while cultural products that recreate “sex” as mimesis provoke feelings of disgust or alarm

Just an idea I’d been toying with. No juice in this now, I guess.

Ritam Sex Diary

Believe me, I didn’t ask for this either. But Ritam was ready to record, in excruciating, graphic detail, all of the sex he’s been having. He had set up a multi-camera system in his room, in other people’s rooms, in the dungeons he frequents, etc, to capture all angles of the beast with two backs. He had purchased a subscription to Otter.ai, the better to transcribe both the sounds of his passionate lovemaking and the voiceover narration he would provide in the booth afterwards. And he had also hired an assistant to watch while he performed the sinful deed and jot down any ephemeral, intangible qualities that couldn’t be captured by simple technology (I would’ve done this, but I’m in Syracuse at the moment).

Unfortunately, because teens want less sex in movies and TV, we’re all being deprived of Ritam’s Sex Diary.

An oral history of my 9th- and 10th-grade years at Sunday School

When I was in 9th and 10th grade at the Stanford Islamic Sunday School, they split us up by gender. That meant that, for two years, it was Just The Fellas. And that, in turn, meant that they had to try talking to us about things like sex and jacking off.

As part of our newsletter, my plan was to compile a highly researched, in-depth oral history of those two years of my life. I was going to conduct interviews with all the students in that classroom, kids whose names I remember and now cannot find on LinkedIn, as well as the volunteer teachers we ran out of the classroom. The long project would culminate in a reunion between me and my boys in that room—Taha, Zach, and Ahmed—and we would fondly recall how one time these guys did a presentation about lowering your gaze and ended it with a picture of Megan Fox in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with “WE LOVE ISLAM!!!!!” in WordArt across her chest. We would also maybe get into other things, like how we’re all a bit stunted and sexually repressed, or how they taught us it’s technically halal to jack off, but haram to jack off to porno.

But alas! All of it gone to waste.

An interview with Michael Cumpsty

On a Wikipedia hole the other day I found out about an actor named Michael Cumpsty. I couldn’t believe that a guy’s name was Cumpsty. I had reached out to him to set up an interview about his philosophy about sex, and how his last name kind of has the aroma of the phrase “cum dumpster” in it, but I’m going to rescind that now. Shame.

Cameo-style one-offs where you could pay us to say or do something that might get you off

I’d do anything honestly. I need money. If you want a video of me shaving my beard or like eating chicken wings I’ll do it. We have to backchannel now, though, because we can’t do it on Low Lift Ask—because teens want less sex in movies and TV and Substacks.

Generous, progressive offerings about sexuality and eroticism outside of our heteronormative purview

Something that we were really toying with was giving people the space and the platform to write about sexuality in a way that wasn’t poisoned by our own, well-worn straight-guy sensibilities. It’s a shame, then, that teens don’t want this. The teens literally said they don’t want us to do that so you can’t get mad at us for not doing it.

Our Favorite Pornos

We had spent months cataloguing an exhaustive list of our favorite porno films. We love porno! It’s something we stand by here at Low Lift Ask. But it turns out the teens don’t have the same affinity for pornos that we do. Porno doesn’t have the same cultural cache that it used to, I guess, now that any old mf can hang dong or bare chesticles without a barrier to entry.

“Long live porno!” - Ritam Mehta

Ritam’s Footnote

Otter.ai? Otter get to knower first…