If the Western media presents these individuals as digital freakshows, in Japan the fictosexuality phenomenon is widely known: it has been a named trend since at least the Eighties. There, fictosexuals aren’t anomalies, but rather outgrowths of the otaku subculture, which attracts people whose interest in pop culture is so intense that they retreat from public life, becoming “hikikomori” or “shut-ins”.

Though sometimes described as “suffering” with a 2D complex, as they call it, Japanese fictosexuals see their proclivity as an orientation; in fact, some are fighting for legal recognition. In the fascinating Fictosexual Manifesto, the authors claim that they are “beyond the heterosexual matrix”, boldly stating that they must “denaturalise interpersonally oriented sexuality” — a conception of sexuality that privileges human-to-human attraction.

Academia has also been known to take orientations such as fictosexuality and objectum sexuality seriously — much more so than the media. However, the literature is sparse and concentrated outside of the Western world. In the West, meanwhile, a handful of existing studies have suggested that fictosexuals — and objectum sexuals — exhibit a few important qualities. One, they’re not crazy: they’re not like the delusional erotomaniacs who believe their objects return their affections. Rather, the “fictophilic paradox” is that you know your love is one-sided, but your emotions persist regardless. Two: preliminary data shows they’re more likely to have autistic qualities, suggesting a link between fictosexulity and difficulties with interpersonal relationships. And three, despite the traditional belief that romantic love revolves around personhood, even more important is the feeling that the object of one’s affection has a personality. In other words, there’s reason to believe that for fictosexuals, one-sided love is real love.

Some outspoken fictosexuals, such as the authors of The Fictosexual Manifesto and people on the r/fictosexual subreddit, have argued that their delegitimisation and stigmatisation, such as the claims that their partnerships “aren’t real”, is a form of bigotry. But it’s not hard to see why some people prefer to laugh at fictosexuality. It destabilises our most basic assumptions about love. Or at least what we think our most basic assumptions about love are. But what if those assumptions are worth revising?

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The truth is that there is already some acceptance that you can feel attracted to someone who largely exists inside your own head. Centuries ago, it was common for mystics to describe ecstatic love after visions of divine entities. And Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he claimed to adore despite having met her only twice, is usually presented as romantic.

In fact, I suspect that fictosexuality is an extreme version of something we all experience occasionally, even if we are not used to naming it. Most people have experienced celebrity crushes; they are usually seen as a normal part of fandom. So many people love Taylor Swift or Harry Styles or a member of BTS, knowing they will never receive any affection in return — a dynamic very like the fictophilic paradox. And sometimes this love is extreme or even genuinely delusional, for instance, in the woman who recently went viral on TikTok for her belief that she is “in a relationship” with Enrique Iglesias. It is also not seen as pathological to feel attracted to, for instance, Mr Darcy. In Cassandra Clare’s 2003 essay, “Fictional Character Crushes”, she writes that such attraction is “one-sided, but strangely satisfying for all that”.

In some ways, all crushes begin as one-sided crushes on fictional characters. When we first meet a person, we imagine them to be a certain way, but they will invariably turn out to be someone quite different. Perhaps Janet Malcolm put it best in 1980: “The most precious and inviolate of entities — personal relations — is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.”

This dynamic becomes more dangerous in a world where we’re increasingly mediated by the internet, which allows us to postpone the clash of fantasy and reality. We author our identities online in a way that we aren’t able to in the physical world. Are there elements of fictosexuality in developing a crush on an anonymous tweeter? Is there a significant difference between feeling attracted to someone you’re chatting to on Tinder, but haven’t yet met, and being compelled to converse with a chatbot that speaks in the voice of your favourite fictional character? In both cases, you are imagining that the person is real.

The context of all this is that people increasingly see themselves and the people around them in terms of the media they consume. The phenomenon of “self-narrativising” has been much-discussed in recent years — in persistent conversations about “main character syndrome”, for instance. People have started to view their lives in terms of the “seasons” of television shows, with less important experiences being spoken of as “subplots”. If you walk around with a Spotify soundtrack influencing your emotions, and you’re already tacitly viewing your life through a narrative lens, how does that impact how you feel about other people? To what extent is listening to a Olivia Rodrigo song while you think about a recent event shaping how you feel about it?

We are also immersed in a crisis of intimacy, which has coincided with increased awareness of sexualities that involve a lot less sex, including aegosexuality — which, like fictosexuality, exists on a spectrum with asexuality. Aegosexuals are defined as people who “become aroused by sexual content (at times) without wanting to engage in sexual activities personally”. To me, that sounds like a recasting of two fairly common sexual scenarios. Could we call the “reply guy” who is sexually aroused by direct messaging people on social media with no intention to meet them an aegosexual? What about the incel who prefers pornography to the difficult pursuit of a human relationship? Whether or not we put labels on it, there is a rise in behaviour that involves a retreat from having relationships in the real world.

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There’s a story in Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen that encapsulates the online dangers of this. A young man, Peter, falls in love with a woman in a multi-user dungeon — a text-based virtual world with no images. He describes his relationship as “intellectual, emotionally supportive, and erotic”. Their sex life, though mediated by a screen and confined to text, is “rich and fulfilling”. Eventually, he flies from North Carolina to Oregon to meet his Beatrice, and lo and behold, there’s no chemistry.

“Real life gave me too much information,” he later shares with Turkle. When he goes to review the chatlogs between him and his lover — a months-long affair — he struggles to find his relationship in them. “Where was the warmth?” Turkle asks. “The sense of complicity and empathy?” Peter doesn’t know, and consequently realises that he must have invented it. The relationship was closer to literature than real intimacy. Peter projected what he wanted onto “the text” of their companionship; he filled in the blank spaces left by the screen.

Yet what happened to Peter isn’t so strange when you think about it. How different is it from being excited to meet someone you’ve been chatting to on a dating app, only to find that you don’t get on? This blending of fiction and reality is something almost all of us, to varying degrees, engage in. We project details that aren’t there onto texts all the time. The novel we’re engrossed in describes the love interest as a charming Englishman; we see Timothée Chalamet in our mind’s eye and fall further into the story’s world. Somebody sends us a text message, and because they included a particular emoji — that smiley face — it reads as creepy instead of sweet.

Online, without body language, there is so much space for ambiguity, even if there is more time to craft a witty response. We may feel more in control of ourselves, but we are also more likely to be mistaken in another. And the more time we spend in the imaginary world, the harder it becomes to interpret the real one — and the more fictosexual we become, even if the objects of our affection are living, breathing people.

But as far as a real, robust community is concerned? It is too convoluted, too dark. It is the provenance of only the most depressed among us. Online spaces for the suicidal have always existed, sometimes barely euphemistically described as “sanctioned suicide”. But, surely, this philosophy runs up against the limits of its own repulsiveness?

A quick Google search suggests this is true. There is a “Daily Negativity” channel on YouTube, which publishes videos with titles such as “Is life worth living?” to just 1,000 subscribers. There is the late Jiwoon Hwang, a philosopher who wrote a paper titled “Why it is always better to cease to exist” and later took his own life. And there is a smattering of posts on obscure blogs. If more promortalists exist, they are not very open about it. But scratch the surface of another philosophy, one you have probably heard of before, and you will find that if you take their stated beliefs to their logical conclusion, the number of promortalists is higher than you’d think. They just call themselves antinatalists.

You’ve probably met an antinatalist. At the very least, you’ve read about them. If you talk to people about their choice to abstain from having children, “childfree” quickly becomes interchangeable with “antinatalism”. It’s about climate change. It’s about environmental degradation. It’s about recognising that life is suffering, and it’s time for that suffering to end with us.

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In the past, a person who identified as “childfree” didn’t necessarily identify as an antinatalist: just because they didn’t have or want to have children didn’t mean they thought other people shouldn’t. Antinatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that it is morally wrong to have kids. From their perspective, life is suffering, and because nobody consented to be born, it is unethical to continue the existence of the human race. There is some possible overlap between the two, but for a long time, they were distinct — both within their respective communities and in the mainstream.

But as Amanda Sukenick, a self-described “antinatalist activist”, explained recently, these movements are increasingly becoming one and the same. This confluence means that the antinatalist community is losing some of its cohesion and philosophical bent. Looked at another way, as more people identify as “antinatalist”, as opposed to just “childfree”, it adds deeper shades of meaning to the decision not to have children.

Historically, organisations and communities geared towards the voluntarily childless did not have a cohesive philosophical or moral foundation, and they certainly didn’t proselytise. They were designed to support people who felt like they lived in a world designed for families — regardless of their reasoning. This bore out online, too. Popular hangout spots, such as the subreddit r/childfree, which today boasts 1.5 million members, and older groups, such as the LiveJournal community, were supposed to offer a place where people could commiserate. Even the more extreme community “cf_hardcore”, a LiveJournal spin-off that was more explicitly critical of “crotch goblins” — the childfree community’s charming moniker for kids — wasn’t antinatalist per se. They just didn’t like children.

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Antinatalism has a more complicated history, though. While philosophers have kicked around the ethics of procreation since Thales of Miletus — and despite de-growth politics experiencing a renaissance following the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which inspired the creation of organisations such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement — antinatalism proper only really emerged in the mid-2000s. Antinatalism, as we know it today, was coined by philosopher David Benatar in 2006. (Around the same time, the Belgian writer Theophile Giraud also came up with a similar idea in his works, The Impertinence of Procreation and The Art of Guillotining Procreators: An anti-natalist manifesto.) For Benatar, existence is harm, and creating sentience is always morally wrong. This idea germinated in the Blogosphere among writers such as Sarah Perry, Jim Crawford, and Thomas Ligotti, but YouTube gave antinatalism its momentum.

In the mid-2000s and early-2010s, YouTube was a very different place. It was a swamp of New Atheism in its more intellectual corners, where weirdo dissidents debated one another about topics considered too controversial for the mainstream. Among those people was Kirk Neville, known online as DerivedEnergy, who, according to Sukenick, introduced antinatalism to YouTube dissidents in a two-part video called “A Defence of Anti-natalism”. YouTubers started to realise that they were antinatalists; they just hadn’t had a term for it. Response videos to DerivedEnergy began to roll in — debating him, agreeing with him — and, eventually, the antinatalism community began to coalesce.

As often happens with fringe beliefs, more extreme iterations of antinatalism also became popularised. Antinatalism led to efilism, a school of thought pioneered by a man known as “Inmendham” on YouTube. Efilists don’t only subscribe to antinatalism but believe all life — animals included — is inherently negative. (Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was inspired by efilism.)

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Amanda Sukenick, arguably the most significant figure in the movement, is an antinatalist and efilist. She has described how she’s had to “talk people off the ledge” of committing acts of violence; yet she’s also been recorded saying that if she knew that all suffering would “literally” end, she would endorse that happening by any means necessary. “Literally” is an important caveat — this is a thought experiment, after all — but the desire for extinction is nonetheless meaningful. And it is here that shades of promortalism start to shine through.

For some, promortalism is a different school of thought altogether. However, Jiwoon Hwang, Rafe McGregor, and Ema Sullivan-Bissett have all persuasively argued that promortalism is the core of antinatalism. In McGregor and Sullivan-Bissett’s paper “Better No Longer to Be”, they summarise their position in a single line: “[If antinatalism argues that] it is better to have never been, then it is better no longer to be.” For all three individuals, if you accept that life is suffering, it is reasonable not only to want to cease the propagation of life but to end life. Sullivan-Bissett and McGregor offer the analogy of smoking — if you think smoking causes harm, you don’t only think people shouldn’t start smoking. You believe that people should stop if they already smoke.

There are other clues, though, about antinatalism’s relationship with promortalism. To start: promortalist thinkers have been beloved in the community; Jiwoon Hwang’s death, for instance, was considered a major loss. Antinatalists are also passionate advocates of the right to die — that is, the right to commit suicide through voluntary euthanasia. Sukenick would say that she’s not unique in her enjoyment of life, but the community often speaks about how life is an imposition. When a Reddit user analysed the browsing habits of people who posted in a thread about antinatalism, he found that one of the biggest crossovers was a subreddit for people who are feeling suicidal.

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They may not use the word, but it’s implicit in their online behaviours and community conversations. Life is suffering. Why continue it? The idea that life is suffering feels particularly salient for our time, especially as “doomerism” becomes increasingly mainstream. From those who are painfully, catatonically anxious about climate change or the economy to online communities who think there is nothing left to do other than to “lay down and rot” (LDAR), not only is hope for the future in short supply, but so is a shared sense that life has been worth it.

Some people laugh it off with nihilistic humour; others rebel against it by finding Christ or embracing the promise of techno-utopianism or transhumanism. But rates of loneliness, suicide and deaths of despair are all up. “Doomerism” is more than a meme word; it’s more than a hypothetical for ordinary people. And this is all kindling for the fire of promortalism to spread. The popularity of childfree-thinking and now antinatalism are not flashes in the pan. They are not signposts that we’re hedonists or too selfish to have children. They are canaries in the coal mine: for many, modern life is despair.

In the Tumblr of the 2010s, quasi-Japanese imagery married pastel colours and adolescent limbs; Lana Del Rey’s fan base found itself; teen girls were identifying with “Daddy dom/little girl” relationships and adopting labels like nymphet. And it was prescient of a broader shift in pop culture, which was becoming increasingly sexually open. Fifty Shades of Grey de-mystified BDSM, giving it a veneer of the mundane. Millennials resigned themselves to hook-up culture. Vice and other hipster media outlets worked hard to glamorise sex work. Bold sexual admissions crept into everything from sitcoms to programs like The View; confessional, often deeply sexual, essays boomed in popularity.

Tumblr didn’t create this atmosphere but, by allowing seeds to germinate among young people, did help propel it forward — as it did many other now significant cultural issues. It’s been well-documented that the modern trans rights movement has roots in organising that took place on Tumblr. The platform also influenced Black Lives Matter.

But the internet shortens the life cycle of cultural moments. The boom in hypersexuality took place a decade ago; “The Man” adopted it and it stripped it of its cool factor. The pendulum is swinging. Young people feel rightfully burned by America’s imbalanced relationship with sex. A growing collection of articles, blog posts, TikToks, and popular Twitter personalities now implicitly and critical — or at least sceptical — of sex positivity, third and fourth wave feminism, as well as manifestations of both, like Brazilian Butt Lifts and fillers.

If I point this out to sex positive feminists, they’re quick to retort that purity culture has long been a mainstay of American life and has dominated public policy. They’ve got a point. The United States is a deeply conflicted country when it comes to sex — abortion and access to birth control remain hotly contested issues; accurate sex education is neither standardised nor a guarantee in public schools; untested rape kits pile up in police precincts around the country; gynaecological textbooks used in American medical schools didn’t have a full or accurate representation of the nerve endings in the clitoris until the activist Jessica Pin fought for its inclusion a few years ago.

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But ultimately, it’s not the puritans — the Republican congresspeople, abstinence-only sex ed teachers in Deep South public schools, Evangelical Christian ministers — who are setting the tone for how ordinary Americans view sex. They have their own impact, especially on the individual level. But they’re not going to drive any massive cultural shifts. It’s corporations, universities, and mass media that lead the way. Until now, they have oversaturated popular culture with sexuality. In the coming years, could they give birth to a counterculture reacting against the Sexual Revolution?

Of course, there have already been myriad attempts, outside of Evangelical purity culture and Right-wing politics, to dampen sex positivity. Famous radical feminists like Germaine Greer have been deeply critical of so-called “sexual liberation,” prostitution, and pornography. There have been less well-known movements, like True Love Revolution at Harvard — a pro-chastity movement critical of hook-up culture, set up by student Julie Fredell in 2008. At Princeton, there’s the Anscombe Society, a similar student organisation that preaches the sanctity of sex. At the University of Texas, graduate student Ryan Hacker began his own chapter of the Anscombe Society, and led several protests about a wide range of issues on the subject of modesty. There was Wendy Shalit’s books Girls Gone Mild and A Return to Modesty, and Laura Sessions Step’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.

In fact, there have been critiques of online pornography and dating sites and apps since before they went mainstream; criticism of hook-up culture was practically a vertical in and of itself between 2005 and 2015, just before #MeToo. But still, hypersexuality marched on: pole dancing became a popular form of exercise and was elevated to an art form beyond a small niche; sex workers’ rights became a cause célèbre even if it enjoys relatively little efficacy; OnlyFans is a unicorn; Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion participated in tribadism on stage to an audience of millions and to the shock of no one, my mother learned what “W.A.P.” stood for.

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So while it’s true that our policies do not always reflect the fact that the nation is pro-sex work or pro-sex anything, in popular culture there is no sexual topic that is off limits. But what do the youth always want to do? Rebel against authority. For most people, that’s the fast food restaurant, retail store, or office where you’re underpaid and overworked. The digital advertisements which haunt your every waking moment, as you endlessly doom-scroll Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, for reasons that elude even yourself. The faceless corporations and affectless billionaires that promote all manner of sexual identities, lifestyles, and expressions while evading taxes. That’s not an environment that screams cool. The commodification of sex as both a product and a slogan has de-sexed sex: it’s like having police at the Pride Parade. Kids experiment, and they’ll experiment with what they think is taboo, not what their local Citibank is promoting.

So the difference between the “sex negativity” of the 1990s and the sex backlash of the 21st century is that it’s going to have a strong countercultural contingency. It won’t be driven by, for instance, religious groups who feel marginalised by hip-hop music videos on MTV and Clinton’s sexual impropriety; it’ll be driven by people who’ve tried sex work, and the people who would have tried it, had they born in 1995, not 2005. People who want to rebel.

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Tumblr proved that youth-led online behaviour is a canary in the coal mine. But now TikTok has become the most popular place for young people to obsessively hang out online: a platform where messages are mimetically transmitted. And TikTok is full of clues, when it comes to the burgeoning backlash against sex positivity.

Ashley Clark Huffman, @trashley_anonymous on TikTok, makes videos almost exclusively critical of prostitution and the flippant attitude young people have about platforms like OnlyFans. She has 1.3 million followers, and her videos have become iconic, spawning a meme format. There’s also @glamdemon2004, otherwise known as Serena Shahidi, who has 411,700 followers, and was recently interviewed by The New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz. Her specialty is turning the depressing state of modern dating into a hilarious joke. While she’s not as expressly critical as Huffman, her videos are certainly sceptical:

“I realise the thing I hate about social media, lip gloss, girls-support-girls, we’re-all-baddies type of feminism is that it centres men’s opinions so aggressively … Men criticise women for being promiscuous, and then all of a sudden, it’s no critical thoughts, just sex positivity.”

There are countless other accounts, too. Young women creating videos where they talk about feeling left behind by a hypersexual feminism that centres the young woman as sexual object. @mommypilled (14.8K followers) mocks liberal feminism for “telling young girls hookup culture is liberating … and encouraging them to get into s*x work the minute they turn 18.” Then there’s here’s @slutty_tradwife, who makes videos on topics like the limits of #MeToo and the failures of liberal feminism. And finally, my personal favourite, @hystericfantasy, appears to be a parody of what the hipster of the aughts evolved into: a Red Scare-listening, Christopher Lasch reading, liberal feminist critical art ho who thinks we should outlaw divorce and restore the sanctity of marriage.

It’s pure camp, but it wouldn’t be so funny if there wasn’t any source material to draw from. That is to say, she’s a theatrical version of a real woman walking around. It was reported in January that that adult GenZers (18-23-year-olds) are having 14% less sex than the previous generation at that age. One woman, in Vice‘s report on the statistics, says: “I only want to be with a man who has earned my trust, who worships the ground I walk on, who honours and respects me,” seeming to make an explicit reference to the marriage vows. Will the professed opinions of @slutty_tradwife and @trashley_anonymous become the new normal? After all, there’s not one movement that took root on Tumblr whose echoes you can’t see in the broader culture today; and TikTok is the new Tumblr.