I should have become a fan earlier.

I’d heard that Tolentino was a brilliant young essayist. And that alone should have drawn me in, as I love the essay form. Yet still I resisted. What overcame my inertia was when I heard her compared with Montaigne. “Aha, a fellow Pyrrhonist!” said I, meaning a particular kind of skeptic, no mere scoffer or cynic, but a person who questions dogmatic statements (including his or her own) without abandoning the quest for truth itself.

Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist motto— Que Sais-Je? [What do I know?] with a scale in the foreground—is inscribed as the frontispiece of his Essais— that is, “Attempts,” not finished statements, but the record of continual trial and error in the search for truth. Socrates, whom Montaigne adored, inspired the motto’s words, and the scale of justice refers to Montaigne’s love of balancing a statement to make sure it’s not claiming too much or too little.

So finally I was prepped and ready to admire Jia Tolentino. Alas, I had no essay of hers at hand to test my hopes against. But, as fate would have it (a phrase Montaigne would have enjoyed weighing), I opened The New Yorker for June 30, and there was her latest book-review essay: “Sex Bomb: Why Generation Z is so Chaste.”

Alas (again), here were new obstacles. First, how could I forgive Tolentino for the cutesy, in-your-face title? (Solution: by blaming it instead on nameless editors at their gleeful work.) But what really turned me away was the subject, clarified in the subtitle. As an eighty-two-year-old, I’m not much interested in essays about the sex issues of twenty-somethings. (Said he, grousingly, as old people do.)

But, again, as fate would have it, my eye strayed to the first sentence, the author’s actual first words, and immediately found itself stuck:

The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago.

Wait: “Virgin allegations” in the sense of freshly-minted, unspoiled, or even, somehow, unravished allegations? The picture vaguely forming in my mind was, to say the least, grotesque. But no. Erase that cartoon. Instead, fill out the syntax: We’re talking about allegations OF virginity. Virginity as a term of indictment. Virginity is on trial here, and virginity’s crime is…? Tolentino summarizes one writer’s terms for it: “that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties.” As if virginity is metastasizing like cancer or multiplying like rabbits. Then Tolentino quotes another writer who gives the offense an economic spin by calling it a “sex recession,” as if virginity were the fall-out from bad investments. Neither writer’s metaphors do much beyond create an aura of panic around the crime, if crime virginity be.

Then Tolentino, with one breath, blows aside the verbal fog so that we can look straight at what these writers, and others, consider to be a major problem.

The youth had stopped fucking.

Of course, that’s not actually the case. Copulation among the young still occurs, as I am glad to note, just not as frequently as it has in the recent past. But Tolentino’s terse translation of recent expressions of social panic refers to what she herself acknowledges to be an actual trend: declining rates of sexual congress not only among Zoomers but among Millennials as well. This despite what Tolentino calls a “Vegas buffet of carnality” on the internet. She asks, reasonably: “How should we respond to this? And what, if anything, should we do?”

Her “we” includes observers like herself not willing to get caught up in the jitters represented by the authors of the two books she’s reviewing in her essay, Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Carter Sherman’s The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future. Both authors, Tolentino observes, link the “sexual recession” to the internet’s wild proliferation of sexual enticement. Perry, a social conservative, wants the kids to close their eyes, cover their ears, and Just Say No. Sherman, more liberal, acknowledges the confusion the internet can inflict, but also suggests that the debate has encouraged healthy options of sexual behavior. Sherman calls this growth of possibility a “revolution.” Tolentino scales that claim down to a “tortured dance between backlash and progress.”

So Tolentino, balancing both Perry’s and Sherman’s reactions to what Tolentino calls the “cultural whipsaw” of opinion on Zoomers’ sex life, finds sense and nonsense in each writer’s claims. Both seem, in Tolentino’s account, unable to step back from the problem they’re addressing to see where they’re putting a finger on the scale.

But stepping back is what Tolentino does best, and is the main reason I’ve come to admire her. Here, towards the end of her essay, is the paragraph that really won me over. It occurs when Tolentino shows her inner Montaigne in stating her own view of the harassing issue in question:

The reality—that relationships are based on the idiosyncratic magic and complexity of any particular pairing and must be continually navigated and negotiated through time—is arguably learned in the purest way through sex. Sex is one of the few arenas in life in which the hyper-mediation of contemporary existence can vanish completely, one of the rare infinitely repeatable experiences of unadulterated human presence and instinct and responsivity. It can be a form of discovery, especially but not only for young people—a zone in which we might, if we’re lucky, learn how to be partners and friends and citizens, how to find ourselves and one another worthy of love and respect simply for having desires.

Here, Tolentino is speaking in a way that includes an eighty-two-year-old me. Not because she’s appealing to an audience older than or floating above the heads of the Zoomers whose struggles she’s been talking about, but because she’s addressing all of us, young and old, in common. For all of us of any age, sex is perhaps the most powerful life force we have to try to make peace with. Making that peace, Tolentino suggests, requires speaking in a way that neither succumbs to the hyperbolic tone of buffeting culture wars nor soars above those wars in serene disdain. In the paragraph above, she is following a line close enough to the turbulence to let us all feel its power but far away enough to encourage us to spot a distant shore. Not only sex but sentences about sex—sentences about any passionate human activity—have to be “continually navigated and negotiated through time.” Her prose eases our way on that long journey.

In keeping the goal in her sight, not wavering to extremes, Tolentino is following the advice Ralph Waldo Emerson gleaned from his own love of Montaigne, in his essay on Montaigne in Representative Lives:

Let a man [sic] learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting: let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon: and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause:—

                           “If my bark sink, ’tis to another sea.”

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.