As someone who writes about sex for a living, I spend a lot of time, well, thinking about sex. When people ask me why I do what I do, I suspect a lot of them assume the answer has something to do with being extremely horny or wanting to be Carrie Bradshaw. In reality, I think I could probably benefit from having a higher sex drive and being less like Carrie—particularly when it comes to her taste in men and poor financial choices—but we are who we are. The real answer I give, the actual reason I built a career on sex, is that it’s the lens through which I best understand the world and my place in it. Sex to me is not just an act but a philosophy, a way of mapping out and making sense of human existence. And it all started with The Sims 2.
JK (kind of). But The Sims 2 *was* one of my first introductions to sex—something I remembered earlier this month when EA Games re-released the first two installments of the game in honor of its 25th anniversary. As a baby zillennial, I remember watching my older cousin play the original Sims for hours on the desktop computer in her bedroom (peak millennial coolness). When she outgrew the game, my sister and I inherited it—along with several expansion packs I’m pretty sure were responsible for cooking at least two successive household computers—and started playing god with Sims of our very own.
While I obviously dabbled in the game’s infamous acts of Sim sadism—deleting pool ladders and drowning unsuspecting Sims I’d forced to go for a dip, setting the house on fire and deleting the doors—my favorite thing to do was make them fall in love.
OG Sims enthusiasts will recall that the closest you could get to “sex” in the original game was making your Sims kiss multiple times in a row until an info box popped up that said, “Should we have a baby?” Unless, that is, you had one of the expansion packs that included a vibrating heart-shaped bed, which unlocked a “play in bed” action that seems to have either eluded me entirely or simply gone over my very young head. Either way, that all changed a few years later when The Sims 2 came out, introducing the now-iconic “WooHoo” feature, and so did my life.
Somehow, I suspect my parents were unaware of this spicy addition to the game when they bought me The Sims 2 for my 10th birthday, and I was determined to make sure they stayed unaware.
In retrospect, it can be tricky to remember what we really knew about sex before we really knew about sex. By that point in my life, I think I had some vague understanding that it had something to do with love and babies, but mostly I knew it as some Big Thing I wasn’t supposed to know about. When I made my Sims WooHoo for the first time, something clicked: Oh, I know what this is.
To be clear, the game kept it all pretty PG—cartoonish, even. WooHooing Sims disappear under the covers and rustle around aggressively for a few seconds while fireworks erupt over them, then emerge in their underwear looking a little dazed and dizzy. (If they’re doing it in a hot tub, they slip under pixelated water and splash around, arms and legs flailing about.) Suffice it to say, sex in The Sims was not particularly graphic, realistic, or erotic. What it was was a perfect, surprisingly age-appropriate intro to sex for my barely pubescent brain. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on underneath all those sparks and pixelation, but I got the gist.
I doubt the makers of The Sims 2 intended it to teach 10-year-olds about sex (and it certainly wasn’t a replacement for the sex ed I obviously never got—shoutout Catholic education). But as far as unsupervised, screentime-based exposures to sexual content go, The Sims 2 was weirdly…wholesome. It presented a deeply unserious version of sex that painted it as playful, fun, and a normal part of life—a far cry from most of the (largely negative) messaging kids tend to receive around sex. I still wasn’t about to let my mom find out about “WooHooing” lest my new favorite game mysteriously vanish into the night, but sex no longer felt like this big, presumably bad thing that was being kept from me. It seemed…normal.
Thinking about all of this for the first time in a long time thanks to the game’s recent re-release, it occurs to me how lucky I am that this was my first real introduction to sex, rather than stumbling across porn online the way so many my age and younger have. I’m grateful to have grown up in a zillennial sweet spot of technology—I had the internet from a young age, but not unfettered, handheld access to it from birth. Porn was obviously out there and could have potentially been accessible to me, but being exposed to it too young wasn’t the near inevitability it likely would have become had I been born just a few years later. Which is a long way of saying, I’m unironically grateful for (and maybe owe my career to?) The Sims 2.
