By Meredith Sparks
Most people reading this article will have one thing in common. And no, it’s not that we’re mostly American or in college or know a Beatles’ song. It’s that most of us have had no strings attached, anonymous sex. Our Generation Y vocabularies are permeated with terms to describe casual sex: one nightstands, hook-ups, friends with benefits, booty call, and f*ck buddy, just to name a few. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, casual sex has saturated every aspect of popular culture and it’s completely acceptable to have a whole slew of booty calls on speed dial. The sexual revolution was partnered with female liberation and it’s been a symbol of feminist power to engage in casual sex without forming a romantic relationship. This idea is promoted through media everywhere and it’s especially been engrained in our moldable brains through music, television and movies. Take the recent indie hit “(500) Days of Summer,” in which a boy falls head over heels in love with Summer, who just considers him a friend with benefits. Or look at the David Letterman scandal where young interns have been screwing Letterman, in an attempt to move up in the ranks. CNN was even hosting a debate as to whether monogamy is a realistic obligation in modern times or whether it’s as baroque as petticoats and arranged marriages. And who can deny the impact that “Sex & The City” had on women? As a result, women use casual sex to achieve any number of goals: some want to use sex for business, others for love and some just to have sex for the hell of it.
The idea of casual sex has been a completely viable concept until today, when science is proving that perhaps there isn’t such a thing as casual sex. I’ve read recent Cosmos and other magazines that are publishing statistics that the majority of men think that a hook-up can turn into a relationship. Oprah is even telling the women of America that casual sex ain’t so laissez-faire. “When you hop in bed with somebody, be prepared to fall in love,” declared Dr. Helen Fisher to Oprah’s mostly female audience. Dr. Fisher and other scientists are saying that all kinds of sex, even no strings attached, produce chemical dependencies that lead to intimacy and attachment. Men and (mostly) women form a chemical dependency to the other through oxytocin when it is released following an orgasm and even when just cuddling and kissing. Cosmo explained to me that when women kiss men, men actually transfer testosterone in their saliva that is then absorbed by women and increases their desire to have sex. This kind of research definitely influences the motives behind women sleeping with a man without a commitment.
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So do women really have a chance at engaging in a completely casual, unattached sexual relationship? Lord knows we try. I don’t think that women have really decided whether the need to love and be love is ultimately a blessing or a burden, since in today’s world, so much is unattached and noncommittal. Women are going to use sex to make people jealous, to try to fall in love, to get a promotion, but mostly to prove a point. The curse of the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution being partnered together is that women are attempting to use sex to gain respect from men and they want their sexual appetites and their views about relationships to be the same as men. Some people think that casual sex is a progressive part of modern times, while others think that regressing back towards a traditional approach to sex will fix a whole number of evils in our world today, including STDs and teenage pregnancy. It remains to be seen whether monogamy is realistic and whether women (and men) can have a continual sexual relationship without forming some sort of attachment. I think that casual sex is a-okay and it’s fun for a while, but it’s undeniable that eventually somebody is going to get his or her feelings hurt and you sure as hell don’t want it to be you. I don’t know who would have sex with Woody Allen, but apparently even his scrawny ass gets some and he’s seem to got a pretty good handle on the whole phenomenon of casual sex, since he is cleverly quoted as saying, “Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it’s a pretty good one.”
