Casual Sex
Long ago, it became clear to me that separating love and sex turned sex into a commodity and made people inclined to manipulate each other. The sex becomes the power, and the formula of love becoming sexual is inverted, with people hoping to find love by giving out and then withholding sex.
In this way, any sense of the transcendent is lost; instead people become materialistic and narcissistic, thinking that manipulating others gives them power because it causes others to act against their own needs and interests. The narcissism spreads to every level of civilization.
Casual sex will someday rank up there with jobs, bureaucracies, and totalitarianism as destroyers of the human spirit. When the innocence leaves, alienation and manipulation replace it, making the person more alone and less likely to ever bond in a unitive, transcendental manner with another.
Why are so many marriages failing? Casual sex trained people in being stockbrokers of sexual favors. Why do so few people seem to actually know their spouses? Love became alienated from the methods of love, including marriage. Why are children hollow-eyed and paranoid? Their families are not stable, thanks to long-ago casual sex.
Consider that casual sex makes for mental misery except in the soulless:
Unprotected sex and having more hookup partners were associated with greater negative experiences of hooking up. Contrary to expectations, there were no gender differences in the total number of negative hookup effects, although men reported more frequent hookups. In addition, negative impacts of hooking up were positively associated with psychological distress regardless of gender.
At some level, everyone knows in their gut that casual sex is not an honorable or desirable thing. It is what they do to feel powerful. Naturally if things do not go as they intended, they feel a loss of power and stability.
In addition the hookup culture involves rolling the dice:
Emotional outcomes of CSREs differed across people and situations. Women and individuals with less permissive attitudes toward CSREs experienced worse emotional outcomes of CSREs. Alcohol use prior to CSREs, not being sexually satisfied, and not knowing a partner well were also associated with worse emotional outcomes.
Those who embrace casual relationships have low expectations beyond the physical. For everyone else it is an awkward and destructive process that ends in confusion and alienation.
People choose sex partners based on who they would reproduce with at that moment in their biological cycle:
Sex differences were abundant and showed mostly support for sexual strategies theory. Mating context also influenced reasons for having sexual intercourse in accordance with sexual strategies theory, rather than social role theory.
Nature does not separate sex from love, but does not join them either. It rewards love-sex pairings with more stable families and therefore, more descendants, at least until egalitarian governments get involved.
In particular casual sex is harder on women, for whom it is higher-stakes choice than for men, who probably hump stumps and knotholes when no one is looking:
Because of women’s higher obligatory costs of reproduction throughout evolutionary history, we hypothesized that sexual actions, particularly those involving casual sex, would be regretted more intensely by women than by men. In contrast, because missed sexual opportunities historically carried higher reproductive fitness costs for men than for women, we hypothesized that poorly chosen sexual inactions would be regretted more by men than by women. Across three studies (Ns = 200, 395, and 24,230), we tested these hypotheses using free responses, written scenarios, detailed checklists, and Internet sampling to achieve participant diversity, including diversity in sexual orientation. Across all data sources, results supported predicted psychological sex differences and these differences were localized in casual sex contexts.
To males, orgasm is ejaculation; to females, it is the taking in of sperm and doing something with it. The two sexes are not the same and for this reason, casual sex disadvantages females and fails to fulfill male sexual appetites.
Women in fact attempt to use one-night stands to start relationships, but when this fails — as it usually does, in the long term at least — they feel an intense sense of loss:
Women were significantly more negative and less positive than men. Although women did not especially view these relationships as a prelude to long-term relationships, they felt greater regret than men about having been “used.”
In fact, women find it difficult to sever sex and reproduction, probably for the obvious reason that an entirely foolproof form of birth control has never existed.
They have sex with men based on their estimates of the longevity of the relationship:
The leading explanation for these changes — the good genes hypothesis — predicts that women should prefer presumed markers of genetic benefits (“good genes”) most strongly when they are fertile and evaluating men as possible short-term mates…The authors had women at different points in their ovulatory cycle rate videotapes of men in terms of how attractive they found each man as a short-term and long-term mate. The authors then examined how women’s preferences for traits typically valued in long-term and/or short-term mates varied according to women’s fertility status. The results supported the good genes hypothesis.
Planning for the short-term intensifies neurosis because it eliminates long-term planning. In other words, it is giving up on the future to deal with the immediate situation sort of like palliative care in medicine.
It turns out that smarter people avoid casual sexual and romantic relationships more than those with fewer options:
Number of prior dating relationships, education status, substance use, and perceptions of peer sexual behavior significantly influenced the number of casual sex partners. Emerging adults who did not complete high school, compared to those enrolled in four-year degree programs, reported significantly more partners.
Generally intelligence correlates to having a longer-term vision. Casual sex prioritizes the short-term over the long term, which not only makes people hopeless but orients them away from fidelity and family-building.
Not surprisingly, casual sex maps to a bell curve in which a small portion of the population account for most of it:
Over the course of the school year, 20 % of women engaged in at least one hookup involving receiving oral sex, 25 % engaged in at least one hookup involving performing oral sex, and 25 % engaged in at least one hookup involving vaginal sex. Using two-part modeling with logistic and negative binomial regression, we identified predictors of hooking up. Risk factors for sexual hookups included hookup intentions, impulsivity, sensation-seeking, pre-college hookups, alcohol use, marijuana use, social comparison orientation, and situational triggers for hookups. Protective factors against sexual hookups included subjective religiosity, self-esteem, religious service attendance, and having married parents.
It would be interesting to track these through life because they are probably chronically incapable of long-term or transcendental thinking, therefore are going to express interest in the materialistic and manipulative and become increasingly alienated as a result.
The links between mental unwellness and casual sex suggest this type of neurotic divide of choices from anticipatable future:
The results show that CSREs had a small impact (small effect sizes) on subsequent psychological well-being, especially among girls; FWB relationships involving penetrative contact increased girls’ psychological distress and both their alcohol and drug consumption. ONSs including sexual touching increased girls’ psychological distress and their drug use. None of the CSREs influenced boys’ psychological well-being.
Again, males have fewer issues with casual sex because of the male orgasm being a complete loop at ejaculation. It feels just as good to violate an apple pie as it does to have real sex and so males are less connected to the sex act and more connected to ejaculation.
It turns out that in addition to general negative effects, casual sex correlates with depression and poor mental health:
Researchers found that teens who showed depressive symptoms were more likely than others to engage in casual sex as young adults. In addition, those who engaged in casual sex were more likely to later seriously consider suicide.
Not surprisingly, detaching sex from love and the short-term from the long-term will create a sense of no future which in turn makes people nervous and adrift.
Those who see sex as a means to power are less likely to regret casual sexual encounters:
Sexual gratification and socio-sexual orientation both predicted the sex differences in casual sex regret. In contrast, only socio-sexual orientation attenuated the sex difference in regret passing up casual sex.
In other words, if they can gain more popularity through casual sex, they are less likely to think it through much. They simply trade it like they would any other property for money.
Peer pressure is status-based, however, which means that in order to keep above it, the individual must maintain status through constant acts of dramatic sexual adventure. This forms a loop that is hard to escape.
Since casual sex reduces the reproductive value of a woman because she is now less likely to bond, she often loses social status for having sex with lower-status males, manifested in feelings of disgust:
Results suggest that greater feelings of worry, experiencing disgust, and feeling pressured to have sex predicted more regret for casual sex. In contrast, experiencing higher levels of sexual gratification, finding the partner to be sexually competent, and being the one taking the initiative predicted less sexual regret. Predictors of casual sex regret were not moderated by nation. However, relative to men, most of these predictors had a stronger impact on women’s likelihood of regretting their most recent casual sex encounter.
In the big picture, if you want intact families and sane people, you make sure that your nation avoids casual sex. The Christians rage about homosexuality and abortion, but this is the issue that should be discussed more clearly.
