Jesse Singal breaks down the breaking news that casual sex may be beneficial “… if you like casual sex”:
[R]esearchers had a bunch of undergraduates take a survey that revealed whether they had so-called restricted or unrestricted “sociosexual orientations” — that is, whether or not they viewed casual sex in a positive light and had a tendency to seek it out. (How someone’s sociosexual orientation develops is complicated — it’s “determined by a combination of heritable factors, sociocultural learning, and past experiences,” the researchers write.) Then they tracked the participants’ sexual activity via self-reporting over the course of an academic year.
Undergrads who viewed casual sex in a positive light “typically reported higher well-being after having casual sex compared to not having casual sex” — “well-being” meaning higher self-esteem and lower depression and anxiety. Those with negative attutides toward casual sex reported a hit to their well-being, but this wasn’t statistically significant. (The researchers didn’t have a lot of data to work with because, unsurprisingly, people who don’t like casual sex don’t tend to have a lot of casual sex.) There were no identifiable gender differences.
Picking up on Isha Aran’s takeaway of “whatever floats your boat,” Amanda Hess challenges the study:
But whose boats are being floated here, exactly? [Researcher Zhana] Vrangalova told Pacific Standard that people who rate high on the sociosexual scale are generally “extroverted” and “impulsive” men who are more likely to be attractive, “physically strong,” and “more sexist, manipulative, coercive and narcissistic” than their peers. The people on college campuses who are the most likely to engage in casual sex—and to reap its benefits—are also dudes who are high in social status and low in character. For college students like them, ‘‘not all casual sex is bad.’’ But is that actually good news for anyone else?
It may be that attractive, manipulative, narcissistic, and sexist men are simply naturally inclined to enjoy no-strings-attached sex. Or it might be that only these men have acquired the status necessary to not suffer any social consequences for doing so.
Update from a reader:
As a younger man, I had many, many partners and tons of casual sex (but please, let’s not conflate “casual sex” with a one-night-stand with someone I just met – though that happened, too). I’m not extroverted nor impulsive (OK, maybe a tad impulsive), and definitely not sexist, manipulative, coercive nor narcissistic. I can say, however, and without hesitation, that before I entered into a monogamous marriage, some of the very most joyful moments in my life were associated with casual sex experiences.
I struggled with that realization for a long while because I had inevitably absorbed some of the societal bullshit that makes us think that casual sex is automatically wrong. After pondering on it for years, I came to the conclusion that experiencing joy through casual sex is A-OK. Again, I never manipulated, coerced, nor deceived, and I tried my very best to be considerate of everyone’s feelings. At various times, these encounters were loving, healing, confusing, awkward, bittersweet, angry, sad – the whole human range of emotions. Further, those moments of joy often weren’t necessarily about the sex itself, but rather the situation around the encounter, the run-up to sex. Had I not met and married my spouse, I would be happily living a life that involved lots of joyful casual sex and I wouldn’t feel a nit of guilt about it.
The Dish 