Go Organic: Why to Quit Casual Sex
by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
I wrote the book Smart Sex(1)as a protest against all the dumb sex that’s going on in our world. I have to confess how I got to be an expert on smart sex and its opposite: I’ve tried many of the hair-brained things that I write about. That’s how I know they don’t work. I venture to guess that many of the activities during Sex Week at Yale will fall firmly into the Dumb Sex category.
So, here is a quick quiz. Which demographic group has the most sex? The best sex? What kinds of relationships face the most sexual violence?
Married people have more frequent and more satisfying sex than the unmarried.(2) And as for sexual violence, marriage is by far the safest kind of sexual relationship, both for women and their children. Rates of domestic violence for cohabiting and dating couples are higher than for married couples. Children are more likely to be abused by their mothers’ boyfriends than by their mothers’ husbands, even when the man is their biological father.(3)
Do these politically incorrect facts surprise you? The key to understanding them is to get past the modern vision of sex that I call “consumer sex.” The modern view is that sex is a private recreational activity with no moral or social significance. That’s the vision you are likely living with now, whether you label it that way or not. This attitude underlies much of what goes on at Sex Week at Yale. Sex is just for fun. Don’t take it too seriously. Just stay safe and don’t get pregnant.
The alternative vision is that sex is an organic reality, with two natural purposes written on the human body. The first purpose is procreation. The second is not so obvious but is equally important. Sex builds up and solidifies the relationship between the members of the couple. Building a long-term relationship has survival value for a species whose young have a long period of dependency. The offspring of parents who work together are more likely to survive than the offspring of parents who can’t or won’t cooperate with each other. The fact that sex is fun is along for the evolutionary ride. The fun is nature’s way of getting us to keep the species going . Presumably the procreation part of this equation is self-evident. So let me say more about the bonding part. Science can now show the physiological pathways by which we attach to our sex partners. The physiology is different for men and women. During sex, women secrete a hormone called oxytocin. This is the same hormone that we experience when we are nursing our babies. Some experts refer to oxytocin as the attachment hormone, because this hormone causes us to both relax and connect with the person we are with. In the aftermath of sex, we relax and commit to our sex partners. While we are nursing, we relax and connect with our babies.(4)
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Footnotes:
1 Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, by Jennifer Roback Morse, (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2005).
2 The evidence that married people have more and better sex than unmarried is compiled in Chapter 6 of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially, by Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
3 The evidence on violence in cohabiting relationships is summarized in Chapter 4 of Smart Sex. A recent study in Pediatrics confirmed this long-standing finding that children are more at risk from unrelated males in their households, especially, their mothers’ boyfriends. “Child Death Resulting from Inflicted Injuries: Household Risk Factors and Perpetrator Characteristics,” Patricia G Schnitzer and Bernard G. Ewigman, Pediatrics, 2005; 116; 687-693; located on-line at www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/116/5/e687.
4 The Alchemy of Love and Lust , Theresa L. Crenshaw, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 90-105; The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing is Essential to Who We Are and How we Live, Shelly E. Taylor, (New York: Times Books, 2002), pp. 24-28.
