Noli Irritare Leones

Last month, yet another study of college students’ sex habits, this one from University of Minnesota, hit the headlines, with the news that casual sex doesn’t cause emotional damage.

Thoughts. First, I think Amanda’s right that it’s worth noting that

… researchers also found that there isn’t as much screwing around as breathless stories about the “hook-up culture” would have you believe. Between these two studies, it was found that only 4 precent of teenagers have sent a sexually provocative photo through text message and 80 percent of college students’ most recent sexual encounter occurred in the context of a committed relationship.

Second, I’m inclined to be cautious of any single study about the emotional impact of casual sex. Not because there’s anything particularly obviously wrong with this study, of “a diverse sample of 1,311 sexually active young adults,” published in a peer reviewed publication, but more because I think it’s easy for different studies to point in different directions depending on what questions you ask. Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite, in their book on marriage, cite research to the effect that people with a steady sex partner in the form of a spouse tend to be happier with their sex lives than people who have to go out and troll for hookups. This University of Minnesota study that’s currently in the news reports that the 20 percent of college students whose most recent sexual encounter was either with a casual acquaintance or with a close but nonexclusive partner didn’t score as noticeably more at risk for “harmful psychological outcomes,” which I take, in absence of anything beyond the press release, to mean that they aren’t, for example, clinically depressed. Both results could easily be true.

We tend to have two competing public narratives about “casual sex,” one in which you’re permanently damaged by it, tape that has lost its stickiness and will no longer be able to fall in love, chewed gum which no one wants, and another in which it’s no big deal, something to be open to trying, don’t pooh pooh one-night stands if you’re frustrated about not yet having found that relationship you want. But in fact, there’s a vast middle ground between being just fine with even the most emotionally disconnected kinds of sex, and suffering lasting damage from your more casual experiences, a middle ground where you make some bad choices, regret them, recover from them, and learn not to repeat them, without turning into that tape that has lost its ability to stick to anything once the right person comes around. It’s in that vast middle ground that my own experience lies.

If I take the three basic positions generally current about sex and commitment – wait till you’re married, anything goes as long as it’s consensual, or sex when you’re not married is just fine as long as it’s not too “casual” – it’s the last one that comes most naturally, that resonates most easily with my gut feelings and experience, while the other two take a certain mental effort to adopt. At the same time, I see some limitations in the position my gut wants to adopt.

Since I’ve been writing recently on war and peace issues drawing from the Bible and Christian tradition, I want to be clear that here I’m not talking about what the Bible or Christian tradition has to say about sex, but, for the moment, only about where my own experience leads me; the two aren’t bound to line up (though they may, in the end, prove to do so).

Nor am I talking about reason, exactly. For the moment I’m talking more about stuff like this. On Twitter, Scarleteen suggested a #ThanksAbOnly tag for people to Tweet about what they got out of abstinence only education, and one of the tweets was:

JaymeFH #ThanksAbOnly for telling me sex before marriage makes me like a beat-up used car no one will want to buy.

When I hear the kind of abstinence till marriage argument that JaymeFH scorns, there just isn’t any part of me that’s nodding along, feeling somehow ruined because I slept, before I married, with people I felt I cared about at the time. When I read an article from someone who seems to be shaking his or her head and wondering “what do women get out of it,” and “it” is having sex at all before you’re married, I have to laugh. Women get sex out of it, and sex is no small thing. It’s not that waiting till marriage strikes me as some perverse, oppressive, irrational, prudish, indefensible position, even absent an appeal to God – set your worry about birth control failure and your negative evaluation of the results of a pregnancy before you’re committed to each other high enough, and it actually makes perfect sense – but it is that, when it’s argued, as it so often is, in terms of lost purity or perfect virginal wedding nights, it winds up going against the grain of my experience.

On the other hand, here’s an article lamenting the rise of casual sex in a particular segment of working class British culture. Amanda Marcotte links it impatiently on Facebook, with the comment

Yeah, I love how it’s a given that wanting to fuck a woman and having searing contempt for her are basically the same emotion.

I’ve seen this kind of sex panic article often; the working class British subjects in this one could just as easily be replaced by students at elite colleges in the US in another, and the quotes would sound almost interchangeable. I’m skeptical of such articles, because I suspect that the world of the Aughts hasn’t really changed as much from the world of the Seventies as the writers say, that romantic love isn’t really this scorned, marginalized thing. But my skepticism isn’t backed, like my gut reaction to the “beat-up used car” remark, by any difficulty feeling why someone would be dismayed, to find a dating world that actually looked just like the one described. I would find any dating environment troubling, in which it were really true that

She is angry that she is growing up in this milieu. “It’s all casual sex now; nobody talks about love,” she said. “I wish I could have a real connection with a man. But there’s no courtship any more. That’s all dead. It’s just immediate. There’s no getting to know someone; you’re expected just to look someone up and down and make the decision just like that: are you going to have sex or not?

“There’s no time to build up a connection. The idea is that you have sex first, but how are you meant to create the kind of excitement, the emotional connection, after that? I want to have an emotional connection with a man. I want it to be there with the feeling that I am equal to him. I do think I’m as good as a man. But I don’t want just this no-strings sex stuff.”

Like the woman described, my own experience of sex, when young, didn’t leave me wanting, or even, frankly, understanding the desire for, “just this no-strings sex stuff.”

But before I get to sex, I need to talk about not-sex, because that has a lot to do with my visceral reactions to what people call, variously, “casual sex,” “one-night stands,” “hookups,” “flings,” “no strings attached,” etc. In particular, I’m thinking of a particular kind of not-sex: the stream of not particularly welcome overtures, from people not particularly willing to care about my response, that started with the obscene phone call from an apparently adult man when I was just a kid, including the guy who tried to grab me on the street when I was still not quite legal, the shouts in the street from groups of men, the drunk at the swimming pool whose wife kept apologizing for him, etc. Because the thing about these unwelcome, uninvited, boundary pushing approaches is that, though the men making them were very much a minority among the men I met in general, they were a much larger set of the men who were approaching me for no strings sex. I know that people can be coercive even to people they’re close to; that’s why we have laws against rape within marriage as well as among strangers. And I know that it’s possible to cruise strangers in a way that, whatever its other problems, at least shows some respect for the desires and wishes of the person you’re cruising. Once in a very blue moon, I’ve been cruised that way, and I’m told it’s routine among gay men. But my own experience involved a lot of disregard for my boundaries by strangers and near strangers; it took a while to realize how much this colored my attitudes about “no strings attached,” and how different must be the experience of people who find “no strings attached” appealing (for I’m sure no one finds it appealing to be called a bitch for turning down a random married drunk stranger).

And now, having dispensed with not-sex, I’ll talk about sex, about choices that, even if I came to regret some of them, were my own, free, uncoerced choices, for which I don’t blame anyone but myself, ones that involved people who may have broken my heart, but who never once disregarded my “no.”

I don’t know how to do this without getting into numbers, because the numbers kind of matter to my reaction. There are seven people who matter to this story. Not that my “number,” in the most technical sense, is seven; it’s actually some number smaller than that; I won’t say what. All of these seven, as it happens, are men, because, though I’m bisexual in my attractions, I didn’t in practice make out with as many women as men, or go as far with the women as with the men.

First, there are the two non-relationships, two men with whom I came to the sharp realization that I’d made a mistake, and had to set a limit. The right feeling just wasn’t there. One time, I spoke with what felt like a necessary cruelty; I just needed out, and in the process was, I think, very unkind to the guy involved. The other time, both of us were as nice to each other as we could be under the circumstances. In each case, my limit was respected (so the “number” actually can be counted on one hand). But the experiences marked me; I realize that, for me, if the feeling isn’t there, I freeze in ways that are really unpleasant, for me and anyone who’s with me.

Then there were the five others. And what happened was that, with four of them (including the one I married), I found myself having fantasies about babies, and the really long term. I’m not sure how ordinary I am in this. I actually suspect that I’m an outlier, that the guys didn’t necessarily have the same kinds of fantasies, that my friends, male or female, didn’t necessarily go quite as often, or as quickly, to baby thoughts. Not necessarily an outlier in caring about the people I had sex with, I don’t mean to suggest that the whole rest of the world is crazy about anonymous sex. But an outlier when it comes to the baby fantasy thing. But maybe we’re all some kind of outlier. At any rate, for all four, I had that fantasy and that impulse, however careful I was in practice. So, there are these two extremes, I’ve-got-to-get-out-of-here and I-want-to-have-your-baby, and not a heck of a lot of middle ground.

And then there’s the middle ground. One person. The closest to a friend with benefits I’ve ever had. The guy who was a friend rather than a lover, with whom I briefly shared what he called “adventures.” And somehow wound up feeling fine about it, neither madly in love (no baby thoughts there) nor trapped and needing to get out, but just having fun with a friend. But at the same time, given my other experience, my being OK, just the once, with a more friends with benefits arrangement has always felt to me like a kind of rare freak accident, harder to come across than true love, not something I’d find a likely enough prospect to take a chance on again.

Eve Tushnet once included, among the many links she posts and excerpts to Marriage Debate, one with rules for how to handle a friends with benefits arrangements. The gist was a series of don’ts: don’t confide in each other, don’t do this and that and the other thing that might suggest you’re actually close to each other, or like each other too much, certainly don’t meet his family. I broke every one of these rules with my friend, including the one about meeting family (though I’m not sure I met any of them till the “adventures” were over, maybe a brother, maybe not even him till later). We went places together, confided in each other, all the usual sorts of things friends do; the only thing we didn’t do was fall in love. And, in fact, for years afterwards I counted him as one of my best friends, till, as often happens even with good friends, we let the friendship lapse.

And this gets to the place where I’m ambivalent about “friends with benefits.” As I hear it described, it often winds up sounding as if there are more “benefits” than “friendship” to it, or are supposed to be; that “keep your distance to make your friends with benefits relationship work” article that Eve once linked is the kind of thing I see often. And it frankly sounds to me like an awful deal. Why would I want to be trying really hard not to like the person I’m sleeping with too much? It makes as much sense to me as trying never to have an orgasm with the person I’m sleeping with. To me, the only reason “friends with benefits” felt OK in this case was precisely that, even if I didn’t feel in love with the guy, I still felt close to him. Which makes it hard for me to see how not falling for the person I’m sleeping with makes any sense as, well, a plan, or an expectation, rather than a kind of mutual accident. Going by my own experience, it sure isn’t something I’d want to bet on.

But why I say ambivalent, instead of purely negative, is this: the “friend with benefits” was still around, years later, and willing to take phone calls when I was in crisis, and generally be a shoulder to cry on when I needed it. The guy who, before the man I actually married, was most forthcoming with words of love and assurances of his unending friendship, wasn’t. He was off without so much as the courtesy of a face to face break up, or the least explanation for his sudden silent treatment.

When we talk about how bad “casual sex” is, the temptation is to define “casual sex” as, first, always something more “casual” than what I’m doing, and, second, in terms of feelings; if you feel all mushy about someone, it’s not “casual,” but if you feel less starry-eyed, maybe it is. And feelings matter, of course; whatever else may guide your decisions about sex, you shouldn’t be sleeping with someone if you don’t feel right about it, or don’t feel right about what you think the other person feels for you. (There might be any number of other reasons you shouldn’t be sleeping together, but, regardless, not feeling it is reason enough.) But how starry-eyed you feel isn’t the only thing that matters. If there’s one thing that the “no sex until marriage” ethic and the “consenting adults” ethic both have to offer, that the “sex with love” ethic sometimes forgets, it’s a focus on taking responsibility for your deeds, whether it be by hanging around to help raise that child you’ve fathered, or by using condoms to avoid spreading STDs.

Articles giving dating advice on what kinds of “casual sex” you should be avoiding, frankly, often suck. They wind up sounding as if you mainly have to concern yourself with your reputation, with not having a “number” that’s too high, or having sex on too early a date, and they don’t talk so much about how to handle the feelings that are actually involved, or what responsibilities people actually have toward their lovers. But I have seen bloggers who, though their perspectives vary, use words that resonate with me more than those dating articles. Steve Barnes often says that you shouldn’t have sex with someone unless you’re willing to take a call from that person in the middle of the night a year later. Hugo Schwyzer has sometimes talked about being willing to support the other person through all the consequences that might come of your sleeping together. *Christopher suggests asking, where is this heading. What I like in all of these suggestions is that, in their different ways, they point to deeds and taking responsibility, not just really, really feeling as if you’re in love. Because really, really feeling as if you’re in love may or may not last very long at all, but some concern for the welfare of the person you’ve slept with (and certainly for any child you might conceive together) ought to remain. Ethics, whether sexual or other ethics, have at least partly to do with what we still may owe each other, even when we’re not feeling it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 8:37 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.