TonioTimeDaily

Side note: I don't mind people casual sex and hooking up being what it is called, I'm elaborating on the importance of not well-treating self and others. 

"I wish I’d known sooner that the careless is the enemy of the good. Sex doesn’t need love, or permanence, or even much talking, in order to be healthy and satisfying. But sex without care is toxic. Sex without care leads to violated boundaries, injured bodies and unequally distributed pleasure. At best, sex without care is awkward and unsatisfying. At worst, sex without care is humiliating, traumatizing and painful.

Sex without care is bad sex, or regrettable sex, or sex with weird social consequences afterward. It’s wanting to sink into the floor when the girl you kissed last weekend gets in line behind you to order coffee at the student center and doesn’t acknowledge your presence even though she clearly saw you standing there.

Casual sex that includes trust, communication and respect is possible. I know because I’ve had it before. There was the arrangement I had for most of 2016 with a lovely, kinky Twitter comedian who wanted to know about my desires and my work drama while sharing my disinterest in dating each other. There was my weekend fling in Boston with an old friend who fucked me and cooked me pizza from scratch for three days. There was the simple and pure one-night-stand I had with a frat guy at age 19; his leg was broken and we stopped having sex when his cast started digging into his skin, at which point we watched the movie Up together instead.

Healthy casual sex isn’t some myth tossed around by naïve feminists and kinky sex educators (trust me, naïve feminists and kinky sex educators are on the cutting edge of creating a world that isn’t trash). But a culture of healthy casual sex requires conscious effort. It’s not all that casual."

"There is nothing wrong with sex that is uncommitted, anonymous, surprising or meaningless. Casual sex is not bad or degrading or hurtful or doomed or dangerous or risky or a threat to civilization and the world order. The problem is not the act. The problem is how we treat each other. It’s the ignoring and the evading and the using and the taking. We’re not doing this right.

And we know we’re not, we know it during every conversation with friends about opaque text messages and uncomfortable sexual encounters. We know we have a problem when we talk about the Me Too movement and sexual harassment and wonder about the nights that were nowhere near rape but left us feeling used and diminished. We want to have sex without commitment, and we fear we’re sacrificing something vital in exchange for that freedom.

One reason we treat each other like shit is the term “casual sex” and all the sticky, unspoken baggage it carries. Our concept of “casual sex” has given us permission to be casual with each other’s humanity.

I see now as an adult that we use the phrases “casual sex” and “hooking up” as shields against vulnerability, trust and compassion. They create a false binary between casual sex and serious sex, turning emotional nuance into a shameful trap and not a normal side effect of two humans interacting. “Casual” lets us stop caring about each other and ourselves, positioning sex as about the individual and not the couple because when it’s over, we are alone again. It is supposed to be an impersonal act of taking pleasure rather than creating it together. It’s physical, unemotional. Serious sex within a relationship means that you care. Casual sex, then, is careless. And if you care, you lose."

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