History confirms that if Louis XIV didn’t exactly invent the notion of recreational sex, he was certainly an enthusiastic participant.
Sex Without Strings
Are we getting it more, but enjoying it less?
“Change is the greatest aphrodisiac,” Louis XIV, the Sun King, is purported to have said. Indeed, the secret stairwells at Versailles connecting lavishly appointed bedchamber to lavishly appointed bedchamber, and the lengthy list of Louis’s mistresses, including such courtly ladies as Marie Mancini, Madame de Montespan, and Louise de la Valliere, suggest that the king knew whereof he spoke.
Long before Louis, however, recreational sex existed as a favorite sport, not just of kings, but of mere mortals as well. The Greeks, who even gave their gods busy and varied sex lives, partook themselves — and then wrote humorous, merry plays about it. The Romans, too — if The Satyricon is any reflection. And without question, after Louis’s reign, recreational sex remained in vogue. The Restoration period in England, for instance, was notorious. Even the ostensibly prissy Victorian era smoldered with pornography and prostitution. In the days when there was no birth control and no penicillin, men did it rather openly, disregarding the dangers of syphilis and the nuisances of illegitimate children. Women, on the other hand, did it either in the confines of the brothel, or covertly, and many did not do it at all.
Until recently, that is. The youth explosion of the sixties, given impetus by the marketing of penicillin (1940s) and the Pill (1960s), undoubtedly helped to shake the foundations of establishment expectations and produced a sexual revolution and a modern women’s movement whose stories are not yet finished. Everyone today wants independence, out of bed and in it. Recreational sex has become not simply a pleasurable pastime, but an inalienable right of men and women alike.
So how are we faring with our new freedom? Is sex just for the fun of it — that is, sex without marriage or procreation or love — all it’s cracked up to be? Are we jumping into bed because there are so many beds to jump into? Are we jumping because we’re pushed? Come to think of it, are we jumping at all? Some observers of modern courtship patterns have suggested that we’re losing interest because sex is so available. But is sex really so free? And are we losing interest?
Of the more than two dozen men and women with whom I spoke (a homegrown sampling of people ranging in age from 17 to 45, and in occupation from cabdriver to architect, from student to stockbroker) it was clearly the men who were more active and enthusiastic about recreational sex. The older men and women, oddly enough, were more adventurous than the younger ones. Witness, for instance, Kirk — who at 40 is a tennis pro at a posh Los Angeles tennis club. He is a legend among the women who take tennis lessons from him. In the rarefied world he inhabits, Kirk is known not only for his relish of the conquest, but also for his success at it. At one time or another he has bedded down most of the regular female players and staff members he deals with daily. “It’s very much like the spider and the fly,” says a colleague of his. “A new woman comes to play at the club, she doesn’t know Kirk’s reputation, and she’s dazzled by his boldness and interest — and by that I mean the sexual vibes he throws in her direction.”
Kirk boasts a finely sculpted body, an IQ of 160, and a coolly unsentimental attitude toward sex. “What I like is fucking. And I like to find women who let me know that that’s what they like, too.” he says bluntly. “When a relationship that I perceive as purely sexual gets too complex, and I don’t know what a woman wants from it, I turn off.”
Does Kirk ever feel that there’s a downside to recreational sex? “Every once in a while I feel I’m being used as a dildo by women when their boyfriends aren’t around, or when their social lives are empty. But how can I condemn it? After all, isn’t that what I’m doing as well?”
“Recreational sex? For me, it’s not just fun, but a necessity,” jokes Tom, a 25-year-old law student whose mane of thick blond hair calls to mind Robert Redford’s. “At least lately,” he quickly adds. “You see, my lady and I broke up about three months ago. We’d been living together since we graduated from Cornell in 1982. But then one day about seven weeks ago we had a spectacular fight about — you guessed it — my roving eye, and Maria booted me out of the house.” After rescuing his belongings from the sidewalks of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Tom deposited them at the apartment of his best friend and headed toward a singles bar on Columbus Avenue, hoping to distract himself from his grief. “I wanted, you know, to lighten things up a little,” he admits. “And I also wanted a roof over my head for the night. I could have crashed with my friend, but I figured his girlfriend would be less than ecstatic. And so I cruised this bar. And you know what? A pickup for the night was easy to find! You go into any of these fancy places on the Upper West Side, on the East Side, in Soho, and there are all these cute types hanging out — the girls who once were stewardesses but these days are MBA candidates, all blond and peppy with turned-up noses. And they’re just dying to meet young law students.” He grins. “Like me.”
“I love first encounters,” says Mona. “Nobody has any emotional baggage. I find that I even have my most intense orgasms with these strange men.”
Tom’s rate of success has been astonishing. In three months he has found a different woman to shelter him every night but two. “I think of them as my ‘roofs,’ and I really have come to enjoy living like a nomad. It’s also something of a challenge,” he boasts. “I’ll enter a bar at, say, 9:30 or 10:00 in the evening, and then I’ll time myself to see how long it takes me to find my roof for the night. If I’m feeling great, I pick out the prettiest lady in the place and see how receptive she is. If I’m tired or grouchy, or if I feel rumpled, I’ll pick out a lady who looks a little more, well, desperate and eager.”
Does Tom ever have a good enough time to come back for more, to see these women again? “I keep meaning to,” he replies. “But somehow the challenge of seeing who’s around the corner is more appealing to me right now. I really like the idea of variety.” Does Tom ever feel he’s deceiving these women? He shrugs. “Well, I do pick them up in a bar, don’t I? I try to be a very good lover. And,” he smiles mischievously, “a very good houseguest, too.”
Nick is equally enthusiastic about recreational sex. A 27-year-old Miami cabdriver with a scraggly brown beard and an ever-present pair of sunglasses, Nick prefers recreational sex in its purer forms. “The only thing better than a great fuck,” he says, dead serious, “is two great fucks.”
Nick has been married to Tina for five years. When they first took their vows, they did so with the idea of remaining faithful. “I must’ve had a screw loose to even toy with the idea,” Nick laughs. “Man, by the end of the first year, I was crawling the walls. Being faithful seemed like a cruel joke. Finally, one chick who hired me to drive her out to Hollywood one night got to me. It was a humid, sweltering night. She lit up a joint and offered me a toke, and before I knew it, we were on the beach fucking like crazy.”.
In a matter of months Nick and Tina’s marriage had deteriorated — much to Tina’s distress and confusion. When Nick finally leveled with her, Tina was initially dismayed. “She bawled her head off for a week, then she blew her nose and ordered me to get out.” But after three months of separation, Nick says, blushing, “I guess we really missed each other.” They decided to get back together, but this time with a new understanding: that it would be an open marriage — for the time being, anyway.
Did their marriage experiment work? “Well, we’re still together,” Nick says, nonchalantly. “Actually, the thing that kept us together was swinging. Like, Tina agreed to an open marriage, but she admitted she was liable to get vicious over other women I was seeing, especially if she didn’t know them. So I figured that maybe we could find some other couples and do it together. We asked around and began to advertise in a swingers’ newsletter a friend gave me.
“The first time it was weird as hell. There we were, the two of us, on a blind date in a swanky restaurant with another couple who we only knew from Polaroid photos. Tina was so nervous I could feel her leg shaking out of control under the table. But the funny thing was that Tina liked the guy much better than I liked his wife. Wouldn’t you know that would be how it worked out? But that’s the roll of the dice, isn’t it? And so after dinner, when they invited us back with them to their house, I figured, Hey, man, I’II be a good sport, and I went along with it. The chick didn’t look like much, but she was a real good fuck. And I’ll be damned, Tina had herself a great time, too. We’ve been swinging ever since.”
Chris is another married man who feels the need for recreational sex. A lean, craggy-faced 36-year-old architect, Chris lives in a rambling suburban Connecticut home with Paige, his wife of six years. “Recreational sex is my sole hobby,” Chris admits in a quiet, measured voice. “In all other aspects of my life, I am regimented and in control. But I have always been greedy and, well, reckless about my sex life. I have always craved variety. And I have always thought of myself as a connoisseur of lovely women. In fact, until I met Paige, who’s from one of the oldest New England families, I thought I would never get married. I was one of those happy bachelors. I had my Monday night lady, my Tuesday night lady, my Saturday lady — you get the picture. And there was always room for a new woman who appealed to me. But then Paige came into my life, and I fell head over heels for her.
“It wasn’t just sex; in fact, we didn’t even have sex until we’d been seeing each other for three months. I didn’t want to let this woman go, but I was resistant to making a commitment because I also knew that I would never, ever be able to remain faithful. But Paige is an amazing person. Not only is she extremely mature — she’s six years older than I, not that that matters — but she’s also trusting. And so, so smart. It was she who proposed marriage — or, should I say, open marriage. But she also set down rules for it: 1. Whatever we do, we keep it to ourselves; no flaunting. 2. Our partners must never call home or interfere with our life together. 3. We each get Mondays and Thursdays off — “flying time” we call it and we each get to take two vacations a year, solo. It’s been a perfect arrangement. Paige and I are happy together. There’s no suspicion, no sneaking around. And I have enough freedom to satisfy my appetite for other women.”
“Sex has always been an obsession for me,” says John, a 30-year-old television writer and former priest. “For as long as I could remember, I was told — no, warned — that sex was for procreation, period.” According to John, he felt the priesthood would protect him from temptation.
“Well, I won’t go into what my experience was like,” he says, “but suffice it to say that for almost ten years — first in the seminary, then in the parish — I had a lot of unclean thoughts, took a great many cold showers, meditated for hours on end, and tried for the sake of God and my soul to exorcise my thoughts. Finally, after struggling with temptation and my conscience, I left the priesthood.”
Since John quit his parish five years ago, he has put into practice a good many of the sexual fantasies that preoccupied him during his years in the service of God. “I don’t think I overdo it or anything,” he says thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’m a degenerate, whatever that means, or that I won’t go to heaven. But you are talking to a man who was a virgin until he was 25, a man who went to confession for masturbating. Now, since I’ve chosen a lifestyle where my spiritual being can peacefully coexist with my physical being, I lead a very active sex life.”
While recreational sex provides a means for John to rebel against his religious past, it lets Ken, a 20-year-old pastry chef, work out his anger against Linda, the woman who left him a year ago. “You know what she did?” he says angrily over lunch in a New York French restaurant. “She picked up one day and went off and married her second cousin. Just like that. Anyway, I don’t want the grief that comes with having a steady anymore. So now I’m playing the field — and the field is the size of a football stadium,” he boasts.
“I feel I’m being used as a dildo by women,” says Kirk. “But how can I condemn it? After all, isn’t that what I’m doing as well?”
Since Ken — tall and lean with angular features — could pass for Sean Penn’s double, it’s easy to see what the women find so appealing about him. “You want me to be honest with you, right?” he asks. “Right now I’m into numbers. My goal for the year is 100. I dig sex for its own sake. I don’t have to love the girl or even like her; I just have to get turned on by her, and I’m running . You wanna know how many girls I laid last week? Six. Maybe this week it’ll be seven, who knows?”
Ken makes no bones about what interests him about his conquests. “The power play,” he says. “Each girl becomes a game or a contest. It’s the same thing as, Can I whip the lightest cream in class or bake the highest scuffle? I like to figure out what it’ll take to get a girl to give in. What moves do I make? Do I work slow or fast? Do I play the cool dude or the country boy? It’s always a puzzle waiting to be solved, and it’s a real rush when I finally put the last piece in.”
Robert, a curly-haired 28-year-old stand-up comic with a slight build and lots of nervous energy, is extremely articulate about his interest in recreational sex. “Sex is, for me, what drugs are for someone else,” he says, smiling wryly. “I never have sex just for the fun of it. I have sex to obliterate my fears — like, Is this pain in my chest angina, or is it heartburn?; and my doubts — like, Did I bomb this evening? or, How come I’m not getting any bookings this month? I also have sex to avoid loneliness on the road. I have sex to avoid small talk with women I’ve just met who I’m not really interested in. Sometimes I have sex to close the gap with women who come from different cultures or classes or who speak different languages.”
Robert pauses for a moment and manically begins chewing on his cuticles. “You won’t believe this, but sometimes I even have sex to avoid being funny. Honest. I swear. You go out with a woman, or you meet someone while you’re doing a club date, and she expects it to be a laugh a minute. Forget it. It never is. But at least in the bedroom you don’t care.”
The ease with which some men engage in recreational sex is in striking contrast to the discomfort that it brings to others. “Recreational sex sounds great, and I wish it were all that easy,” observes Cary, a darkly handsome 20-year-old Yale junior who, from all appearances, would seem to have no trouble finding women either for long-term or short-term relationships. But the truth is that this brilliant science student and outstanding swimmer is exceedingly shy.
“Sure, there are girls around all the time,” he says. “Nice girls, pretty girls, smart girls, but somehow never in exactly the right combination.” For a relationship or a marriage, perhaps, but why not for something more immediate and realistic — say, a purely sexual encounter? Cary grins. “Sounds good to me,” he jokes, but then his eyes cloud over as he tries to explain himself. “I guess that with all this sexual freedom, the stakes are always just a little higher than you want them to be. I mean, most of the time the girls I hang out with are girls I like. They’re fun to be around, they’re smart, they’re real friends. Sex always looms large — it’s tantalizing, it’s exciting to fantasize about, yet it complicates matters in a way I’m just not ready to handle.”
Cary admits to having had sex with only three women in his life: the 38-year-old French professor who took his virginity and whom he saw on and off for a year; a prostitute (“only once — and it was gross”); and a girl he’d known since his first day at Yale (“it was a travesty and ended our friendship”).
Cary thinks it’s unfortunate that women expect men to make a pass on the first date. “The pressure is enormous. Girls think you’re either gay or not attracted to them if you don’t jump into bed with them the first instant,” he observes. “But what do you do if you have sex with a girl and then you want to keep the relationship casual and easy? She gets hurt. What if she wants to keep it casual and easy? Then you get hurt. What if it’s just too intimate, too personal, for the limits of the friendship?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t have any answers.”
Cary’s more conservative thinking was echoed by Henry, a 28-year-old stockbroker, and by Henry’s young cousin Larry, an 18-year-old Harvard student. “I am celibate for long stretches of time because I am reluctant to connect so casually with a woman,” says Henry, a big burly fellow who looks like he’d be more at home in the wilds of Oregon than in the stodgy brokerage off ices he occupies. “You see, I’m just not the in-out, slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am type. If I do it, I want to do it right. And I don’t mind waiting. Like, right now I’m waiting, and I have been for six months. Besides, there’s something very charged about this ‘waiting’ situation. I feel like I’m in a constant state of excitation. I have a fantasy life that’s off-the-wall. And, believe it or not, from time to time I still have wet dreams.”
Is Henry afraid that a real-life partner, when she presents herself, won’t live up to his carefully developed fantasies? “Sure, that’s a possibility,” he says, nodding. “But the point is that when I choose a woman to have sex with, she’s going to be someone I care about in other ways as well. So we’ll just keep trying till we get the sex stuff right.”
As for Larry, the Harvard student, he has been seeing his steady girlfriend since they were both 15. “I’m a serious kind of guy,” he insists. “I’m not into sleeping around. Like, it bores me. I mean, I’ve done it with enough girls. After all, I’ve been fucking since I’m 14. But for me sex is the greatest when it’s with Gwenn. We really love each other, and that makes a difference. Besides, who said that recreational sex, sex just for the fun of it, has to be promiscuous sex? Gwenn and I have recreational sex all the time. It just happens to be with each other.”
If the men I spoke with were divided over how they felt about recreational sex, most of them were comfortable with and often obsessed by it. On the other hand, the women as a group tended to be more unified and definitely more wary in their responses. With the exception of four, the 15 women I interviewed were disappointed with their own experience of sex for its own sake. And they all viewed it either as an interim diversion on the way to more substantial emotional commitments or as a passage in their own growth patterns.
Take Katharine, for example. The only woman I spoke with who engages in recreational sex as casually, frequently, and unemotionally as the men, this 33-yearold school-teacher admits, “Sex has always been one of my favorite pastimes. Some women like to cook, others like to crochet, I’ve always liked to fuck. When I was younger, I’d do it all the time. I’d sleep with one man in the morning and one in the evening. I’d go to a bar and scout out the best-looking person in a three-piece suit and take him home and fuck him. Then I’d never want to see him again. For me it was a way of saying, ‘Hello, how are you? Good night, goodbye,’ without getting involved. It was also, or so I thought at the time, a way for me to be totally in control.’’ Growing up in a strict Catholic family, Katharine was told as a child that a woman had to submit sexually. “I swore I never would and that I’d enjoy it.”
Katharine has, over the last decade, taken well over 300 lovers, but her attitude about sex seems to be changing. “For so many years I thought that all I had to offer a man. and that all a man wanted from me. was my pussy, and so I gave it to him immediately to get the issue out of the way. Also, ironically, I — the woman who refused to submit, who insisted that, unlike my mother, I would enjoy sex — simply couldn’t say no. I had a total inability to change the flow of events if a man I was with was determined to fuck me. So there you have it: my mother’s passivity, which I’d always disdained, rising up to haunt me. What an irony! But I feel that today I am not the same woman I used to be. For one thing, as a result of one of my blind encounters. I’ve contracted herpes. which is certainly a sobering condition. Beyond that, I feel that I’ve evolved to a point where I’d like something more than impersonal sex. I deserve something more, and now I’d like to try for a relationship instead.”
“I don’t want the grief that comes with having a steady anymore,” says one man. “Now I’m playing the field — and the field is the size of a football stadium.”
Is the danger of contracting a sex-related disease — herpes, VD. fungus infections, even AIDS — a factor to be concerned with today? Fifty percent of the men brought it up as a key issue, and all the women did. “I’m very blunt about it.” says Cara, a 19-year-old University of Michigan sophomore. “I simply ask guys, ‘Are you clean? Do you have herpes?’ Luckily, most of the guys I go out with are pretty inexperienced, but let’s face it, it only takes one unlucky fuck to make you miserable for the rest of your life.”
“Frankly, I would engage in more recreational sex,” confides Lisa. an auburn-haired 22-year-old English major at New York University, “if more men were better lovers. But the truth is I never worry about diseases, while I do worry a lot about not coming. And most of the casual sex I’ve experimented with — some one-night stands, sex with guys who were friends and would never be anything more, sex with married guys — has always been catastrophic. Most guys, in my opinion, don’t know anything about what pleases women. I can’t tell you all the guys I’ve gone down on who’ve let me know, either by being skittish or by being blunt, that they weren’t about to return the favor. And I can’t tell you all the guys I’ve gone home with who’ve come and then rolled over without the faintest idea of whether or not I’ve had my orgasm. Worse, I don’t think they cared.”
Lisa insists that the only way a man takes real interest in pleasing a woman is when he’s actually involved in a relationship that he’s eager to continue. “Then, at least, the guy is eager to learn what it is that you like. For instance, I just adore it when a guy kisses me on the neck and ears. Simple, right? Well, in the course of any one night, how many times can you tell this to a guy without feeling like a shrew — or worse, a fetishistic nut? In a relationship, however, we can keep working on specifics like this until he gets the knack of it. But if you know any great lovers who can tune in to what gets me going, let me know. I’m all for sex just for the fun of it — if it’s fun.”
Cindy, a petite, sandy-haired 32-yearold Chicago divorcee, has had no problem enjoying random recreational sex. “You know what Tallulah Bankhead once said?” she asks devilishly. “She said, ‘I am not promiscuous, you know. Promiscuity implies that attraction is not necessary.’ And I, too, have always made it a point to be attracted, in one way or another. to the men I’ve made love to.” Nevertheless, Cindy, who manages to juggle a busy life as a third-year law student and mother to two young daughters, reckons that “my attitude toward recreational sex has changed a lot. Years ago I used to be a glutton about it. I slept with many men. and often indiscriminately. But somehow, as I’ve gotten older, that kind of raw sex has become less appealing. Now I need to know a man before we have sex. I’m not talking about a serious commitment. mind you, but just a camaraderie that makes me feel warmly toward these guys.”
Although Cindy has been seeing one particular man on a steady basis for the past two years, she feels that the present state of their relationship is not enough for her. First, they only get together twice a week. “And I’m a person who needs a lot of sex — once or twice a day, if possible,” she says. “Besides that, I like variety. And I find that sex is not just pleasure, not just something that feels good, it often makes me feel closer to my partners. It’s a way to get to know them.”
As an example, Cindy tells how, most recently, she got to know one of her neighbors “quite intimately.” “Alan and his girlfriend live down the hall from me. They’ve been here for dinner a few times, and I’ve been to their apartment. One rainy Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was going to the incinerator when I ran into Alan. He was disheveled and sweaty and out of breath. His clothes were wet. I said hello and asked him what had just happened. He said, ‘You won’t believe this, but I just caught an intruder trying to pick my lock. I chased him downstairs, out of the building, and for about a mile and a half. But, damn it, he got away.’
“Because he looked so soggy, I invited Alan in for a cool drink. He walked into my house, took off his shirt, mopped himself off, and wolfed down three fresh lemonades. Then, as we sat in the kitchen and talked, sparks started to ignite. I began joking with him about how wet his pants were — ‘from the rain, of course,’ we agreed — and soon he’d taken them off. Then I teased him. ‘As a good hostess, I feel it my duty to take my things off, too, so that you’ll be comfortable here. ‘No, let me,’ he said, unbuttoning my shirt and pulling off my jeans, and suddenly — we were fucking right there on my kitchen table. It was one of those thunderously rainy days, and we spent the entire afternoon making love. It was heaven.”
Cindy hasn’t seen Alan in the two months since their encounter, but it doesn’t faze her at all. “I’ve been busy studying, and I presume he’s busy, too,” she notes without a trace of remorse.
While Cindy views recreational sex as a way to get to know her men-friends more completely, Janet, a youthful-looking divorcee, sees it as a complement to her ego. Slim and raven-haired, Janet’s checkered history includes stints as a high school teacher, actress, and prostitute; she now runs a Manhattan health food shop. Janet mulls the idea of sex just for the fun of it. “In the course of the past 15 years, I’ve indulged myself plenty,” she says, smiling. “God knows, I couldn’t count my partners if I tried. These days, though, I mainly see two sex partners — my husband, Joe, and his bestfriend, Alan — although I only see them separately.”
Janet sits behind the counter in her small, crowded shop and drinks freshly brewed herbal tea. “My needs are really different from what they used to be,” she murmurs thoughtfully as she delicately sips from the cup. “Years ago, I would have sex just to satisfy my ego needs. I never really got horny. l never met a guy in a bar and just wanted him more than anything. No pulsating, no throbbing, no salivating. I just loved having a man respond positively to me. I adored having him desire me and give me attention. For those few hours, men made me feel pretty and funny and sexy and charming, and that’s exactly why I would pick them up. They made me feel, well, adored. These days I guess I don’t need to. I’m more sure of myself. I have two very attentive men in my life. This store is doing great. I don’t need that fake attention, that quick shot of flattery. I don’t have the same ego needs that I once did.”
For some, recreational sex holds emotional hazards. Mona, a 27-year-old administrative assistant with a New York City arts foundation, is one such person. “It’s funny, I can meet a man, immediately become turned on to him, and jump into bed with him that evening — and it’s usually terrific,” she says. “Actually, I love first encounters. Nobody has any emotional baggage, nobody has any resentments, the balance of power is evenly divided between the woman and the man, the man is as perfect and as loving as he’s going to get. Which is why these casual sexual experiences are sometimes the best, the sexiest. I find that I even have my most intense orgasms with these strange men.”
Ken makes no bones about what interests him in his conquests. “The power play,” he says: “Each girl becomes a game. My goal for the year is 100.”
“Don’t talk to me about recreational sex!” laughs Beth, a roly-poly sophomore from the University of Colorado whose round, rosy face and halo of blond curls make her appear much younger than even her 19 years. “I confess I’m not that experienced. I’ve had two boyfriends, period. My first, who I went with steadily for about four months last year, finally decided that one girlfriend wasn’t enough for him. He didn’t want to settle down, he told me; he wanted to date around. My second, who I just broke up with, decided we had no future because I wasn’t a virgin when we met. Can you imagine?” Her voice gets higher and louder with mounting frustration and disbelief. “Here we are in the eighties, and Mr. Jock of America wants a virgin! I can’t believe it. Like, for six months we’re fucking like bunnies, and he wants a virgin! But you know what? He has a frat house full of friends who think the same way. What’s the matter with these guys? They leave a girl with no choice. She’s damned if she gets into bed with someone, and damned if she doesn’t.”
Beth’s bewilderment echoed that of many of the women, and some of the men, with whom I spoke. For them, sexual freedom was a conundrum they weren’t quite sure how to solve. If there were some, like Cindy, who used sex to explore intimacy, most women, at any rate, preferred that intimacy precede their sexual encounters. “I have nothing against sex for the fun of it, but isn’t it better if you and the guy have loving feelings for each other?” asked Linda, a 23-year-old graduate of Ol’ Miss.
“I’ve had more than one experience where the guy lured me into bed, only to be flaccid and unaroused,” points out Sally, a New York copywriter. “And my guess is that he was just going through the motions of sex because he thought that it was expected of him when, really, he would just as soon have not gone to bed with me. Like, dealing with a guy who, for one reason or another, isn’t as excited as he ought to be is not my idea of sex as fun.”
“No matter how easy it seems to slip into bed with a stranger or a casual friend or a new beau, it’s always complicated,” remarks Jennifer, a 28-year-old speechwriter. “Even though it’s the eighties, when I sleep with a guy on the first date, I get the feeling that I’ve made a terrible mistake. That now the power is all in his hands. That he thinks less of me. Sometimes I think a guy needs to make an investment — in time, in money, in effort — in order to ‘see’ you clearly. Otherwise, you’re just another cunt to him.”
“Let’s face it,” says Renee; a cosmetician, “being intimate with someone means sharing your most naked and vulnerable self. I’ve done it with men before, hoping that it would be a springboard to further closeness. Often, it’s not. And it’s devastating. It becomes a total rejection of your best and most loving self. Now I take a good long look at a guy before I decide whether I want to be intimate with him. If you get burned often enough, you learn not to put your hand in the fire.”
What’s striking about these responses is a conservatism that was not in evidence, say, five years ago. Although we take our sexual freedom for granted, many men and women today are having second thoughts about recreational sex. One of the problems — an age-old standoff, it seems — is the difference between what women and men want. Whether biological or environmental in nature, or whether the result of the, simple numerical fact that there are more available women around than men, the truth is that almost all of the women I talked with still use words like “commitment,” “romance,” “intensity,” “caring,” and “tenderness” when they describe even a casual sex situation. Men, on the other hand, seem less interested in the emotional aspects of their encounters, placing more emphasis on sheer variety and on preserving their sense of separateness from their partners. With exceptions, of course. It may prove of interest that two of the men in this survey who were least comfortable with the idea of sex for its own sake were also the youngest.
What, in fact, do responses like these signify? It’s difficult to say. But it’s interesting to note that, according to statistics, more couples are getting married this year than at any time in the past decade. The personal columns in popular magazines, once given over to ads for sexual partners, are now devoted to ads for committed relationships. A recent survey among French teenagers revealed that 80 percent of them rated romance tops on their list of goals, while only nine percent rated sex similarly. And most interesting of all, Michael Jackson, America’s most celebrated rock hero — whose staggering popularity rivals that of the Beatles in their prime — is at 25 a self-proclaimed virgin who insists he will remain that way until his wedding day, should there ever be one.
How do we interpret these facts? Are these instances merely unrelated coincidences, or are they indicative of a trend in sexual relations — a return to old-fashioned values? Are we on the brink of a new backlash? Is the sexual tenor of our country becoming as conservative as our politics? Or have men and women simply become accustomed to and blase about sex for its own sake?
As one 22-year-old graduate student at M.I.T. told me, “What’s the big deal? Sex is great. It’s part of life — like eating and sleeping and brushing your teeth. Only it feels better.”
Or, as Woody Allen confided to Diane Keaton after an intimate moment in Annie Hall, “That was the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing.”
Well, it would be asking a lot for us to wrap us the lesson from recreational sex in a footnote. We can tell you that regardless of the era it remains easier to investigate as an option if you happen to be really good-looking or rich, pretty much in inverse order. That said, we always hear “confidence” and “makes me laugh” as the most attractive attributes for our Pets when we ask them, so maybe you should take up stand-up comedy. … That seems to hit both points.
