Strauss: Casual sex is anything but harmless

Many women of our generation, raised on shows like “Entourage” and “Sex and the City,”… Many women of our generation, raised on shows like “Entourage” and “Sex and the City,” have become unconsciously conditioned to a life of singledom. Now, unfortunately, we’ve allowed marriage to become obsolete and casual sex to mess with our heads.

According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, 39 percent of surveyed adults believe marriage is becoming obsolete. A large portion of young people might celebrate this development. The logic goes that, given the diminishing chances of having a successful first marriage, why not just make everything once associated with the traditional family casual? We could avoid messy and time-consuming divorces and the pain of infidelity. Believing we’re smarter than our parents, we emotionally detach ourselves from these antiquated problems and instead focus our energies on a career, social networking, mastering the yoga crow pose and baking vegan oatmeal cookies — all so we don’t have to deal with real pain.

Unfortunately, we’ve compromised ourselves in this binge of tradition-breaking, and we’re allowing our carefree attitudes about love to turn us into damaged lovers. Casual sex — that is, intercourse with no pre-existing emotional commitment to one’s partner — is unhealthy for women. A woman’s orgasm releases oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone,” which allows us to feel a sense of attachment to our partner. But if there’s nothing to attach to — no meaningful emotional connection — we’re left feeling regretful and empty after the orgasm. (Psychologists have also identified these feelings less prevalently in males, who release smaller doses of the hormone). Compartmentalizing sex and emotion is difficult for us because our orgasms have a lot to do with the mind. As New York Times contributor Richard A. Friedman wrote in a 2009 editorial, “The truth is that the most important sexual organ of humans is actually the brain.” Sex may be a physical act, but depression, which you might feel afterward, can be physical as well.

Sex therapist Ian Kerner, Ph.D., shared similar concerns on his MSNBC page. “We can treat sex lightly,” he said, “but sex doesn’t always treat us lightly back in return.”

Although women gained the right to vote in 1920 and are working steadily toward being perceived as equal in all spheres of society, there remain fundamental gender distinctions that we need to acknowledge. The fact of the matter is that sex is fun for us in large part because it entails emotional attachment (insert male scoffs here). Just as fruits and vegetables require different ingredients to enhance their flavor, women and men require different degrees of attachment to enhance their experience.

Doris Lessing addresses this problem in her 1962 novel “The Golden Notebook”: “Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?”

Carrying on casual relationships with men is like third-wave feminists asking for all-male attributes. We can’t forget that men and women are different sexes that, biologically, require different things. It’s not logical for women to ask for a chemical change so we can have sex with the same mindset as a man. It’s not fair to us to succumb to a man’s casual desires either, especially when it’s detrimental to our emotions. Casual sex is not the answer, even in today’s commitment-phobic world. Let’s look to marriages like Michelle and Barack Obama’s, or even Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne’s, for inspiration.

Of course, if my dream lover came along today, I wouldn’t marry him anyway — at least not until Ricky Martin or Adam Lambert can walk down the aisle in all 50 states. But that’s a story for another time.