We Made Sex Casual. Then We Forgot How to Be Close.

Iona Lowe

Aug 6

3 min read

Updated: Aug 19

Sex has always existed with two meanings. On one hand, it is an act of love shared between two people. On the other, it is a lustful sin, bitten by the tooth of taboo. Or so history would have it.

As a friend and I laid our woes on the table one evening, both recounting worryingly similar experiences that had happened on different occasions, I began to realise something. Our understanding of what sex is has lost an important, intimate side in its slow shift towards becoming casual.

Now, it's hard enough to get a hello the morning after, let alone indulge in the simplicity of a coffee or tea in bed. Instead, when we wake up in unfamiliar houses, we often feel pushed out rather than welcomed in.

Throughout history, talking about either version of sex has been taboo. It was never the loudest subject at the party, preferring instead to linger in the hidden corners of gossip or beneath the comfort of late-night conversations.

But increasingly, we are seeing one version of sex shed its taboo and come to dominate our understanding of this delicate act. And it is not the loving, devoted kind many of us grew up watching on screens or reading about in fairy tales.

During the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 60s, sex shifted from being primarily tied to procreation and became something people could simply have. As it became liberated from pregnancy, it also entered public conversation, becoming increasingly accepted within our cultural vocabulary.

This was, in many ways, a positive shift away from a previously rigid social view. But it also introduced a casual element that has gradually come to dominate the sexual zeitgeist of the twenty-first century.

Dating apps, as has already been widely discussed, have only accelerated this idea of sex as something casual. With sex practically at people's fingertips, it has become easier than ever to access.

At the click of a button comes a two, perhaps three-hour date before the night ends in crumpled sheets and ghosted text messages.

The fact that sex is more accessible and more visible in culture might lead us to believe that people are having more of it.

But the statistics suggest otherwise. According to many researchers, we are living through a sex recession. Research conducted by the Institute for Family Studies, an American think tank, suggests that sexual activity among young people has declined by around 10% over the last decade.

Despite believing sex is more accessible than ever, behind closed doors it is happening less and less.

Which only makes one wonder whether part of the problem lies in how sex is now presented and, ultimately, understood.

As the casual, "no strings attached" version of sex receives more attention, explicit online creators increasingly shape public perceptions of intimacy. Platforms like OnlyFans have contributed to the commercialization of sexuality, turning intimacy into something that is increasingly performed, packaged, and consumed. While sexuality has long been bought and sold in different forms, digital platforms have transformed it into a personal brand.

In doing so, they often present sex as a transaction or a performance rather than an intimate expression of human connection, because those portrayals are ultimately more financially lucrative and attract more attention in an economy where everyone is competing for mere seconds of a consumer's attention.

Because these voices command enormous audiences, they increasingly shape the public conversation around sex, even if they do not reflect how most people actually experience it.

The casual understanding of sex has been prioritised, while the romantic version has slowly fallen out of fashion, or at least out of the dating scene, and has, to some extent, even been dismissed as "cringe" beside its more fashionable, more profitable counterpart.

Yet the very fact that sex is declining speaks volumes about what people actually want. We've been told we want freedom from attachment, from vulnerability, from feeling too much. But that kind of freedom eventually becomes exhausting when it is pursued all the time.

This isn't to say that every sexual encounter has to be deeply meaningful. Rather, it's to suggest that in our pursuit of the casual, we have quietly neglected the other side of sex: intimacy.

Somewhere along the way, while sex became more accepted, it also became more misunderstood. The two meanings gradually collapsed into one another until all that remained was the idea of sex as a means to an end.