The normalization of casual sex destroyed our comprehension of what sex is, and what it has to do with healthy relationships. Women have one reproductive strategy: high investment. Men have two strategies: high investment (which is collaborative, and has everything to do with love) and no investment (which is predatory, and is the antithesis of love). That may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. The ‘no investment’ strategy of men attempts to stick a woman with a child to raise alone, or with a cuckolded partner. It has a consensual form, and a non-consensual form. Does any of that sound loving to you? I didn’t think so. For men, producing a child with a trivial effort is the ultimate evolutionary bargain. It’s something like winning the lottery. For women, being stuck with a baby and no partner is the inverse, like being maimed in car wreck. So men are predisposed to be on the lookout for fertile women who are gullible enough to go to bed with them without locking down a commitment. And women are predisposed to avoid such encounters at all costs. Or at least they were before birth control + abortion changed the stakes and the culture. Women, who have always been the gatekeepers of sex, have been lured into embracing men at their worst. And they’ve started behaving and thinking like them too. There is actually a lot of truth in the idea that “rape culture” has been normalized. Casual sex is not rape by any stretch, but it comes from the same predatory branch of the tree. And before you jump down my throat for saying that, notice just how commonplace “consensual con-consent” has become. That IS normalized rape culture. It comes from the idea that sex is a kind of play. Just like kids playing with toy tanks and soldiers, it’s harmless because the stakes are low and no one actually gets hurt. But it turns out that’s not true. Casual sex is like playing with fire. Actually, it’s worse. Many who play with fire get away with it. They may even learn how to wield it to great effect. The exact opposite is true with sex. If you play with having sex with people that you don’t love, you are damaging the very architecture you will need to form a healthy romantic partnership. Even worse if they bring the same selfish mindset to the alter and the bedroom. For young people participating in their generation’s culture, sex now IS antagonistic and predatory. Most of them don’t know there is any other kind. It’s just some story, like Santa Clause. Not only has this shift in sexual culture obliterated the tools to forge and tend a healthy marriage, but it has also broken the motivational structure that built civilization. —- Exhibit A bellow. Please don’t jump on her. She is voicing a false sophistication of her era. And although I believe what she has said is wrong, exactly why it is wrong, and to what degree it is wrong, requires careful thought.