The casual-sex craze is one of the latest trends to strike the dating scene — particularly among millennials and Generation Xers — and there are fears in the scientific community that it can be harmful to our health.
Experts are starting to worry that many of today’s millennials may be creating a culture where casual sex is the norm, and where people have sex more frequently and for shorter amounts of time, which increases the risk of damage to your body, particularly when it comes to sexual health.
Casual sex is “not without risk,” said Dr. Jennifer Cauley, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Boston University School of Medicine. However, that risk depends on the quality of the sex, and how far the relationship can go. She added, however, that casual sex isn’t the same as, for example, multiple affairs, which can be harmful to relationships. According to a survey conducted by Match.com and The Harris Poll, 62 percent of single women polled had had casual sex with men they weren’t in a relationship with, while 40 percent of single men had as well.
“More and more women are sleeping with guys they’re not attached to,” said Bernadette Flynn, Ph.D. sexologist and relationship expert.
Gillian Elliott, a licensed clinical psychologist in London, England, has seen “many young clients” who don’t really want to go into a relationship because they fear getting hurt, but still feel pressure to “party hard.” They are more than happy to get the sexual release they desire by having a threesome, or to sleep with a man who is just “one of the guys” with whom they don’t have to be very committed.
She said this isn’t always a bad thing. “We need to make sure that sex is about pleasure and not about performance anxiety, which can be one of the reasons many women avoid it,” she said. Sex that is purely for a sexual release can be a healthy practice for both men and women, she added. The only time it might not be, though, she said, is when an addiction to casual sex is ruining a person’s ability to form relationships in the future.
According to the survey by The Harris Poll, there is an even stronger temptation among women than men to have casual sex, with 34 percent of women surveyed describing casual sex as a “must do” compared with 24 percent of men, including nine percent of women in their late 30s, and seven percent of women over age
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Fantasies get released when we pay attention to ourselves, to our bodies and our desires. Everyone wants to believe that fantasies are what come out when we masturbate — this is one of the reasons why people might get into the habit of masturbation. But this isn’t the case with all fantasies. We can enjoy a fantasy, but while we’re doing it, some other thoughts might pop up in our head.
The Power of Sexual Curiosity
Awareness around sex and sexual thoughts and fantasies is a good thing. You are less likely to feel ashamed or embarrassed if you’re aware of your thoughts and desires. So let’s first start by making a distinction between sexual fantasies and sexual obsessions.
A sexual fantasy is the imagined thought of another person doing something specific to or with you in a sexual way. It’s when you imagine someone touching you in a certain way or having their way with you. It can involve you and your partner, or a partner and your favourite celebrity. It’s when you yourself initiate it.
Your sexual fantasies can vary, and that’s the good thing. When you’re a kid, it’s a mixed bag of everyone’s favourite thing you can think of. Then it becomes sex with your parents or the teacher in your class and then it’s whatever you’ve seen in porn.
Sexual Fantasies
What you might call your sexual fantasies might be part of something else. Your sexual fantasies might have an emotional impact on you. For example, we’ve all heard the stories of how getting into your relationship for the first time and having an epic, close emotional connection with your partner is what inspired your partner to want to have sex with you.
When your fantasies are about an intense emotional connection, it can inspire you to have sex with someone just to try and re-create that connection. This is the root cause of sexual addiction. This was a hot topic at the first Sex Addiction Congress which was held last year at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City.
Sexual Fantasies
But when your fantasies are purely sexual, then they can help us to become more conscious of the deeper aspects of our sexuality, and to become more aware of ourselves as sexual beings. If we simply self-stimulate, we might not realise how many layers or textures there are to our sexuality.
In this way, by being aware of our fantasies, we can
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