As the love part of "making love" has been steadily pulverised, no wonder an increasing number of people seem to be working out that casual sex is an oxymoron, and are turning away from the act altogether – towards friendship, and other activities they find more edifying and emotionally fulfilling.
Interviewed last week about her recent book, The Unexpected Joy of Being Single, Catherine Gray, a former Cosmopolitan writer who seemingly never had a dull moment on the carnal front, described the revelation of self-imposed celibacy for a year.
Dating apps had come to feel like "a drug" – a sea of seeming-sexual possibility and validation, but one she was drowning in, her sense of self eroding with each casual hook-up and micro-relationship.
She knew something had to change when she was completely destroyed by the end of a six-month liaison.
Abstinence brought huge relief: "I discovered what I liked, developing a love for yoga, photography and travelling," she said. "I dressed differently and no longer cared about attracting men. I started to see myself as a person – rather than a girlfriend or a sexual plaything." Her celibate year taught her to rethink how she approached relationships altogether; she's now in a happy, healthy one.
The comedian Eleanor Conway has also talked about her relationship to sex in terms of drug addiction – "I've always had an addictive personality", she has told audiences, her three vices being drink, drugs and men. She gave up the first two, but then transferred her alcoholic urges onto Tinder, instead. "It's so easy for a straight woman to date and find casual sex. It's really fun, if you're emotionally in the right place," she said.
But as she discovered, there is no "emotionally right place" for being sex obsessed and constantly objectified (and objectifying others), and she too experienced profound relief at going celibate for a 10-month period, in which she "stopped seeing men as sex objects and females as competition".
Those who aren't giving up sex are questioning its intrinsic value. In her new book, Why Sex Doesn't Matter (out just in time for Valentine's Day on 13 February), novelist Olivia Fane – who has previously admitted having an open marriage with her first husband (from whom she is now divorced) – explains that: "Sex is by no means intrinsically loving, and two people might choose to give meaning to another arena entirely. They might decide that their ritual of washing and drying the dishes after supper was to be something exclusive to them."
Fane, who also once wrote an article titled "It's not sex that keeps a marriage alive, it's conversation", proves a tireless deconstructor of today's cultural obsession: "The shocking thing about sex [is that] there is no aftermath. After orgasm, desire dissipates entirely. It's over. While a walk in the rain with your lover leaves a richer trace: the anticipated pleasure of dry clothes and hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire lingers longer."
Of course, this isn't the first time critics have lambasted the damaging, relentless fixation with sex in the modern West. In his History of Sexuality (1976), Michel Foucault rooted our obsession in the Victorian period, when sex was made into a "secret", which is why we keep going on and on (and on) about it. In 1982, literary scholar Stephen Heath wrote in The Sexual Fix: "I've suffered and suffer and I think others must too – it's difficult not to in our society – from 'sexuality', the whole sexual fix. To the point of nausea".
If it was bad then, it's worse now. And in a society that loves giving things up for "wellness" – whether booze, meat or dairy – it doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that sex may be next.
