Image: I had sex here! by orangeacid

That’s the challenge Fairfax dating blogger Samantha Brett put to her readers yesterday.

Inspired by Julia Allison’s recent commentary on the topic in Time Out New York, Brett wondered:

What if, like a month of no alcohol, women decided there’d be a month of no casual sex (or any sex for that matter), and hence would give any dude who came her way a full 30 days to prove to her he just wasn’t in it for the horizontal hanky panky. Now wouldn’t that be a challenge.

Well no, I can’t say it would, particularly - for me or for virtually anyone I know. As several of Sam’s readers quickly responded, most people live like that pretty much every month.

A lot has been written about the younger generation’s predilection towards “hooking up” and casual sex - so much so that I have made it the subject of my PhD. To some extent, this is just a continuation of the moral panic around youth that has been going on since Plato’s time, but there’s also some truth to it.

On the whole, we are more accepting of - and more likely to partake in - commitment-free sex than those who came before us. And while (as anyone who’s followed the NonSociety discussions has seen) there are still people who judge “women who put out to soon”, we’ve also all heard stories of people who had sex on the first date and lived happily ever after. Or who, you know, just wanted to get laid and were cool with that.

But higher levels of social acceptance doesn’t mean that everyone’s doing it, nor does it mean that everyone’s doing it all the time. The Online College Social Life survey found that the average American college student participated in seven hook-ups in their four years at university; 40 per cent of these will end in intercourse. Sociologist Kathleen Bogle’s research suggests that hook-up rates decline after college as young people return to the dating script.

While dating isn’t as big a part of social life in Australia as it is in the US (and the Australian university scene is very different to the US one - most students commute to campus several days a week instead of living there, for one, nor do we have the Greek system), anecdotal evidence suggests a similar pattern exists here.

That’s not to say that there aren’t people who bed a different person every week, but these people are outliers on the distribution curve. (No moral judgment from me, just saying it’s not that common.) For a lot of young people, a month without sex - particularly a month without sex when you don’t have a steady partner, be that a boyfriend/girlfriend, regular fuck buddy or otherwise - isn’t really anything out of the ordinary.

Nor is it a cause for “OMG crisis, however will I manage that?” Sex may filter into everything we do (whether you look at it from an “evolutionary imperative” perspective, or simply the way we as a society have managed to apply it to pretty much everything), but it isn’t “everything”. Most of us have desires, but it’s a mistake to claim that we’re so beholden to these desires that we’re not capable of making a conscious choice as to whether we want to act on them.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you think Sam’s challenge really would be a stretch for you (and you’re not just bragging to sound like a cool, glamorous person who picks up whenever they want to). If so, I want to hear about it. Reblog/comments, please.

— blogs.smh.com.au