Six Reasons to Have Casual Sex

There's an interesting article over at Alternet.org entitled 6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex. On the surface, the article seems to advocate that casual sex is to be encouraged, and I can't say I'm on board with that idea.

Yet I encourage everyone to read the article as an antidote to the religious extremist viewpoint that pervades this country and leads to unhealthy relationships. It challenges a lot of the dogma about sex that pervades American society, and if more people would at least look at both sides of this important question we'd have a a lot more healthy committed relationships too.

I thought the most interesting reason was number six:

We’ve all heard the stories about undereducated, traditionalist marriages in which the partners never realized that sex is possible in a position other than missionary, or that a woman can orgasm. With public school programs throughout the country refusing to provide young people with accurate, useful information, Americans are often left to educate themselves through the oldest and arguably best form of learning: experience.

In other words, the conservative machine that has America's morality in a stranglehold is being hoist by its own petard.

Because our school system doesn't teach our children about their bodies and their sexuality, these young adults are left to experiment for themselves. They can (and do) surf the internet, but 99% of the sexual material is pornography, which is hardly a good representation of healthy human sexuality. Or (as the article suggests) they can find willing partners and learn for themselves, which turns out to be a good thing, not a bad thing.

If you need even more convincing that casual sex won’t ruin you, consider this. Another recent study, one conducted on 1,311 Minnesotans between the ages of 18 and 24, found that there was no correlation between emotional or mental distress and casual sex. The professors were “surprised,” said Marla Eisenberg, lead researcher. “The conventional wisdom is that casual sex […] is harmful. That’s what we’ve been teaching kids for a decade.”

It's time to break the religious stranglehold on our children's sexual education. It's bad for them and its bad for society.