A newish friend was asking me recently what some of the lessons or benefits I've gotten from casual sex are, and I was able to articulate one to him that I haven't really managed to identify previously. Let's see if I can recreate a reasonable explanation here:
Growing up, girls -- well, probably everyone, but I think especially girls -- get a strong message of how important it is to save sex for marriage. There's a lot of acknowledgment that loads of people have sex before marriage, but even then, the dominant paradigm is that sex is a Big Deal, and you should only do it when you're in a committed relationship with someone you love.
And on top of that, there's this weird fetish our culture has for female virginity, so especially when you're young, you get a lot of rhetoric about how important it is to be sure, to pick the right guy, etc.
I remember a having a discussion in high school with some friends about which would be worse: to be raped or to be murdered. Read that again; I'll wait. Smart, thoughtful girls actually had a conversation wherein there was serious consideration of the question of whether it might not be better to be dead than to be raped. That is fucked up.
But the point, here, is that there's a lot of time and energy going into giving people the message that sex is HUGE, and that, if you're a girl, at least, you're a prize, and you should be sure not to give yourself to just anyone. ("Why buy the cow, yadda yadda?") And I'm not saying that people, especially young people, shouldn't be smart and thoughtful about sex, picking when they want to do it and with whom. But I am saying that the current dialogue about it is fucked. And not in a good way.
And one of the great great things that casual sex has done for me is allowed me to stop thinking of myself as a prize that I award to someone for being the nicest guy or the smartest or the hottest or the nearest or whatever -est he happens to be, and, instead, to think about what I want out of sex. I'm not someone's prize; I'm my prize, and my reward is that I get to to what I want with my mind and body, when I want, and with the person (or people) I want to do it with. I'm not having sex to pat some guy on the head to say, "Hey, man, nice work! You win the good guy award! Have some pussy!" Instead, I'm having sex because I like sex, and it's what I want to do.
And despite having a couple of kickass awesome relationships before my casual sex days started, I think I'm a better lover now than I was then. Not because I have any great new techniques (though, let's be honest: I may), but because I'm choosing for myself when I take my clothes off.
