Human nature refuses to change, news at 11

Watching this video from the Today Show is a downright surreal experience. Once again the topic is: Teenager have hormones, world to end tomorrow.

Watch carefully because buried deep in this alarmist segment about how college kids, who by the way are voting adults, are having sex you will have the resident expert admit that this is nothing new. Only the slang has changed--apparently now casual sexual encounters are called "hook-ups". (I'll bet $20 they aren't now that every freaking pinched mouth middle-aged expert on TV is proud of his/herself for knowing how the kids these days are talking. But I wouldn't know--the funny thing is that I'm too old to use lame euphemisms any longer.)

Since I'm on a roll, let me say that the thing that annoys me most about these types of alarmist stories about younger people having casual sex is that they are ugly, self-serving lies to their very core. Within any random scare story on "Oprah" or "Dr. Phil" or Newsweek or whatever, you will hear the same sorry assumptions about sex that only make sense if you ignore everything you've learned about human nature over and over and over again. This segment encapsulates them perfectly.

#1. Kids these days don't understand that sex is serious business and not a casual thing at all.

The assumptions behind this alarmist bit of rhetoric are so much horseshit that it is incredibly difficult to figure out where to begin. But hell, let's start at what they mean by "serious"--yeah, I can't figure out what they mean either. People love to throw the word "serious" around because it's one of those words that sound meaningful but are hard to define, a combination that makes it very unlikely that someone will call you out and ask what you mean. (The President loves words like this--"freedom" being a favorite.) Ask someone what they mean by "serious" and watch the discussion come to a screeching halt as everyone tries to figure what the pervert in their midst is trying to do by implying that sex is or can be anything but serious like a stroke.

Let's just admit it. The vast majority of sex, regardless of whether the participants are committed, married, whatever, isn't "serious". Mostly people do it because it's fun and it feels good. Until we can admit this, we aren't going to get very far. Like any other sort of fun, it's better if responsibility is involved. Like any other sort of fun, it's going to be more fun if you have a good relationship with the people you're having fun with. And it's different, of course, because it's a rather embedded part of our psyche. But the word "serious" is misleading.

It's really just a form of covert slut-bashing. To say someone (usually female) isn't taking sex "seriously" is to say that she's enjoying it too much or with too many men or in some other way not adhering to proper feminine behavior. As with all slut-bashing, it's a way to judge a woman for having sex while exempting yourself from the same judgement for having sex yourself--essentially, the critic takes it "seriously" while the slut does not.

#2. Casual sex is this new, alarming trend.

No, not really. There's a reason they call prostitution the world's oldest profession and it's not because men were having "serious" sexual relationships with prostitutes throughout history. Once women started throwing out the double standard was when we went to Code Red on the casual sex alarm system.

Get over it. There are two huge social benefits to women adopting a more cavalier attitude towards premarital sex that I can think of right off the top of my head. One is that the social ill of prostitution is nowhere near the problem that it used to be. The other is that people are more willing to delay marriage until they feel ready, something I don't think any of us are ready to give up quite yet.

#3. The new cavalier attitude towards casual sex (that is, women having casual sex) is causing untold amounts of heartache.

The way they carried on about this in the clip really annoyed me, since you seriously would have thought that until recently people were never left heartbroken, moping messes over getting rejected. I think this belief is cruel to our ancestors, who were surely the same mopey romantics that we are, albeit it with less teeth.

Okay, we're all grown-ups here so let's face the obvious. Holding off from sex doesn't make someone love you. There's no really good prevention from having someone who said he loves you change his mind. Marriage doesn't keep people from splitting up. Marriage doesn't keep people from cheating. Getting your heart broken is part of life and the best thing you can do for yourself is realize that it's not the end of the world.

I know what they mean to say is that they see girls get all wrapped up in guys they had a casual sexual encounter with and they can't get his love and affection and so their self-esteem takes a dive and it's really sad. God knows I'm sick of this particular pattern myself but it's pretty much pointless to blame casual sex itself for the problem. If it were just the ugly result of casual sex, then boys would suffer from love-sickness just as badly as girls.

And no, there's not inherent sex differences that make women pine for men but not the other way around. If that were so, then those differences wouldn't fade away with age, but we all know they do. By the time you're in your mid-late 20's, it's just as easy to find guys who are pining away for women who are using them as vice versa. No, the reason that younger women struggle like this is because they believe in myth #1, that sex is serious, at least for women. Or to put it in the frank, non-"Today Show" terms, girls who do it just because they like it are sluts.

When I was younger, the way girls distinguished themselves from ordinary sluts was by asserting that they only had sex with guys they "loved". This is pretty much the standard that the "expert" on the "Today Show" was recommending, though she couched it in nicer terms--monogamous, loving relationships are acceptable, all others aren't "serious", that is slutty behavior. Of course, the funny thing is that it's nearly impossible to set solid boundaries between what counts as a loving relationship and what's just sex, making it irresistable for girls to rewrite history and redefine casual encounters as loving acts so that they stay within the lines of respectability.

But I can tell you right now that no one believes you if you write off a casual encounter as "love" and then don't bother to follow up on it ever again. And thus you have young women suddenly finding they love someone just because they went to bed with him and they keep pining even though he has shown no interest in pursuing a relationship--it's either they went to bed with him out of love, which requires the suffering, or out of lust, which is slutty. People concerned over the broken hearts of young women would do better to address the double standard rather than continually harp on the need for them to view their own bodies and desires as the enemy.