Against a Materialist Lens on Sex

You get out what you put in

I grew up a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (you may know them as the Mormons), attended a private university owned by that faith and even served a mission before reducing participation in my mid-20s. There were lots of dates, some formal, some simple; a lot of engaging stories; an overall relaxing, pleasant, silly experience. Mormon men were not flawless and they almost never wanted to stay with me, which you can take as evidence of whatever you like. I didn’t kiss anyone until I was sixteen, and I was halfway through my twenties before doing much more than that.

Dating after mormonism was impacted by many things - notably, grad school and leaving the church and being much further away from any family members emotionally and physically than I had before - but it would have been a downgrade under even the best of circumstances. Suddenly I was dealing with a wealth of people who were trying their utmost to get into my pants, regardless of how clearly I said that I wasn’t interested in that without a pretty serious relationship (I considered myself quite libertine for relaxing my previous position on pre marital sex).

It wasn’t that I was particularly appealing, either - the perception of widely available sex makes men much less discerning about their sexual partners than when it is seen as a scarce resource. Mormon men had considerably higher standards than men outside the church (in both shallow and character-driven ways), and the interest of men outside the church was similarly less flattering. The kind of sex being offered to me was most often men who considered me the minimum viable pussy for their needs.

Being approached by mormon men in dating felt like being approached by someone who wanted to buy an oil field: they were looking at the wisdom of a longterm investment, predicting ROI and resource quality. Mormon men were dating with marriage in mind; they were looking for someone who would be the mother to their children; no one was ever drunk or high in this endeavor. It wasn’t always humanizing, but it felt dramatically better than the “starving man lunges at road kill” vibe I often got from non-mormon men seeking sex as soon as it was available.

Young men are, according to the statistics, having less sex than ever before, a gap that is almost definitely attributable to how few of them are married or in long term relationships. Much of our handwringing about hookup culture and hypergamy and common narratives about men getting access to casual sex means that men don’t attribute their lack of frequent sex to their own failure to select for longterm relationships, but instead to their failure to be in the top 10% of men. [It’s true that low socioeconomic status men have significantly more difficulty getting married than they did in the past, but the picture is not so simple as “they’re not good enough to get married and wouldn’t be in any circumstances.” This post, as with many of mine, is more applicable to upper middle class environments.]

For me, the most confounding element of sluttiness (derogatory) as a cudgel is that the only place I saw it discouraged as much in men as in women was mormonism. When I read culture writing about sluttiness, whether it’s pro or con, it focuses on whether women are promiscuous.

This is at odds with my experience: that men being judicious about their sex lives (and abstaining from sex for even a religious reason) makes for vastly better dating experiences. Sure, I can add that my own choice to refrain from casual sex was usually protective. I would expect that to be the case for a lot of women. As effective as my choices were for avoiding some negative outcomes (but not all of them), they had limited effect on the dehumanizing experience of engaging with people expecting to get to sex by the third date.

Women may represent a sexual bottleneck due to their relatively higher standards for sexual partners, but that’s different than modeling them as the only ones who can reasonably be expected to control their sexual impulses. Culture writing often dabbles in suggesting that women should have less sex (on the right), or perhaps that men should have less bad/harmful sex (on the left). Our most common cultural narratives do not acknowledge the reality that minimal sexual restraint results in less satisfying sex for men.

I hear anecdotes from men in which women assume that the man is not interested unless he’s pushing for sex as early as possible. Most of the ones who share this sort of thing don’t appreciate this obligation but don’t see a way out of it. I hear reports of men having sex with someone and realizing only after the fact that this was not something they enjoyed the way they thought they would. “Post nut clarity” looks less to me like an inevitable result of a hormone shift and more like an effort to acknowledge how much it sucks to have sex with people you didn’t select carefully.

I could complain about the high time preference costs of this sexual approach, but it wouldn’t make sense unless people believed that the low time preference strategy resulted in better outcomes, and our cultural models almost never make space for that possibility.

We evolved to function best when we feel like our lives and choices are deeply meaningful. You can try to logic your way out of that, the way you can try to enjoy a life where you believe you have no free will because it’s the more rational perspective, but you will probably have a different and lower variance pleasure experience than someone who seeks meaning.

Our modern models of sex writ large have been severely impacted by a focus on the quantitative and physical. (Indeed, despite the reports of a feminized society, our focus on the tangible is to my mind an overwhelming problem of masculine concept creep that appears to be getting worse). Only the barest materialist lens on sex could claim that without significant risk of pregnancy and STIs, sex itself loses its power and relevance as a human way of relating, but many people engage in sex as though pregnancy, illness, and assault are the only meaningful ways it can go poorly.

This is in stark contrast to my upbringing, where sex was so spiritually relevant that it was best to engage in it with only one person, the person you were going to spend the majority of your life with. My model predicts that reports of unsatisfying and depressing sexual encounters are often the result of trying to get transcendent experiences from a model that treats sex like a handshake. These things are rarely if ever compatible, and in particular, being nonselective about who one has sex with will result in worse sex on average, for everyone.

It’s hard to have satisfying sex when we treat it as a purely physical way to pass time with another person, because the bulk of what makes sex satisfying is not physical. Sex where physical pleasure is the goal is like meditating where “sitting in one place for as long as you can” is the goal. It’s not totally without benefit - you will get the expected outcome, at least some of the time, but you stripped the activity of its teleological purpose and then expected teleological magic to occur nonetheless.

That’s only one facet of the physical model’s limitations. Not getting to orgasm in sex that is emotionally and/or spiritually meaningful and connective is occasionally disappointing but still satisfying overall; not getting to orgasm in sex that you’re having for the orgasm is an abject failure. Aiming for orgasm means that any physical difficulty in sex - vascular, sensation-wise, or otherwise - will be experienced as making sex an embarrassing chore that lays bare one’s physical limitations.

In my ideal world, people would be just as concerned about whether the sex they were going to have would feel emotionally unsatisfying as whether it was going to include an orgasm for any/all of its participants. Some people - I will take them at their word - appear to need less context, but I am skeptical given the human desire for meaning that those people represent even a sizable minority.

I would like to believe that we could adjust models for sex such that everyone would have a reason to take it more seriously, and that men in particular could optimize for quality of sexual partners rather than quantity (and in return likely secure more regular sex for themselves). We can do better than materialist sex.