Really Smart Expert Says Listen Up Kids, There's No Such Thing as Casual Sex

It's that time of year: when high school students start receiving acceptance letters from the colleges to which they applied.

As many of them prepare to leave home for the first time, they'll not only be faced with new academic pressures, but social ones as well--including sex and alcohol, and the combination of the two, which is otherwise known as the "hook up culture." The culture of casual sex.

But does casual sex exist? Is casual sex actually possible?

No way, jose, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist:

So, casual sex is really never casual unless you’re so drunk you can’t remember it; something happens. As a matter of fact, in one study of over a thousand people, over 50% of both men and women reported that their first kiss of somebody was sort of the kiss of death. They had begun quite attracted to a person sexually and romantically and then when they kissed them, it was so horrible for them that it turned them off completely. So, casual sex is just plain old not casual. Something can happen. You can either fall madly in love with this person, or you can begin a deep sense of attachment to them.

As a matter of fact, I’ve been working with a graduate student named Justin Garcia, and he and I believe that people go into hookups, or one-night stands hoping to trigger a longer relationship. And in fact, in a study that he did of 515 men and women in a college in the northeast, he asked them why they went into this hookup; this one-night stand. Fifty percent of women and 52% of men reported that they went into the sexual experience hoping to trigger a longer relationship, and in fact, 1/3 of them did.

Here she is, in an interview over at Big Think, where she explains further: