/lit/ - Literature

What's wrong with the relaxed attitude towards sex and hookup culture of today is that the more your life revolves around sex the less human and the more of an animal you become. The one thing humans unambiguously have in common with the rest of the animals is sex. What distinguishes humans, as far as can be told, is a capacity for love. Casual sex is for animals, it is mechanical, impersonal. Animals at least have the dignity to follow their mechanisms for the sake of the obvious natural purpose of reproduction, but with people that is the worst possible outcome. This alone paints it for unnatural.
If casual sex is to some degree abnormal, pornography is to an extreme. No one with a rational mind can see the situation in which an isolated individual masturbating in front of a screen at flashing pixels is the way it's supposed to be. There is a depressing absurdity of the act, a futility, which seems to chip something away.
This relaxed attitude also pretends as though there were no psychic consequences to sex, and while that may occasionally be true, we ought to note how many ways that sex has been alienated. It is less about reproduction, it is less even about intimacy, all that remains is its function of raw pleasure. One might assume that if things continue how they are it won't even be about pleasure anymore, after all, now or later desensitization will set in. All that will be left is the brainless automatism of coupled, mutually alienated bodies.

(Note on pic rel I actually kind of hate Egon Schiele but I wanted to pick an artist who I thought best represented the modern attitudes on sex.)