Words by Willa Umansky PZ ’27

Graphic by Thea Riley PZ ’28

“I love reading about your sex life in the school newspaper,” is a text that would have sent me into an anxiety induced coma in high school. At my haggard, ancient age of 20, I have grown used to receiving messages of this nature. Intimate inquiries, promiscuous prose, and porny poems — I have written a lot about love and sex. Naturally, when an Ath talk promised to feature conversations between two different columnists about the sexual revolution’s impact on college campuses, I was all in. 

Turns out, so was everyone else. The room was riddled with late teens and early twenty-somethings desperate to hear an academic take on everyone’s favorite topic. Does this mean that people want change? Or do people just want, as a friend of mine put it, “an excuse to talk about sex?” I mean, we were ALL at Ooze.

Despite my allegiance to featuring admittedly faulty hookup culture in the paper, I will be the first to concede discontentment with the way that these less-than-fulfilling sexual encounters function. The Forum’s Henry Long recently wrote an article, presumably inspired by the very Ath talk that we both attended, asserting that “eros is by no means dead, but it is on life support.” Pulling from Plato’s symposium, Long explains the concept of eros in its classical context as the force that drives the soul towards the desiring of higher objects, a force both erotic and pure. As Plato conjectures, the “perpetual human temptation is to stop our ascent along the ladder of love and remain fixated on lower objects,” posing a discrepancy between enlightenment and impulse. 

Long is right, eros is most certainly on life support in our current culture! My peers and I constantly find ourselves groaning at the brunch table about our qualms with hookup culture, seemingly stuck on the lower rungs of desire in what feels like a fruitless endeavor towards something more.

One of the Atheneum speakers, Christine Emba, author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation”, delivered such a compelling argument that I almost didn’t register she was positioned as the “conservative” voice in contrast to her more liberal debate partner, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason Magazine’s biweekly “Sex & Tech” columnist. Emba’s book, which I purchased after the event, dissects modern sexual culture with an argument that, while more conservative than my own views, resonates in unexpected ways. She suggests that contemporary sexual norms attempt to make sex inconsequential — detached, easily digestible, and stripped of its emotional weight—ultimately leading to worse, rather than freer, experiences.

At the Ath, Emba raised a provocative point about the potentially negative effects of the consent-culture that has emerged over the past two decades. What I gleaned from her argument is that the emphasis on consent as the sole box to be checked to green-light a sexual encounter as communicative and ethical actually creates more room for excused gray area sex. This absolutely struck a chord in me. Emba said something to the degree of “I didn’t rape this person and I wasn’t raped, so why do I feel so icky about this experience?” The idolization of consent as the only prerequisite of acceptable sex is to blame for this phenomenon. There is an attentiveness beyond consent necessary for a good sexual experience that Emba thinks is nearly impossible to cultivate among two strangers and thus incompatible with many modern-day hookups.

In her book, Emba quotes blogger Ella Dawson who defines bad sex as “the sex we have that we don’t want to have but consent to anyway.” Under consent-culture’s definition there is nothing really wrong with bad sex, it’s an inconsequential symptom of a liberated sexual life. That simply can’t be true. The fact that it’s not criminal doesn’t mean it’s harmless. The current discourse often paints sex in binary terms — either okay and fully consensual or not okay and outright coercive — leaving little room for the many gray area experiences that people struggle to articulate. That binary can be isolating for those who feel their experiences fall somewhere in the middle, it also encourages people to not interrogate what makes their “ethically okay” bad sex so negative. 

Emba elaborates on this argument in her book, elucidating how consent can perhaps be a reductive barometer of ethical and communicative sex. She criticizes different consent trainings and laws, saying that “they dumb down sex and make it smaller and meaner than what it could be. This is one of the reasons why consent—our shorthand for ethicality—so often falls short.” Casual sex isn’t inherently bad, but the fallacy that a strong consent culture sufficiently ensures good or ethical sex proves deficient. We need more than just that one box to be checked, oversimplified devices to calculate consent gloss over the complexities of desire and effectively ostracize mutual care, which should be a fundamental pillar of sexual encounters.

Emba cites Amia Srinivasan’s “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?”, specifically Srinivasan’s critique of metaphors that reduce the importance of sex, such as the food-ifying ones that say you don’t have to share your pizza/sandwich/fries/etc. with someone if you don’t want to, so why would you be expected to share sex? Srinivasan bites back, explaining that “Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.”

In the chapter of the book titled, “Sex is Spiritual,” Emba attempts to prove the atypical nature of sex. It is not only unclassifiable and immune from being boxed up in a domain of the human experience, but it is transcategorizable in that it transcends category — it embodies everything and more. Sex is physical, emotional, religious — it can speak to who we are as people, who we want to be and what we’ve been through. Emba claims that although we have made it a cultural fact that sex is an act like any other, sexual assault’s status as a crime unlike any other proves this assumption wrong. Emba cites a priest who once told “The Atlantic” that “as many as 80 percent of the people who came to him seeking exorcisms were sexual abuse survivors.” Sexual assault wounds the spirit in a way that nothing else can. It is violating and confusing, its effects are piercing and perennial. Even consensual sexual encounters, with birth control and condoms reducing the physical risks, refuse to be diminished in significance. We talk about it differently than anything else.

Emba argues that there is something functionally futile in searching for examples of ethical sex, because of its scarcity. Emba’s recounts a conversation with a young professional whom she refers to as Kris. Kris details a one time sexual encounter that she had that left her feeling empty and generally questioning the merit of casual sex. Emba explains that Kris pacified her renunciation of hookup culture by saying that, “‘There are plenty of people who have truly casual sex and don’t think about it at all.’” Emba says that when people say something to this effect in her interviews with them, she follows-up by interrogating whether the women actually know someone like this to which she asserts that “usually the answer is no.” This is where my optimism about casual sex deviates from Emba’s essential condemnation.

Dolly Alderton, whom I now revere as a role model after recently reading “Everything I Know About Love”, argues in that book that one should take casual sex for what it is. A stranger taking on the role of “boyfriend” — which Alderton defines as simply as letting someone spend the night and hold you, actually does more harm than good. She vastly differs from Emba by citing emotionally hands off casual sex as ethical, but a posturing of care as manipulative. I just think that both of these views are not only reductive, but actually miss the solution that they’re in search of.

The notion that enjoyable casual sex is a myth is simply untrue. Maybe it’s because I attend the unruly Pitzer College and grew up in girl-boss New York City, but I know plenty of people who have enjoyable casual sex. Yes, “no-strings” encounters can have adverse effects, but to suggest that they inherently lack value is just wrong. Successful casual sex requires a trust bubble between partners — private and outside of mainstream culture — but it is certainly possible. I’m feeling less generous with my desire to share copious personal details as I write. Perhaps I’m growing out of the whole ‘spill my sex life in the school newspaper’ thing, but I do have personal anecdotes to combat Emba’s claims.

There is a pattern that I have detected in good partners that cultivates that key trust bubble in casual relationships and hookups, both in my own personal experiences and stories from friends. A good partner, in my observations, tends to be someone who embodies a leftist ethos. I’m not talking about wokeism BS or the shallow and aestheticized sense of the term — I’m talking community care. Not just “are they politically progressive” but “do they move through the world with a sense of responsibility for others?”Are they kind and thoughtful? Do they reject transactional, extractive dynamics in favor of a more mutual approach? That sort of countercultural disposition — the kind that resists commodification, prioritizing presence over performance — tends to translate into something raw and connected in the bedroom. It is not manipulative — or nearly extinct in its rarity — to intentionally cultivate something intimate and healthy, even for one night stands.

That being said I do think that it is more than fair to assert that people are not always inclined or equipped to cultivate that for themselves. The ability to embrace eros — desire not just as a seeking fleeting pleasure, but as a force that elevates the spirit — requires a certain kind of emotional literacy. It necessitates a recognition that even in its most casual forms, sex is never fully divorced from its deeper implications. Even a passing encounter can momentarily lift you up the ladder of eros, but only if the participating parties recognize — consciously or not — that their desire is tethered to something beyond itself.  

I sent out a survey called “Let’s Talk About Sex” to Student Talk and texted it to just about everyone I know across all five campuses. I was originally planning on including the Claremont data that I collected in this article, but I think it would better serve you guys to ingest that separately. This article would have been far too long to keep the attention of our desperately Gen Z dopamine fiend brains. I’ll give you a taste of my future analysis by revealing my most interesting finding thus far with 124 respondents across all 5Cs, the vast majority being Pitzer students with Claremont McKenna College as a second, and Scripps College as a close third.

When asked why they engaged in sexual relations most recently,  just over 47% of respondents selected “I wanted to feel close to someone” while 35% selected “I was seeking physical pleasure.” To me, this is damning. Long puts it best in his Forum article, stating that “desires give us clues about what’s truly good,” and I think Christine Emba would strongly endorse this statement.

Emba describes “sex [as] a powerful mode of bonding, especially in an unprecedentedly disconnected time.” People are lonely and they crave the stability of a partner to ease that loneliness. Sex, situationships — even torturous ones — and the like, can feel like a stepping stone to that stability. Love is constructive in the fight against loneliness and we all just want to feel less alone. When sex becomes a means to fill a void, it often just highlights the very emptiness that it was meant to cure. Eros drives us all. As Emba writes: “More and more, we are drawn to the conclusion that sex without love — at least of some kind — leads to disappointment and disillusionment.” 

I’m not as harsh as Emba, clearly I am not anti casual sex — non-newsflash, I have it. We have to be careful with sex, more so than probably anything else we engage in as people. We have to ask the “what to do’s” and  “what feels good” and go into every sexual encounter with an eye towards our partner’s personhood. At the end of the day I think that it’s really quite as simple as a friend of mine once brilliantly put it, “love sex is nice.”