The common wisdom has been clear for generations: women offer sex to get love, men offer love to get sex. It is a bleak paradigm, but a stable one.
Today, that stability feels shattered. The sexual revolution promised liberation, the freedom to engage in consequence-free, casual intimacy. Yet decades later, a profound dissonance hums beneath the surface of modern relationships. The central, unsettling question remains: What, in the end, do men really care about when it comes to sex?
As seen in this article, the revolution’s premise hinged on severing sex from consequence, primarily through the advent of reliable contraception and abortion access. The lifelong risk of a pregnancy could, in theory, be removed. “Sex can’t ever really be ‘casual’ if there are lifelong consequences in the form of a human being,” the logic went. With that barrier lowered, a new era of openness was to dawn.
But neuroscience suggests a more complicated reality. “Love and sexual arousal are typically indistinguishable in the brain,” explains Dr. Nicole Prause, a licensed psychologist and neuroscientist. “This is an uncomfortable research result because we have social pressures to understand love as ‘more serious’ and sexual arousal as overwrought or even base.” Biologically, the lines are blurred; emotionally and socially, we insist on drawing them.
This tension plays out in lived experience. For some men, sex can serve as a form of validation, separate from emotional bonding. “For some men, sex is an affirmation of how good-looking they are,” says certified sex therapist Amanda Pasciucco, noting it can be about attractiveness, desirability, or conquest, particularly in early stages of attraction.
Historically, social structures created a clear, if restrictive, framework. Women often operated as gatekeepers, linking sexual access to commitment, a pragmatic necessity when single motherhood was a path of extreme hardship. That dynamic enforced a mutual, if reluctant, negotiation.
That gate, however, has been dismantled. Women can prevent pregnancies and choose single motherhood. The old leverage is gone. And the result, some argue, is a landscape of confusion and discontent. Biologist Bret Weinstein recently observed, “The sexual revolution disrupted something fundamental… Sex, it turns out, is far more important than we understood, and making it cheap unleashed a cascade of negative effects. Among the worst: men and women have now become unsympathetic and grotesque in each others’ eyes.”
Cap? No.
The contemporary scene appears fractured: the rise of the ambiguous “situationship,” rampant pornography consumption, and reported declines in traditional dating among the young. The promised freedom, critics contend, has proven asymmetrical. It offered men physical access without the traditional requirement of accountability, while convincing women this was also their liberation.
Yet, for many women, the outcome of truly casual encounters often feels hollow, leaving them, as described, feeling used, discarded, and emotionally unfulfilled in a way men may not experience.
Within long-term relationships, the challenge shifts but endures. Routine and comfort, the very bedrock of a secure partnership, can dampen sexual spontaneity. The pressure to maintain a frequent, passionate sex life itself becomes a source of anxiety. “Society makes us think that it’s abnormal if a man isn’t wanting sex all the time,” says Lagos-based couples therapist Dr. Cecilia Anyah. This can spark insecurities in partners, fueling fears of fading desire or marital catastrophe.
Anyah suggests the solution may lie in broadening our definition of connection itself. “The very first thing we have to understand is that sex is not just penetrative sex,” she says. “Sex is not just intercourse. Sex is a lot of things, and it’s anything intended for one’s arousal… intimacy comes in many forms.”
The revolution’s promise of simple, cost-free physical intimacy now seems a mirage. It swapped one set of rules for a void of expectations, leaving both sexes to navigate a terrain where biological impulses, emotional needs, and social narratives are constantly at odds.
The question now is: Can both sexes can rebuild a shared language of intimacy in an age that promised freedom but delivered something far more complex?
Perhaps.
