Valentine’s Day’s over — the chocolate’s gone, the candles are burned out and the flowers are wilting. So with all those romantic distractions out of the way, let’s talk about sex.
Specifically, how Americans’ views on sex and relationships have changed over the last 10 Valentine’s Days.
The decade-old dating Web site OkCupid has been asking users personal-preference questions since its inception. The company recently released the results of a study on the sexual mores of some million or so users, showing how users’ views have shifted since 2005.
It’s easy enough to guess where those trends have been heading — the last decade has seen the rise of even more flesh-flaunting celebrities, an explosion of insta-porn sites and STD rates and an increasingly sex-saturated media where casual hookups are shown as the norm. It was just last Valentine’s Day that thousands of men took their wives and girlfriends to see the bondage-themed movie “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
When it comes to sexual behavior and values, there seems to be an increasingly common attitude of “anything goes.” Unless you look at OkCupid, because believe it or not, the matchmaking site suggests that, in fact, their users might be becoming ever so slightly more conservative about sexual morals.
The company asked a series of questions and sorted out the answers from both men and women.
The responses to two questions stand out:
No. 1: When asked “Would you consider sleeping with someone on the first date?” compared to 10 years ago every single group was more likely to answer “no.” (There was an overall decline of about 19 percent, but straight women and gay men were about 25 percent less likely to say “yes.”)
No. 2: When asked, “Would you date someone just for the sex?” every single group again said “no” more than they did a decade ago. (The “yes” answers declined by nearly 10 percent total.)
Really? In 2016? Those are telling answers. Together, those two questions hit at the core of hookup culture, a culture that anecdotal evidence suggests is more deeply ingrained now than ever before. But if people are less likely to have sex on the first date, and less likely to date just for sex, maybe the foundation of hookup culture is starting to shift, or crumble altogether.
Perhaps the alarming and frightening rise of STDs has spooked some people out of casually sleeping with strangers. Perhaps hookup culture’s promise of carefree sex turned out, for some, to be empty.
Maybe the appeal of sexual liberation that feminists have long preached to girls is starting to lose its sparkle. Maybe, just maybe, the cultural pendulum has swung to its furthest point, and is now on its way back in the other direction with both men and women realizing that severing love and commitment from sex too often leads to hurt and heartbreak instead of fun and freedom.
Maybe. But missing from this question of whether we’re becoming more sexually conservative is one very important word: Tinder.
That company has, from the beginning, helped facilitate the no-strings-attached, casual one-night stands of our hookup culture. So while it’s entirely possible that OkCupid users are slowly heading in one direction, Tinder is speeding in the other. By 2014, a year before OkCupid conducted its user poll, Tinder was just two years old, but seeing some billion swipes per day.
Tinder’s explosive popularity probably attracted those online users more interested in casually hooking up than seriously falling in love. And if so, the older, more established sites like OkCupid, Match and eHarmony were probably left with the folks who wanted more than a one-night stand. If so, that helps explain why the results of OkCupid’s poll seem so surprising in our sex-saturated culture.
Then again, maybe OkCupid’s users are on to something. Maybe some digital match-seekers have already traveled down Tinder lane and realized that approaching love and sex casually usually just leads to a dead end. Maybe Tinder helped push that pendulum to its farthest point and people are beginning to return to a more conservative view of sex and love.
Time will tell if Tinder’s approach is here to stay or if people really are ready to start unhooking from hookup culture. But there are at least some positive signs in OkCupid’s data.