Today’s sexual mores often seem to be shaped more by virtual reality than by immutable truths about human nature and the moral law.  In the age of “Sex and the City,” risqué reality shows and Internet pornography, we are told that there is no inherent meaning in sex, there are no intrinsic differences between the sexes and there are no consequences for our sexual choices. 

Many women have struggled to believe these virtual truths, only to find that it is easier said than done.  Consider the results of an opinion survey highlighted recently in the London News Telegraph.  The survey found that nine in 10 British women believe that casual sex is immoral and that women who indulge in one-night stands do so not because they want pleasure but because they are lonely, lacking in self-control or copying the behavior of men.  Researcher Sharron Hinchcliffe of the University of Sheffield noted that some respondents admitted that they engage in casual sex but still condemned the practice as pathetic and wrong. 

Surveys show that American women feel equally conflicted about their own behavior.  In 2001, researchers at the Institute for American Values released “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right,” a report on the college social scene.  The study found that conventional dating was virtually nonexistent and drunken sexual encounters were the norm.  Forty percent of college women in the national survey said they had experienced a “hook up”— a fleeting sexual encounter completely severed from commitment.  One in 10 said they had experienced such an encounter more than six times. 

But the women were not particularly pleased with their behavior: Nearly two-thirds said that such encounters made them feel “awkward,” since campus norms decree that a woman has no right to expect a relationship after experiencing physical intimacy with a man.   As one Princeton student told a researcher, “The whole thing is a very male-dominated scene.  Hooking up lets men get physical pleasure without any emotional connection, but for women it’s hard to separate the physical from the emotional.  Women want the call the next day.” 

In a culture that tells a woman not to expect a phone call – or anything else – after sexual intimacy, her natural longings for love and commitment can be puzzling.  And the frustration of those longings can be devastating, particularly for young women. 

A study in published last fall in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine showed a strong correlation between sexual activity and depression in teenage girls – a correlation not seen in boys.  University of North Carolina researcher Denise Hallfors found higher rates of depression among teenage girls who were sexually active than among girls who abstained from sex, with depression rates rising as the number of sexual partners rose.  The study suggests that sexual experimentation is not a symptom but a cause of depression in teenage girls. 

These new studies only reinforce an old truth about human nature revealed in the structure of our bodies: Men and women were created for union, a union powerful enough to bond a couple for life or devastate a person when it is casually severed.  The physical receptivity of a woman’s body mirrors a deeper reality about her exceptional emotional openness to the human person – an openness that can make her especially vulnerable to the devastation that so often accompanies casual sexual encounters. 

A wise woman will ignore our pop culture’s virtual truth and embrace the unchanging truth inscribed in her very nature: that she was made for lasting love, and nothing less. 

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.