Casual Sex and Self-Esteem: Why It Affects Women Differently Than Men (opens in new tab)

There are ideas modern culture treats as settled not because they are proven—but because they are convenient. Casual sex is one of them. Liberated. Normalized. A matter of preference, not consequence. Everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s fine. And then a study appears—quietly, without moral urgency—and suggests something less symmetrical. A paper in Personality and Individual Differences finds that openness to casual sex—what psychologists call sociosexuality—does not carry the same psychological ...