August 2009 – They are two different stories: A young woman volunteers to sell her virginity to the highest bidder; a company makes money by advertising a “dating service” for adulterers.

But the people involved in these stories share something in common – the belief that sex is basically no big deal. There are certainly no legitimate moral judgments to be made regarding who willingly does what with whom.

You’d be surprised how many people agree. Welcome to an America with an increasingly postmodern take on human sexuality.

Selling sex
Last year a 22-year-old Californian going by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan decided that a fun thesis for her master’s degree would be the following sociological experiment: Auction her virginity to the highest bidder.

Dylan had already earned her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and, in September 2008, while working in preparation for entering a master’s program, came up with the idea. 

Dylan has gotten numerous offers and as of this point the highest bid is, as she put it, “a cool $3.8 million.” She has avoided any pesky prostitution prosecutions by making the offer via a whorehouse in Nevada, where prostitution is legal.

Make no mistake, however, Dylan is selling sex, not love. “I get some men who are obviously looking for a girlfriend but I try and make it clear that this is a one-night-offer only,” she told a newspaper in the U.K.

But in defense of her entrepreneurial experiment, Dylan made clear her core belief about sex: It’s all about personal, individual satisfaction. 

“I think me and the person I do it with will profit greatly from the deal,” she said.

Sex at its basest
How is it possible to conceive of such a cold and callous experience as something that is profitable to both parties? After all, we are talking about prostitution.

But the postmodern view of sex is that there is nothing intrinsically beautiful about it – certainly nothing sacred. It’s just simple down-in-the-dirt, even-animals-do-it copulation.

This is the rationale for The Ashley Madison Agency, a company dedicated to providing a “dating service” for married people wanting to commit adultery. According to founder Noel Biderman the business has 3.86 million members. 

He told the Toronto Sun, “Physical intimacy is no different than requiring oxygen to breathe or water to drink. If it’s missing in your relationship, I don’t care who you are … you’re going to step outside your relationship. That’s the bottom line.”

Many postmodernists move quickly to detach sexuality from the realm of the sublime. Journalist and author Kathy Dobie, for example, thinks there is nothing wrong with the hook-up culture – casual sex with whomever and whenever – that dominates the lifestyles of many American young adults.

Girls who live the hook-up life “refuse to conflate … love and sexuality,” Dobie said in the Washington Post, while those who warn against hooking up are combining the two unnecessarily. “Sometimes [love and sex] coexist, sometimes not,” she said.

Ho-hum. Sex has become a form of entertainment that can be detached from life and love as easily as an iPod from a computer.

In a column titled, “In Defense of Casual Sex,” Salon.com blogger Tracy Clark-Flory bluntly said, “I put my academic and career achievements ahead of romantic relationships, and allowed myself plenty of uncommitted [sexual] entertainment along the way.”

All about me
The Natalie Dylan and Ashley Madison cases are, of course, extreme expressions of the postmodern ethic. Nobody believes that a majority of Americans are in favor of selling sex to the highest bidder. And on the matter of what Biderman’s business does, most people in the U.S. (91%) still view adultery as being wrong.

But while the expression is extreme, the underlying philosophy is mainstream. Both Dylan and Biderman manifest an intrinsically self-centered view of sexuality that is pervasive. Sex – whether within marriage or not – is simply a part of the individualistic journey of self-discovery.

“We feminists do, indeed, love words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘respect,’ but there’s one we like even more: choice,” said Clark-Flory. “The problem is that, too often, the abstinence movement prescribes a particular path [of waiting for marriage before having sex], rather than encouraging young women to blaze their own trail.”

This is postmodern sex at its most brazen. Not only are there no moral principles governing sex – with the exception that it must be consensual – but no one even has the right to suggest that there might be some absolute truths governing coitus. It is hyper-individualism writ large.

But if sex is primarily an expression of individualism, then it essentially becomes nothing more than a masturbatory exercise. A string of sexual partners simply serves personal desires and fantasies, and the other person involved is a mere prop. He or she becomes the personification of the fully pornified imagination.

It should be no surprise, of course, that the postmodern approach to sex is not explained in such vulgar terms. In fact, defenders of casual sex like Clark-Flory go to great lengths to put a positive spin on hooking up.

“I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships. … Hopefully, by taking several test-drives before buying, we’ll be happier with our final investment,” she said.

Amazingly, Dobie one-ups this utilitarian defense by claiming that the hook-up lifestyle is actually more human than limiting sex to marriage. “Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex,” she said.

Of course, this makes the Creator’s design for human sexuality – sex is reserved for marriage – something which, in Dobie’s opinion, actually chips away at our humanness. 

Just the way life is?
The final postmodern argument in favor of unbridled sexual experimentation is that, ultimately, people having sex whenever they want is simply the way life is. And if that’s the way it is, it must be the way it should be.

Dobie dispenses with the concerns of the hand-wringers who worry about whether or not girls who hook up can ever “learn how to be [a part of] loving couples” or “sustain deep and long-term relationships.”

One must remember, she said, “that life just doesn’t work that way: In our teens and early 20s, sexual relationships are less about intimacy than about expanding our intimate knowledge of people – a very different thing.”

But Dobie is begging the question. Even if she is correct in her assessment of ‘the way life is,’ that is no reason to assume that is the way it should be. 

Moreover, the postmodern view of sex is not the way it always was, either. Figuring out how our culture’s view changed may reveal the cultural forces driving the sexual revolution – and, perhaps, the way back.

And make no mistake: It was a revolution. According to sociologist and sex researcher Ira L. Reiss, the change in sexual permissiveness in America began in the early 1960s. He said a 1963 survey found that only 20% of adults said sex outside of marriage was acceptable.

Sexual permissiveness proceeded to skyrocket after that. Acceptance of sex outside of marriage rose to 28% in 1965 and 52% in 1970. A Gallup survey in 2008 found that 61% of American adults believe that sex outside of marriage is “morally acceptable.”

“[I]t is hard not to conclude that in those seven years [between 1963 and 1970], something that can be called a revolution began to evidence itself in American attitudes toward premarital coitus,” Reiss said.

What was responsible for this startling change? Reiss believed it may have been the normal response of a culture that has moved out of the phase where people are concerned about economic survival into a phase in which there is a sense of abundance. In such circumstances people begin to “stress well being and quality of life, over accumulation of more economic wealth.”

That would explain the shift to a more individualistic and self-centered worldview in general. How I can enjoy my life more would become the central focus of life. 

Add to this the much ballyhooed and discredited research of Alfred Kinsey, which told people that no one was paying attention to traditional mores anyway; the Hugh Hefner philosophy promoted in Playboy; and, of course, the invention of the birth control pill, and there was a ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances to create a sexual revolution.

He’ll ‘be devastated’
Unfortunately for the revolutionaries and their followers, understanding ‘the way life is’ may not always be as easy as expected. In fact, real life has a nasty habit of intruding into revolutions as well as the status quo.

Clark-Flory admits this in her piece: “Of course, there are also very real hazards to hook-up culture: namely, rising rates of unplanned pregnancies among young women and sky-high STD rates.”

And how. A study last summer found that more than 25% of the adults in New York City were infected with genital herpes, an incurable sexually transmitted disease that causes painful blisters and ulcers.

Dobie, meanwhile, also admitted at the end of her article that hooking up has a potential downside – that it might very well produce “a generation unable to commit, unable to weather storms or to stomach second place or really to love at all.”

As for Ashley Madison’s bold venture into the adultery business, one customer, “Karen,” told Good Morning America’s Kate Snow that after two-and-one-half years of adultery she was conflicted about what she’d been doing.

Snow said Karen is afraid that “her husband, if he finds out, will be devastated.”

These are the real-life consequences of rejecting human sexuality the way the Creator designed it. After all, Christianity does not put forth a naïve view of life. God certainly understands what is – both the sources and consequences of postmodern sex.

However, in the offer of the Gospel, Jesus Christ says, in effect, “That may be the way life is, but it’s not the way it has to be.”

Understanding that truth might just unleash the biggest revolution of all.  

Antidotes for the hook-up culture:
▶ Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting our Children by Dr. Joe S. McIlhaney and Dr. Freda McKissic Bush
▶ *Sex 180: There’s More to it Than “Just Wait” by Chip Ingram and Tim Walker
▶ *Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust by Joshua Harris

*Explicitly Christian perspective