I recently watched the movie, “No Strings Attached.”
Your typical friends-with-benefits-turned-lovers plot.
Boy meets girl. They sleep together. Boy catches feelings. Girl does too but isn’t brave enough to admit it. They break up. Girl finally admits her feelings and they get back together.
Whoop-dee-do.
Predictable, boring, and completely unrealistic.
Here is everything the movies get wrong about casual hookup culture.
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1. Everyone is magically sexy.
This one always gets me. In the movies, everyone is always sexy and beautiful with slim bodies and six-packs. In real life, going home with someone you meet at a frat house or the bar is a huge gamble.
The saying “go to bed with a 10 and wake up with a 2” comes from somewhere.
2. STDs?
Nobody gets tested.
Nobody considers that they could catch the gift that keeps on giving.
Nobody has a case of crusty crotch or a mysterious itch.
If people really did go around sleeping around as casually as they do in movies, they would certainly have collected them all.
3. Basic Biology 101.
Is nobody getting pregnant? If you were really having sex at the frequency they show in the movies, there are going to be some biological consequences.
Unless it’s a key part of the plot, there never seems to be pregnancy scares. Not how it works in the real world.
4. Casual sex is better than lovemaking?
Sex sans love isn’t any better.
And why would it be?
Why would two people who are using each other’s bodies to “get off” be more enjoyable than two people who genuinely care about pleasing each other?
5. The unsexy parts.
Why do they never show women peeing afterwards? Or taking showers? Shaving their hairy bits? Disposing of used condoms?
Everyone is just magically clean and ready all of the time. Nobody gets UTIs. Bedsheets are never soiled.
The list goes on.
6. The 10-second-make-out-to-sex scenes.
This is how you know the scene was directed by a man.
Just going to put that out there.
7. The main character is always the “best.”
If you actually had many casual partners, what is the likelihood that the one love interest is actually the best? The most attractive, the best in the bedroom, etc.
It’s the kind of thing that’s so unrealistic that it gives everyone a false pretense that they can or should have casual sex until they find the best partner they’ve ever had.
It doesn’t work that way in the real world. By the time you do find this “unicorn partner,” you’re too burnt out or too jaded to recognize it.
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So what do these movies get right?
The only thing that I find realistic about these movies is…drumroll please…that people catch feelings for their sexual partners!
This is the only accurate thing about most of these casual-sex-to-lovers movies. (And of course, it only conveniently happens to the “main character” and with the “main love interest.”)
But truly, if you were having casual sex with someone, that is a pretty darn easy way to grow an attachment to them.
That part is inspired by reality.
Everything else — not so much.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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