Readers of a certain age will know the answer instinctively. Unfortunately, most people are under a certain age, and very confused about sex, love, and biological imperatives. 

That's what Louise Perry writes in a new book, excerpted today as an essay at The Free Press. In the essay, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century sounds a lot like the old guide to sex in the 20th century before The Pill upended everything about humans and sexual relations. Perry argues -- correctly -- that women and men want different outcomes from socialization, and decades of attempting what Erica Jong promoted in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying as the "zipless f***" still leads women astray.

It's still getting pushed by feminists to this day, as Perry points out:

Hookup culture benefits some men, at the expense of most women.

That’s because male sexuality and female sexuality, at a population level, do not match. On average, men want casual sex more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy more often than men do. Hookup culture therefore demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to meet the male demand for no-strings-attached sex. Some women are quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even distressing. This is unfair, particularly given that sex carries so many more risks for women, who might end up with an unwanted pregnancy, or being slut-shamed, or even being assaulted.

But even though hookup culture is a terrible deal for women, it is often presented by liberal feminism as a form of empowerment. Progressive media outlets churn out articles such as “5 Fantastic Ways to Engage in Feminist Hookup Culture,” which argues that “we need to respect that people should make their own decisions about their bodies and their sex lives.” But this approach overstates the extent to which anyone can make truly free choices in a system that is stacked against them.

That certainly sets up the premise, and Perry follows up with both anecdotes and data. The data is depressingly predictable: hook-ups leave women more anxious, depressed, and dissatisfied than men. Why? Men get what they want, while women largely do not. Men have paid close attention to the "zipless f***" propaganda and feel no moral obligation to consider whether women really want that or only use it as an entrée to something more meaningful.

Perry quotes a Reddit thread in which a man expresses frustration with his "friend with benefits" and her emotional breakdown over his disinterest in her other than sex:

She brings it up and starts asking me what should she focus on to be the kind of girl guys want to marry one day. I told her she is fine the way she is, she just needs to find the right guy. She asked me why I don’t want to date her down the road when I am looking for something.

I told her that she is great, but she isn’t really girlfriend material in my eyes. She started crying like crazy after that. I don’t know what was going on, we never had a thing, she never talked about having feelings or anything.

This man seems to be genuinely bewildered by the fact that the woman he has been having sex with for many months is unhappy. And the woman seems to have drifted into this arrangement, not realizing how little regard her partner really has for her. This is a tragedy of mutual incomprehension.

That is certainly one aspect of it, but "mutual incomprehension" is a second-order issue. The first-order issue is that hook-up culture asks its participants to treat other human beings like commodities. Even the mechanics of hook-up culture are structured for that approach; 'dating' apps such as Tinder are basically human shopping malls. And men generally have an easier time with transactional encounters than women do, as millennia of prostitution should amply demonstrate. (Even crediting prostitutes with agency to treat sex transactionally with full consent, there are far more johns than prostitutes in any society.)

These are not new concepts. Human societies used to understand this, and ordered their mores and courtship practices to protect both men and women from this kind of exploitation and misery, not to mention the longer-term social consequences of promiscuity. Pope Paul VI warned of the outcomes of a contraception culture in his prophetic 1968 encyclical Humane Vitae, written after the emergence of the Pill and the subsequent so-called Sexual Revolution. The Catholic Church got pressured to rethink its doctrines on sex to account for The Pill, but Pope Paul VI rejected that pressure and warned what would happen to women who get fooled into thinking they've been liberated, emphasis mine:

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

That describes the man in the Reddit thread to a T. It never even occurs to him that his 'friend' should find care and affection, and he certainly feels no need to care about her physical and emotional equilibrium. He views her as a commodity, a receptacle for his pleasure, and tacitly devalues himself to the same status -- as he assumes that's how she sees him. They both have sold themselves into a form of transactional slavery, but only the woman is deluded into thinking that this is a strategy for something else.

Perry offers advice to women generally, but in this upcoming edition to young-adult women in particular, that could have come straight out of the 1950s. It boils down to this message -- respect yourself, which also would have been advice in that generation:

The fact that a man wants to have sex with you is not an indication that he wants a relationship with you. Holding off on having sex for at least the first few months of a relationship is therefore a good strategy. It filters out the men who are just looking for a hookup. It gives a woman time to get to know a man before putting herself in a position of vulnerability. Also, avoiding the emotional attachment that comes with a sexual relationship makes it easier to spot red flags: Free from the befuddling effects of hormones, it’s possible to assess a new boyfriend’s behavior with clearer eyes.

"Sex must be taken seriously," Perry argues, not impulsively. We used to know that before the Pill came along and radicals attempted to deconstruct human society. The wreckage of the Sexual Revolution has been both societal and personal, with the family model nearly disappearing and fueling crime and chaos. The hook-up meat markets create individual personal tragedies too, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. 

Be sure to read it all at the Free Press. There's also lengthy podcast between Perry and Bari Weiss on the topic that's well worth your time. But no one can pretend that this is new, and no one can pretend that we didn't know the truth from the beginning. We were warned, and we rejected the prophet to embrace the darkness. As the Judeo-Christian scriptures tell us, that's nothing new either. And that's why we are, in the words of Weiss and Perry, we have chosen to live in a pagan society.

The front-page image is a picture of hookup apps on phone, via Wikimedia Commons and Nodstrum.com.