It seems not every student is into sexual scholarship.

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student Lea Palmer shares her views on current  trends in male-female relationships in The Carolina Review.

Sexuality, once viewed as a beautiful way of biologically and psychologically bonding two people together through the truest expression of love possible, has been turned into a cheap struggle for subjective dominance between men and women that, nevertheless, continues to objectify the latter.  As we all know, however, over the years, sex has played an important role in society and should be protected.

Monogamy is the force that connects a husband and wife together, is the only way for children to be created in a non-artificial way, and ensures that children will have a stable family environment to grow up in. It is also a safeguard against the transmission of STDs.  Many people argue that sexual liberation was brought about by the development of different types of birth control, which reduced the risk of pregnancy and the spread of STD’s. More importantly, however, contraceptives and other forms of birth control allowed women to take control of their own sex lives.

However, one of the things that makes sex so dangerous and so damaging are the emotions that are attached to an action that bands two people together, especially when it is exploited.  Although the physical results (conceiving a child) of fornication were diminished, birth control did nothing to limit the emotional and social effects of precarious, casual, and unmarried sex.

UNC freshman Rebecca Igleheart puts it succinctly: “Women are raised on this idea of a fairy tale life where ‘Prince Charming’ is going to ride in and romance us. We’ve been taught to tie all these emotions into sex, and men simply don’t see that side of it.  I don’t understand how telling women to have sex more often with different people actually helps us become liberated or free from these emotional bondages”.

Palmer concludes the underlying problem with today’s attitudes:

Sex is not morally wrong; however, what is morally wrong is the separating sex from the love that it ought to express, and thereby exploiting and cheapening it. The more promiscuous women are, the more men will see women as sexual objects and use them only for sex.  Although this idea of sexual liberation was supposed to equalize men and women, it in fact makes women even less equal than before and continues to paint them as these things to be objectified.

Those interested in a science-based support for Palmers approach should read: A Biochemist’s Argument Against “Hooking-Up”