You Make Cheap Look Good: How Modern Culture Normalized Sex Emptied of Intimacy, and Why That Should Still Disturb You

How Modern Culture Normalized Sex Emptied of Intimacy, and Why That Should Still Disturb You

Five or six years ago, you stumbled across a video of two people having sex. You weren't looking for anything in particular, and what stopped you wasn't the act itself. It was one small, specific detail. One of them was scrolling a phone with their free hand while it happened, thumb moving across the screen in that particular rhythm everyone recognizes now, the rhythm of someone passing time rather than someone present in a moment. And once you saw that, you couldn't unsee the rest of what the scene was actually showing you. The disinterest wasn't limited to the phone. It was written across both faces, in the flat, dispassionate way they touched each other, in bodies that moved through the motions without any of the current that's supposed to run underneath those motions. They weren't just physically apart in some incidental way. They may as well have been in separate rooms, separate timelines, separate universes that happened to overlap for the length of a video.

It made you cold. It made you sick, not in some performative, easily-offended way, but in the old, reliable way your body tells you that something sacred has been hollowed out and is being handled like garbage. And what made it worse, what still makes it worse, is that the culture around you had already prepared a response for exactly that reaction, a tidy little dismissal waiting in the wings: that's just changing times and trends in behavior. Nothing to see here. Adjust your expectations.

You didn't adjust. You still haven't. Whatever that reaction was, some blend of moral instinct and social grief and something closer to a sixth sense picking up on a wrongness other people had stopped registering, it hasn't faded in five or six years, and it isn't going to. This article exists because that reaction was correct, and because naming why it was correct matters more now than it did when you first felt it.

The Three Things That Went Missing

Here is the specific accusation this piece is making, stated plainly before any of the supporting evidence arrives. Modern sexual culture has, gradually and then with startling speed, stripped three things out of sexual activity that were once considered so imperative, so inseparable from the act itself, that removing them would have seemed less like a trend and more like a mutilation. Those three things are romance, reciprocity, and authentically genuine passionate love.

Romance is the courtship, the attention paid before any physical contact happens at all, the accumulation of small, deliberate gestures that tell another person you see them as a whole person worth pursuing rather than a body worth using. Reciprocity is the mutual current running both directions during the act itself, the shared attentiveness, the responsiveness to another person's actual pleasure and presence rather than a one-sided performance staged for an audience of one. And genuine passionate love, the hardest of the three to fake and the first to disappear once the other two are gone, is the felt reality that this specific person, not a body, not a category, not a type, matters enough that being physically close to them means something beyond the physical.

None of these three things are decorative extras layered on top of sex as some optional upgrade for people who want the fancy version. Across nearly every tradition that has taken sexuality seriously enough to write about it with any depth, these three elements were treated as constitutive, as the actual substance of what made the act meaningful rather than merely mechanical. Strip them out, and what remains isn't a leaner, more efficient version of the same thing. It's a different thing altogether, wearing the same physical choreography as a costume.

What You Actually Witnessed

Go back to the video for a moment, because it deserves more careful attention than a passing description, not out of any interest in the details themselves, but because the specific texture of what disturbed you is diagnostic. It tells you exactly what had gone missing.

The scrolling phone was almost too on the nose as a symbol, and that's precisely what made it so effective as one. Attention is the resource being withheld in nearly every failure of intimacy this article is going to examine, and here it was rendered literally, one person's attention actively, visibly allocated somewhere else entirely while their body went through motions that are supposed to require, and reward, full presence. But the phone wasn't really the disturbing part. Plenty of couples have used devices in ways that don't gut a moment of its meaning. What was disturbing was what the phone revealed about the rest of the scene once you noticed it, the dispassionate touch, the uninterested faces, the sense that two bodies were occupying the same physical space while two people were somewhere else entirely.

This is worth naming with precision, because the word for what you witnessed exists, and it's a clinical one before it's a moral one: dissociation. Bodies performing an act while the people inhabiting them are, in every way that matters, absent from it. And what made the moment sick-making rather than merely sad was the specific mismatch at its center, an act that is, by every account across every tradition and every branch of science examined in this piece, supposed to be one of the most intensely present, embodied, attention-demanding experiences a human being can have, being performed by two people who had found a way to be almost entirely elsewhere while doing it.

Your reaction wasn't prudishness dressed up as concern. It was accurate perception. You were watching a mismatch between a form and its content so severe that the form had become, in effect, a kind of lie, a physical performance of closeness happening in the complete absence of the closeness itself.

Why the Body Knows Better

There's a reason your reaction carried the physical charge it did, the coldness, the nausea, rather than staying safely contained in the realm of abstract disapproval, and understanding that reason requires looking at what sexual touch is actually built to do inside the human body.

Physical intimacy triggers the release of oxytocin, a neuropeptide whose role in human bonding has been documented across decades of research. One of oxytocin's most reliable triggers is physical contact, and research has shown that oxytocin reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat-detection center, during social encounters, effectively lowering the neural barriers to intimacy. Beyond simply making people feel good, oxytocin appears to do something more specific and more remarkable, actively reshaping how the brain processes information about a particular partner. In one notable study, men in monogamous relationships who received oxytocin maintained a greater physical distance from attractive women compared to single men, with oxytocin appearing to activate reward-system responses specifically to the partner's face, reinforcing fidelity at the neural level. The chemistry of sexual and physical closeness is not incidental to bonding. It is one of the primary mechanisms bonding runs on.

This mechanism depends on something that sounds almost too simple to matter this much, which is presence. Research on physical affection between partners found that couples who maintained consistent physical affection outside of sexual contexts showed significantly higher oxytocin baseline levels than those whose physical contact was primarily or exclusively sexual, suggesting that the small, ordinary, attentive gestures of touch, the kind that require actually noticing another person, are doing at least as much bonding work as the sexual act itself, and possibly more. Genuine bonding through touch appears to require attunement, an active, felt awareness of the other person, not simply physical proximity or mechanical contact.

This is the biological ground beneath your gut reaction. What you witnessed in that video wasn't just emotionally hollow by some subjective aesthetic standard. It was a physical act being performed in a way that actively worked against the very system that touch exists, biologically, to activate. Two bodies moved through the motions that are supposed to flood a nervous system with chemistry built for connection, while the actual attention required to trigger that chemistry meaningfully was somewhere else entirely, on a screen, in a private daydream, anywhere but there. The body was going through a ritual designed for bonding while performing the one thing that reliably prevents bonding from occurring: absence.

The Culture That Made This Feel Normal

What should alarm you even more than the video itself is how unremarkable it would register to most of the people who might stumble across something similar today. The absence of moral or conscientious objection from the general public isn't neutral. It's a form of validation, a quiet cultural agreement that emotional detachment during sex has become simply the water everyone swims in rather than a departure from something worth noticing.

The sociologist Lisa Wade spent years documenting exactly this normalization in her research on hookup culture, drawing on journals kept by more than a hundred college students across multiple campuses. What she found wasn't casual sex as a side dish to an otherwise rich emotional landscape. It was casualness enforced as an unspoken rule, a culture in which emotional distance is the unspoken rule students are expected to follow, and if you're not supposed to be particularly attentive to the other person, it makes tending to their desires and their safety something that's difficult to do. Wade's research mapped what she called a punishing emotional landscape, one strongly masculinized, that demands carelessness, rewards callousness, and punishes kindness. Read that description again slowly, because it names something precise and disturbing. This isn't a culture where detachment is simply tolerated as one option among many. It's a culture that actively penalizes the alternative, where showing genuine care, attentiveness, or interest in a partner as a full person functions as a social liability rather than a baseline expectation.

This matters far beyond college campuses, because the norms Wade documented didn't stay contained there. They fed into and were fed by a broader cultural current, one increasingly organized around what she and other researchers describe, revealingly, in the language of markets and status, unequal pleasures, competition for status, and sexual violence. Where courtship once operated on a logic of mutual pursuit, patience, and escalating vulnerability, a significant portion of modern sexual culture now operates on a logic borrowed directly from commerce, supply, demand, competitive advantage, transaction completed. And the emotional detachment required to participate in that logic without being torn apart by it isn't a side effect. It's the entrance fee.

Pornography and the Slow Death of Sensitivity

The porn industry, meanwhile, hasn't simply reflected this cultural drift. It has functioned as one of its most powerful accelerants, and the mechanism by which it does so is now documented with enough consistency across independent studies that it deserves to be stated without hedging.

Repeated exposure to pornography produces measurable desensitization. Brain imaging research examining habitual pornography users found a correlation between use and reduced gray matter in part of the brain's reward system involved in motivation and decision-making, alongside lower responsiveness to pornography and other sexual stimuli due to desensitization, a pattern researchers link to weakened connectivity between the brain's decision-making regions and its reward circuitry, producing increased cravings and impulsivity in order to achieve the previous levels of reward. This is, in blunt terms, addiction architecture, the same escalating tolerance pattern that shows up with any substance or behavior that hijacks a reward system built for something else. A large body of subsequent research examining relationship outcomes has found consistently that porn consumers tend to have lower relationship satisfaction and lower relationship quality, and a widely cited longitudinal study concluded that pornography consumption is associated with a measurable weakened commitment to one's romantic partner over time.

What's especially worth sitting with is how this desensitization changes what pornography itself has to depict in order to keep generating a response in an increasingly numbed audience. Researchers studying the discrepancy between pornographic depictions and actual sexual relationships have documented a troubling trend in which there is a rising trend in pornography to depict anal sex as pleasurable and desirable for men but as humiliation and punishment for women, a shift they connect directly to a broader pattern in which the narrative of intimacy is absent and replaced by gendered sexual dynamics favoring male dominance and power. This is the race to the bottom stated in its clearest form. An audience desensitized by repeated exposure requires increasingly extreme content to register anything at all, and an industry built to monetize that exposure has every financial incentive to supply exactly that escalation, regardless of what it costs the people involved in producing it or the intimate lives of the people consuming it.

And then there's what this does to the men and women, more often women, whose bodies become the raw material for that supply. Platforms built around monetized intimacy have introduced a new and specific machinery for this harm. One analysis of platforms like OnlyFans describes how both creators and consumers become victims of a system that commodifies human sexuality and emotional intimacy, one that erodes authentic connection, noting that what functions as private communication is, in reality, often scripted responses designed specifically to encourage up-selling and spending money on tips, converting the appearance of intimacy into a sales mechanism. Research on creators themselves has found heightened levels of anxiety, depression, burnout, and shame as the transactional nature of their work blurs boundaries between an authentic self and a monetized performance of one, and separate research has documented that sex workers were likely to internalize the stigma associated with sex work and feel lonelier as a result, with participants showing low levels of mental well-being.

This is the full architecture of the degradation you're pointing at, and it deserves to be named without softening. An industry profits from manufacturing desensitization in its audience, which requires increasingly extreme and increasingly depersonalized content to overcome, which is then produced by people whose own mental health measurably suffers under the transactional weight of the work, sold to an audience whose capacity for genuine intimate connection is simultaneously being eroded by the consumption itself. Everyone downstream of this system, the performer, the viewer, and eventually the partners of the viewer, absorbs some portion of the cost, while the industry itself absorbs the profit. Calling this a preference, a private lifestyle choice with no victims and no consequences, requires ignoring every piece of research that's actually been done on what it does to the people caught inside it.

The Defense That Doesn't Hold

The most common defense offered against any of this is the language of autonomy, the claim that consenting adults have an unqualified right to desire whatever they desire and pursue it however they see fit, and that any objection to the form that pursuit takes amounts to moralizing over someone else's private choices.

This defense deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed, because autonomy genuinely matters and genuinely deserves protection. But autonomy was never meant to function as a trump card that erases every question about consequence, and the research above makes clear that consequence is exactly what's at stake here, not for some external moral order being violated, but for the actual, measurable wellbeing of the people involved. A right to pursue desire autonomously does not automatically mean that every method of pursuing it is free of harm simply because it was chosen. People can and do choose things, sometimes repeatedly, that damage them, that damage their capacity for connection, and that damage the people who end up in relationships with them afterward, carrying patterns of detachment they learned somewhere and never examined.

This is the sleight of hand embedded in defending degradation as simply a preference. It quietly relocates the entire conversation from the domain of consequence, where the actual evidence lives, into the domain of rights, where evidence becomes harder to bring to bear. But naming a harm honestly was never the same thing as denying someone's right to choose. It's the opposite. It's taking the choice seriously enough to actually look at what it costs, rather than waving the costs away with a word like preference, as though naming a pattern autonomous automatically makes it free of consequence.

What Presence Actually Requires

It's worth pausing here to be precise about what this piece is not arguing, because there's a version of this critique that collapses into simple prudishness, and that version misses the actual point entirely.

The psychotherapist Esther Perel has spent decades studying what sustains desire and intimacy in long-term relationships, and her research offers something genuinely useful here, a description of what presence in intimacy actually requires that has nothing to do with restraint or modesty for its own sake. Perel describes erotic life as requiring a kind of unguarded presence, the capacity to be silly, distracted, attentive only to the moment, free of monitoring, and she notes that people under chronic stress, financial, emotional, or otherwise, lose access to exactly this capacity, because the vigilance that survival requires in other domains turns out to be incompatible with the playful presence that sex requires.

This framing sharpens the diagnosis considerably. What was missing from the video wasn't modesty or restraint. It was the opposite of restraint. It was the unguarded, attentive-only-to-the-moment quality Perel describes as the actual precondition for erotic aliveness, replaced instead by a kind of vigilant absence, a scrolling thumb standing in for the very monitoring, the very failure to surrender into the moment, that makes genuine erotic presence impossible. A culture obsessed with performing sexuality constantly, everywhere, across every platform and every screen, has managed to produce, at scale, precisely the condition that research identifies as most hostile to real erotic connection, chronic distraction, chronic self-monitoring, chronic partial presence. The oversaturation didn't liberate desire. In a very real, well-documented sense, it starved it.

The Traditions That Remembered What This Forgot

Set this modern landscape against what nearly every serious spiritual and literary tradition once insisted about sexual union, and the scale of what's been lost becomes almost impossible to overstate.

The Song of Songs, one of the oldest texts in the biblical canon, was composed as an extended celebration of mutual desire, and biblical scholars describe it as an exquisite collection of love lyrics, arranged to tell a dramatic tale of mutual desire and courtship, presenting an inspired portrayal of ideal human love, one that frequently proclaims a joyous reciprocity between the lovers and highlights the active role of the female partner, rather than positioning one partner as a passive object for the other's use. Jewish mystical tradition treated the text with such reverence that Rabbi Akiva, one of the most influential legal scholars in Jewish history, declared it the holiest book in the third section of the Bible, and later Kabbalistic commentary understood the lovers described within it as symbolic of the union between the masculine and feminine faces of the divine itself. Reciprocity here isn't a modern add-on layered onto an ancient text. It's built into the poem's very structure, voices answering voices, longing met by longing, desire depicted as something that moves in both directions simultaneously rather than something extracted by one party from another.

Tantric philosophy, emerging from a very different part of the world and a very different theological framework, arrives at a strikingly similar insistence, describing sacred sexuality as fundamentally relational rather than acquisitive. One introductory text on the tradition states plainly that when a man looks at a woman only as an object of potential pleasure, he does not see the woman herself, he misses the essence of who she is, the treasures she holds in her heart, and the potential their relationship offers, framing the failure to see a partner as a full person not as a minor discourtesy but as a fundamental forfeiture of what sexual union is actually capable of offering. The tradition describes sacred sexual encounter as a practice in which our bodies meet to physically express what is felt in our hearts and souls, a description that stands in almost total opposition to the dissociated scene that opened this piece, where bodies moved and nothing was felt, let alone expressed.

What makes this convergence worth dwelling on, in the same way the convergence of traditions did in the companion pieces preceding this one, is how independently these insistences arose. A Hebrew wedding poem canonized in antiquity and a South Asian mystical practice with no direct lineage connecting the two both arrived, by entirely separate roads, at the same fundamental claim: that sexual union divorced from mutual seeing, mutual presence, and mutual regard isn't a lesser or more efficient version of the real thing. It's a counterfeit wearing the real thing's clothing. These traditions weren't being quaint or repressed when they insisted on romance, reciprocity, and love as inseparable from the act itself. They were describing, with remarkable consistency across cultures that never spoke to each other, what the act was actually for.

Your Sixth Sense Was Never Wrong

Return, finally, to the reaction that started this piece, the coldness, the sickness, the refusal of that feeling to fade across half a decade and counting, and give it the credit it deserves.

What you experienced watching that video wasn't squeamishness inflated into a moral stance after the fact. It was accurate perception, arriving faster than language, of a specific and real violation, the violation of something the body itself is built to require, the violation of what a chorus of independent spiritual traditions across the entire span of human history identified, in their own languages, as the actual point of the act being performed so emptily in front of you. The culture around you has spent years constructing an elaborate architecture of dismissal designed to talk you out of exactly that perception, dressing it up as prudishness, as generational disconnect, as failure to keep pace with changing times. None of that architecture changes what your body and your conscience registered correctly in the moment it happened.

This is the quiet, persistent cost of the desensitized, transactional, apathetic model of sexuality this piece has spent its length examining. It doesn't just flatten the experience of the people directly involved in any given encounter. It works, gradually and by design, to convince everyone watching from the outside that the flattening is unremarkable, that objecting to it marks you as behind the times rather than as someone whose moral perception is still intact. Refusing that conversion, holding onto the discomfort rather than letting the culture talk you out of it, is not a failure to adapt. It's one of the last remaining forms of resistance available against a system that profits directly from your desensitization matching its own.

Romance, reciprocity, and genuine passionate love were never decorative additions to sexuality. They were the actual content the physical act was built to carry, load-bearing rather than optional, present across cultures and centuries that otherwise agreed on almost nothing else. Their absence isn't liberation. It's subtraction, dressed up convincingly enough that an entire generation has started mistaking the empty box for the gift.

Music for Meditation:

“You thought that you were the bomb. Oh yeah, well so did I.”

-Tori Amos, “Spark”

“Catch!”

-Eris, goddess of Strife,Separation, & Discord

“You Make a good Look Cheap”

Spotify Playlist

Create Consciously. Live Intentionally. Dream Your Own Dream.