Éabha Hughes explores the different effects that society has had on sexuality in Ireland.
Forgone are the days of the slowburn, replaced with a societal acceptance of casual relationships. They’re everywhere - for better or for worse?
The cultural shift toward non-committal relationships is not inherently a bad thing. For decades in Ireland, women’s bodies and sexuality were heavily policed and stigmatised by the church and state: the Magdalene Laundries, run by the Catholic Church, were places where unmarried sexually active women were imprisoned and forced to carry out unpaid labour for so-called sexual ‘deviance’. Ireland’s shedding of this cultural denigration of women’s sexuality means that finally, without a genuine risk of punishment or societal shaming, we can shag around as much as we like. Furthermore, with the 2022 implementation of The Free Contraception Scheme and the 2018 win for abortion rights, practicing safe sex has never been easier. With this in mind, it is a genuinely empowering opportunity for young women to be exploring their sexuality, even through casual relationships.
Along with sexual freedom, the 21st century has brought technological advancements that mean casual sex is one swipe right and a 20 minute taxi journey away. Dating apps like Bumble and Hinge have become mainstream, with an estimated 200,000 Irish users on Tinder - that is 200,000 people that have attempted to fit a sexually acceptable version of their entire identity into six photos and a couple of prompts, and then hope that someone they saw through a phone screen for 30 seconds thinks they’re hot. Dating apps encourage quick, judgemental decisions based on one scroll of a phone - and I believe that the lack of emotional investment in these profiles push the idea of a casual connection. Starting with a no-strings-attached approach is natural when you have no connection to the person on the other side of your phone screen. How have we managed to reduce the art of seduction to this? When I asked, one friend suggested she thought the whole idea of dating apps ‘atrophies the soul’. I’m inclined to agree. While the act of seeking sex has never been more convenient, it has also never been as dehumanising. It is so rare to approach someone at a bar, or be approached; people opt for the safety of a dating app. Dating apps, I believe, are a comorbidity of late-stage capitalism: we reduce ourselves down to a neatly packaged version of ourselves, hoping that someone will pick us out of an unimaginable amount of options.
It’s no wonder so many of us have reduced sexual relationships to an itch that needs to be scratched - myself included - rather than a genuinely intimate connection with someone. Don’t get me wrong, people can have successful casual relationships. But are we being pushed to feel we want that, when intimacy is a natural part of human life? I’m a firm believer that people should do what they want to, casual relationships included. But dating apps are commodifying the first time we’ve had the freedom to explore our sexualities, and we owe ourselves the opportunity to think about whether casual is something pushed upon us or something we really want.