The True Cost Of Cheap Sex

If I am allowed to be totally honest and frank, it seems to me that men love whores and women love to be whores, to the point that it is costing them their families, their children, jobs, and reputations. Men and women alike are willing to put it all on the line for sex.

All of us have a story we know about. Whether in the news, your favorite podcaster, a political figure, your neighbor next door, or even your friend. We all have heard it. When my husband’s father was caught cheating, his wife did not yell; she did not scream. She told him to sit and wait. In the next room, she grabbed something; she set it down next to him, opened it on the bed, and inside were hundreds of pictures of their family. Three little children, all smiling back. Vacations, trips, and Christmas dinners, an entire story of a family out in the open. She told him — look, this is what you are losing, this is the price you are paying, this is your cost. He did not care. The book was closed, the price was paid, and now, many years later, the cost has not lifted; it is still being paid.

This is nothing new. People have cheated since the dawn of time. But the sexual marketplace has changed. It is now organized around desire rather than character. The currency used to be virtue; now it’s sexual desirability. The objective was marriage; now it’s pleasure. We have exchanged what we value for the things we desire.

What do I mean by this?

I mean we have separated sex from all the things that gave it greater purpose. Finding someone attractive was not the only thing that mattered. We were looking for someone to marry, have children with, and spend the rest of our lives with. The idea of marrying someone nowadays without taking a “test drive” first is seen as the worst possible thing a person can do. In this new economy, all the qualities you might have that make you a great spouse do not matter. The real question is — are you sexually desirable? Are you good in bed? You can possess none of the qualities necessary to be a good partner and still have no shortage of options. This is because the goal is no longer to build a life with someone; it is only to satisfy desires.

Men claim they hate whores, and yet they seek them. Women claim they hate to be objectified, and yet they seek it. Men claim to despise sluttiness, and yet they throw their marriages away for the sake of a slut. Women hate that all men think about is sex, and yet they give it. We have done all of it to ourselves.

We assumed that we could spend decades telling people that they should indulge in all their sexual desires, but then we act surprised when people do exactly that. How is a cheating scandal really a scandal when pleasure-seeking is the one thing we are constantly told is the goal of life? Yes, we tell people that the goal is to be happy. Everyone is out chasing happiness, but happiness is just the wrong word; what we mean is pleasure. Life is about pleasure. Life is about what we desire. That is the core message we are given.

We do all of this and then expect that somehow in the long years of marriage people will have this capacity of self-restraint and control, when we’ve never been taught how; we have never been encouraged to do it.

Sex is available everywhere — it’s cheap. The results of all of this should surprise no one. Marriage vows do not produce virtues we have never practiced or thought about. Fidelity is not just this thing we promised in our wedding vows; it is also a discipline we must exercise for the rest of our lives.

This is the great irony of the whoredom economy. We have indeed made sex cheap — cheaply and easily accessible. It costs nothing to get, but it costs everything to have. Not just in the fact that infidelity is so rampant, but in the very fact that every outward action of sin has a steep cost to our souls. A few moments of pleasure are not just costing us marriages, children, jobs, and reputations; they are also costing us our eternal lives, and we are gladly paying it, drunk on the excess of our consumption.

We have confused desire with love, and these two are very different things. Desire is about what others can give us, whereas love is about what we can give others. Desire is selfish; love is selfless. Desire is not a moral argument, and it is not a moral standard. Just because something is available does not make it good.

The new sexual marketplace tells us what people want, and what they are willing to pay, but it can never tell us what any of these things are actually worth. And this has become our greatest mistake. We’ve let what we desire determine what we value. But in reality, it desperately needs to be the other way around.

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Elisabete Stone is a wife and mother of three, and the author of “Of Home and Womanhood,” a Substack publication that explores marriage, motherhood, faith, and contemporary culture through a traditional Christian lens.