With the amount of casual sex that goes on these days, you would be wise to conclude that both men and women feel pretty good about it. Surprisingly, you would be wrong, according to a study published in the journal human nature. Researchers from Durham University in the United Kingdom surveyed thousands of people who had casual sex encounters and got answers about their feelings on the incidents. There were some interesting results.

The researchers theorized that if there are evolutionary benefits to casual sex, such as to spread the proverbial seed for guys, then positive feelings about the practice would develop to reinforce its practice in society and pass down the genes. For women, it is less clear what the evolutionary reason, but it could be to draw from a larger number of quality partners to increase the chance of one of them producing offspring with quality genes. These types of concepts were looked at going in.

The results showed that men felt positive about causal sex 80% of the time, while women felt positive about it only 54% of the time. Men felt more sexually satisfied and confident about the experience and were less concerned if others found out about it. Women reported feeling used and unappreciated, and were concerned that others finding out could damage their reputation. Also, women were not as sexually satisfied and perhaps surprisingly, did not feel any expectation that casual sex would lead to a longer term relationship.

Women clearly had much more negative feelings about casual sex than guys according to the study. The bottom line, however, is that quite a bit of casual sex continues to go on and shows no signs of stopping. The question, then, is what drives women to participate if their feelings about the experience are lukewarm?