You know how it goes, you’re three days into your holiday and you’re feeling a bit squiffy from all the sun and daytime rosé you’ve been drinking. The terrifying, debilitating sunburn you endured when you fell asleep by the pool on your first day has died down and you’re looking sun-kissed and – now, this might be the booze talking – kinda hot.
When sideburns Julio from the local bar sidles up to you and asks you to dance you think to yourself, fuck it, it’s not the kind of thing you’d ordinarily do and, yes, he is wearing harem pants, but you’re on HOLIDAY! Let loose a bit! All of a sudden, his moves are becoming less salsa and more rumba (look it up), his hands are all over your bum and before you know it, you’re on the back of his moped heading to his place for a ‘nightcap’.
You leave his place in the morning having thrown caution to the wind (twice) and, even though you’re a bit embarrassed, you’re also kind of smug that you’ve managed to have a holiday one-night stand safe in the knowledge that no one needs to know unless you fancy telling them. Anyway, you’re on holiday – it doesn’t actually count, does it?
Any of this sounding familiar? Well you’re not alone, because new researchsuggests that we all feel freed from the sexual double standards we experience at home when we go away – so much so that we ‘feel like a man’. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that when we go abroad, women are much more likely to engage in ‘risky’ sexual behaviour, having more one-night-stands and no-strings-attached sex.
Researcher Liza Berdychevsky interviewed women from Israel and the US in an effort to discover their emotional perceptions and motivations for sexual experimentation. The researchers found that some tourist destinations offer ‘an altered sense of reality... while minimising perceptions of risk and long-term consequences.’
In other words, take a woman away from her native country where her risky sexual behaviour might be judged negatively, and she’s able to throw caution to the wind and sexually experiment without as much fear of the consequences. Sex without consequences? We don’t like to be gender biased, but that does sound like more of a male way of going about things, doesn’t it?
Because, despite what years of feminist theory post-sexual revolution and (admittedly, somewhat unrealistic) female characters in sitcoms have attempted to prove, the common perception is that women tend not to enjoy casual sex with the same enthusiasm that men do.
Yes, we might dabble, but the general consensus seems to be that the sex is often bad, the emotional repercussions dire and the chance of us being judged for our behaviour pretty high. But is that really something innate in the way women are wired, or is the reason that many of us feel the way we do about casual sex that we’re too aware of the long-term consequences?
Well, by the looks of this research, the second answer might be true. On holiday, there are no long-term consequences, so women are able to shag about relatively risk-free. Relatively.
Berdychevsky added: ‘This study brings out the complexity of risks. Sometimes that introspection leads to beneficial experiences. Some learn a lesson, how to reject, how to be more empowered, how to be more vocal or how to insist on contraception.
‘At least, we should address that sense of immortality and invincibility that young people tend to have and make them understand that not everything that happens on vacation will stay there.’
So, despite the fact that holidays free us up to have the kind of sex a lot of men have all the time, that doesn’t mean that holiday sex is without consequence. At best, that can mean an embarrassing picture of you grinding sideburns Julio cropping up on Facebook; at worst, an STI. Food for thought…
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophicullinane
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Picture: Lukasz Wierzbowski
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.