ABSTRACT
Does the popularity of Tinder among young metropolitan, middle-class heterosexuals signal the end of marital commitment and the dawn of a ‘dating apocalypse’ (Riley, 2015)? What does ‘casual sex’ mean in the context of contemporary Anglo-American (and Antipodean) heterosexual cultures? As this chapter will demonstrate, casual sex between heterosexuals is not a recent innovation, nor is the ‘gamification’ of dating a purely digital phenomenon. Further, sex outside of marriage has (from the nineteenth century at least) been actively championed by feminist activists and other radicals in the United States, Europe and elsewhere as an expression of personal and collective struggles for freedom.
