Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman published the volume The Individualized Society (Polity Press, 2001) in February 2001, which collects in Chapter 17 a seminal essay titled On Postmodern Uses of Sex, originally published on August 1, 1998, in the prestigious academic journal Theory, Culture & Society. Here, Bauman describes how in the modern era, sex has become an act purely useful for achieving orgasm.
Byung-Chul Han, professor of philosophy and media theory at the Berlin University of the Arts, agrees. In The Agony of Eros (MIT Press, 2017), he writes: «Love is positivized into sexuality», which is subjected to performance. Eroticism is nothing more than «a capital that must be increased».
However, the most recent empirical data offer a decidedly more nuanced and complex picture. Within the longitudinal research project How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST), launched in 2009 by Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford University, the specific study published in 2019 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) - titled Disintermediating Your Friends - shows that relationships formed online do not have higher breakup rates than traditional ones. On the contrary, the algorithm has progressively disintermediated traditional channels (family, friends, colleagues). Rosenfeld's historical data show that while in 1995, 33% of heterosexual couples in the United States were formed through the mediation of mutual friends and only a percentage close to zero online, by 2017, the share of online encounters jumped to 39%, while mediation by friends fell to 20%, and family mediation from 15% to 7%. Rosenfeld highlights that this technological transition does not alter the intrinsic quality or stability of bonds: it has simply extended the pool of potential partners beyond predefined social and geographical boundaries.
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, a scientific advisor to Match.com, also states that «apps do not change the human brain: the neurobiological mechanisms of romantic attraction and long-term attachment evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, and they remain biologically unchanged. Technology is simply the new cultural stage upon which immutable biological impulses are expressed».
Returning to Han and the “positivization of eros", it seems a semantic and economic transition has now taken place toward the model that I would like to call Sex as a Service (SaaS) here on Esisto. Borrowing the acronym from Software as a Service - in which companies forgo purchasing expensive physical infrastructure to subscribe to flexible, on-demand digital services in the cloud -, the postmodern individual stops investing in the complex emotional "maintenance" of a stable relationship. The other is dematerialized into a performance utility accessible via swipe, a liquid resource that activates when needed and deactivates with a quick log-out as soon as the erotic consumption is exhausted, reducing emotional transaction costs to zero.
This transition also finds a solid theoretical footing in the sociological analyses of Eva Illouz dedicated to "emotional capitalism" and, in particular, in the concept of "negative choice" formulated in the essay The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations (Polity, 2021). Illouz explains how neoliberal rationalization has colonized the intimate sphere, pushing individuals to evaluate potential partners as commodities within a high-efficiency, high-yield market. In this e-commerce of bodies, freedom is paradoxically exercised through the power to revoke or not initiate affective commitment at any moment, protecting one's individual sovereignty. The possibility of performing a quick relational log-out reduces the other to pure on-demand utility, legitimizing emotional deregulation and eliminating the psychological costs of abandonment.
In this regard, Michele Spaccarotella, author of the book Digital Pleasure - #Sex&TheSocial (Listlab, 2026), speaks of sexting as Desire on Demand (a delivery of eroticism) and modern relationships as gaseous relationships, emphasizing how the current speed of interactions has modified their state - from liquid to gaseous, indeed - making them similar to bubbles that form and burst with the same rapidity. The psychotherapist points out how screens and chats can also turn into a protected "comfort zone": a filter, a defensive distance that seeks to neutralize the anguish of rejection and the burden of relational responsibility inherent in face-to-face confrontation. In this framework, even the manipulation of body image achieved through enhancing filters (on photos) that alter bodies and features seems to respond to dynamics of the need for positive mirroring and self-validation ("likes" and "matches"), making virtual gratification a priority over the real pleasure of meeting the Other.
Utilitarian eroticism: the carnal e-commerce
Bauman's discourse is not moralistic; he does not demonize sex, but presents the postmodern Western vision of understanding and experiencing sex, love, and eroticism. According to the sociologist, sex refers to the animal sphere, love to the cultural one, while eroticism in its postmodern version "proclaims itself, proudly and boldly, the sole and sufficient reason and purpose of itself". A utilitarian eroticism, therefore, as if it were autoeroticism for a couple.
In fact, Bauman continues, a relationship conceived as a continuous fulfillment of desire is «the typical one between customers and services, consumers and commodities». A carnal e-commerce: the volume Born Liquid: Transformations in the Third Millennium (Polity Press, 2019), written in a dialogical form by Zygmunt Bauman together with Thomas Leoncini, contains in Chapter 3 an analysis titled Sexual and Amorous Transformations. Decay of Taboos in the Era of Sentimental E-Commerce.
In this work, the two highlight how various messaging applications (such as WhatsApp, Telegram, or Instagram Direct) do nothing but shorten the time to reach goals, such as the selection of sexual partners.
The intent of searching for a romantic partner becomes the primary cause for using dating applications, within which, before chatting, a series of actions develop that closely resemble the use we make of Amazon with consumer goods.
The glossary of postmodern sex
Within an e-commerce platform, we decide what type of object we want to buy: in a dating app, we choose whether to look for men or women, the age, the city. Then we are ready to start and choose which person-objects to insert into our wishlist, through the swipe. The swipe is a very common action on mobile devices: with our finger, we can scroll left or right through a photo in a gallery, a web page, application tabs, and so on. In dating apps, with a left swipe we give a negative opinion of the potential partner, with a right swipe, a positive one. A like.
If the person we like reciprocates, we get a match. The match is compatibility, so we can already know that the other user is interested in us. From here the chat begins, which is a bit like entering credit card details or logging in with PayPal before paying for the product on the e-commerce site. We exchange some information, some data, some impressions, then we set a first date, which in most cases is already the one where the objective of the postmodern use of sex is achieved: orgasm, in the best cases.
Non-places, the death of relationships
As the French ethnologist and anthropologist Marc Augé theorized in his work on supermodernity, "non-places" represent the opposite of anthropological places. They are spaces of transit and consumption where individuals remain anonymous and devoid of authentic relationality or historical roots (such as stations, airports, or shopping centers). Dating platforms and social networks operate in every respect as virtual non-places. Their graphic interfaces are deliberately structured to favor transient and serial navigation, decontextualizing the user profile and pushing it into a continuous loop of anonymous scrolling that induces alienation. The postmodern use of sex does nothing but transpose Augé's non-place into physical reality. The bedroom and the contexts of meeting are thus expropriated of their relational density and historical identity, reducing the other to an element of anonymous transit and causing the dissolution of deep bonds.
Today, in Western culture, eroticism has acquired an importance it did not have previously, but alongside this is a new lightness and volatility typical of our times. Zygmunt Bauman concludes the essay by emphasizing how the victim of this instrumental dimension is love, and the destiny toward which postmodern sex brings us is «a situation loaded with psychic neuroses, all the more serious for the fact that it is no longer clear what the 'norm' is, and consequently, what type of 'conformity to the norm' is capable of curing them».
This article on Esisto is a rewrite and expansion of what I published on October 11, 2018, in La Stampa, titled “Swipe, like, match, chat: il glossario dell’uso postmoderno del sesso”.