It’s time for a new perspective on the sexual relationship between heterosexual women and men. Reproductive sex has historically been codified in the context of marriage. The introduction of widely available contraception and abortion in the mid-20th century opened the door for men and women to pursue sex for non-reproductive purposes such as intimacy, novelty, ritual, and sheer physical pleasure.1

The recent overturning of the federal protection for the right of women to have an abortion for an unintended or unwanted pregnancy brings the history of both reproductive and non-reproductive sex into focus. Let’s take a look at where we have been, where we are, and where we want to go in the 21st century.

The Industrial Revolution brought about the replacement of agrarian societies by a new order defined by industrial capitalism, which ushered in the separation of the sexes into different silos of experience in which women became ‘homemakers’ and men became ‘wage-earners’.2 Caring for each other was understood in terms of gender—wives were caretakers and husbands were good financial providers.

In psychological theory, the idea that men and women are defined by their different roles in marriage gave rise to the ‘social exchange’ theory of marriage in which marital contributions by husbands and wives are “exchanged” such that each maximizes his or her benefits and minimizes the individual costs.3 The popular concept for this kind of ‘exchange’ relationship is transactional.

The theory of the capitalist market is based on the idea that everyone acts in their own self-interest. Self-interest was translated in the middle of the 20th century into the psychological theoretical construct of ‘need’, i.e. we are not motivated by our own ‘selfishness’; we are motivated by our ‘needs’ in general including a ‘need’ for sex.4 This general ‘sexual need’ was interpreted as a ‘need’ to have sex performed in a particular manner. For example, one might have a ‘need’ for a certain frequency of sex, or any number of ways sex can be performed. Such self-identified preferences gained the status of ‘male’ sexual needs and ‘female’ sexual needs, which were ‘exchanged’ in a theoretically ‘fair’ transaction.

Neither reproductive nor non-reproductive sex in a transactional marital relationship was going to be fair because until the 1970s, biological science was based on the “male norm," which........

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