Quest for Sex

^{The results?} One of them still hasn't succeeded by the end of the series.

"We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he 'wants a woman.' Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition—one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes."

— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Sometimes, a man really has to get it on. So much, in fact, that it's totally worth spending an obscene amount of time and money if the end result is getting laid. If the primary plot of a work of fiction is an examination of this time and money we have a Quest for Sex.

The reasons for a man's quest can vary to a fairly wide extent—he might just be out to use Sex as Rite-of-Passage to get accepted among the Fratbros. Other times the man isn't a virgin—he just really, really wants it very badly. Sometimes to the point of needing to commit adultery in order to get it. Because, let's face it—he's a dude. What's he supposed to do about it?

This plot trope has been common over time as laxity from the Moral Guardians has made sex comedies centered on this premise easier to distribute. Still, expect many examples to eventually feature an Aesop about sex not being everything at the end, if only because building a character's entire motivation around getting laid often ends up seeming, kind of, you know, shallow and pathetic.

Popular in the Sex Comedy.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ayakashi Triangle: Although Suzu and Matsuri have a genuine romance, part of the reason Suzu wants to make Matsuri male again is because she wants to date and have sex with him as soon as possible. She's considered hooking up even if they're both girls, though her interest in his female form is much less sexual. Eventually, Suzu does become very sexually interested even in female Matsuri and tries to date, but he refuses to until he's male again.
• The protagonist of B Gata H Kei has an explicit goal to gain one hundred sex friends before graduating highschool. Now, she's a beautiful girl, so this should have taken all of ten seconds. But she has no ability to communicate her desires, actually doesn't know very much at all about sex, as well as surprisingly low self-esteem (She's embarrassed to even look at her own body down there), so hilarious misadventures happen instead of hentai.
• Chainsaw Man: Denji is an emotionally-stunted hedonist that kills devils so his basic needs will be met, and when he's feeling "ambitious" that includes having sex. He spends the first story arc doing a favor for Power so he can feel her breasts, but is rather disappointed when she succeeds. Then Makima convinces him intimacy is much more valuable with someone you know closely, and promise to do "anything" with Denji if he kills the Gun Devil, which drives the plot going onward.
• Green Green features the Baka Trio, Yuusuke's three best friends, who are so depraved for sex that it is the only thing they can think about, and they will stop at almost nothing to actually get it. Most of the anime features them constantly doing perverted schemes. They always go wrong. At least Tadatomo can claim he succeeded: He got raped by a bear. Hikaru could have scored with one of the girls, but this girl happens to be Haruno Arisa, who is supposed to be the repulsively ugly one among all the girls (even though she looks fairly normal compared to everyone else). She wanted to have sex with any of them too. She didn't care what they did to her.
• Much of the plot of GTO: The Early Years is driven by Ryuji and Eikichi's efforts to lose their virginities. By the time of Great Teacher Onizuka, Eikichi still hasn't succeeded.

Fan Works

• More or less the whole premise of the Rick and Morty fangame, A Way Back Home. Rick, once again annoyed by his grandson's perceived uselessness, leaves Morty in another dimension and tells him he must become assertive in order to return to his original dimension. Morty initially assumes this to mean he must stand up for himself, but eventually learns he must have sex with enough women in order to build up his assertiveness. In other words, Rick leaves Morty with a literal quest for sex.

Films — Live-Action

• The 40-Year-Old Virgin deconstructs this, as the lead is pressured into pursuing women by his coworkers, but they're shown to be immature about the whole thing while he's interested mainly in a relationship.
• In the movie 48 Hrs., Reggie goes out of his way to get some. It's not the main plot, but a subplot. He is in prison, and is going back at the end.
• Another Gay Movie is both a gay and a parody version.
• Blockers is a rare female example of this trope with longtime friends Julie, Kayla, and Sam making a pact to lose their virginity to their dates on prom night. However, each girl has a different reason to want to lose their virginity that isn't just Sex as Rite-of-Passage: Julie is in a committed relationship and feels that it's the right time to have sex with her boyfriend, Kayla wants to have fun at prom before they go off to college, and Sam is a closeted lesbian who joins in on the pact out of fear at losing her friends. Additionally, Julie ends up being the only girl who goes through with losing her virginity; Kayla decides at the last moment that she wants her first time to have more meaning than "have sex just because you can" and Sam comes out to her friends and hooks up with another girl instead of her male date.
• A Running Gag in Deep in the Valley is Lester's constant attempts to get laid, and his failure to do so despite being trapped in a porn movie.
• Divorce Italian Style features this as an Unbuilt Trope, as is to be expected since it predates current usage by several decades. The usage here as a result tends to be a lot more macabre and disturbing, as the main character in pursuit of his goal to have sex with his 15-year-old cousin, devises a highly elaborate plan to manipulate his wife into having an affair so he can legally have her murdered, and then marry said cousin. Said plan includes knowingly destroying his entire family's moral reputation, and at one point (accidentally) killing his uncle.

• Porky's and the multiple movies spawned by its success use this as the main thrust (so to speak) of the plot. The same can be said of American Pie from a decade later.
  • Parodied to hell and back by Not Another Teen Movie, in which a trio of High School freshmen are on this. One doesn't succeed, another falls in love with Catherine, and the third gets a handjob from his crush.
• Sex Drive is about a man who steals his brother's car and drives across the country to have sex with a woman he met online.
• Superbad uses Deconstruction to take on this premise.
• In The Sure Thing Gib drives across the country to meet the titular "Sure Thing", a woman who is guaranteed to sleep with him.
• Where The Boys Are 84 is a Rare Female Example of this. Four co-eds from snowbound Penmore College head to Fort Lauderdale, Florida for spring break: Carole taking a separate vacation from her steady boyfriend Chip, winds up as a hot contender in a "Hot Bod Contest"; Jennie is doubly lucky, courted by both a rich classical pianist and a devil-may-care rocker; Sandra is looking for the Mr. Right who will finally satisfy her; and Laurie dreams of a night of nbridled passion with a real he-man.

Literature

• In The Game (2005), (formerly) socially awkward music journalist Neil Strauss does research on the Pick-up Artist Community, meeting several other socially awkward types on this quest. They all end up having copious amounts of sex, but it ultimately solves nothing because they still have deeper problems to contend with.
• Youth in Sexual Ecstasy is an inversion of this, the quest is for reserving sex only for your true love.

Live-Action TV

• Barney from How I Met Your Mother does this on a regular basis. How far is he willing to go to get laid? He once found a sorority that had gotten in trouble for lewd behavior, dressed up as an old woman, and had himself instituted as their new house mother, "Mrs. Stinsfire". And that's just Phase 1 of the plan.
• In The Kids in the Hall, a recurring character simply (and more or less accurately) called the Chicken Lady wants nothing more than to have sex. However, since the vast majority of the available dating pool is human, things tend to go spectacularly badly. They also have the character with the accurate name of Cabbage Head, who has similar goals. He fails because he's a sexist jerk whom most women can't stand.
• On My Name Is Earl, after finding out that his wife had an affair with their neighbor some 20 years earlier, Carl (Earl's dad) decides to have a "revenge affair." Of course, the only women he interacts with on a regular basis are a bank teller (who flirts with all her customers, not just Carl), a pharmacist (who slapped him for flirting with her while buying condoms), and a waitress at an all-night diner (who turns out to be Patty the Daytime Hooker, and who can't even accept the chocolates he bought her because some of her clients are allergic to peanuts). He ends up going back to the motel to have a cry with Earl about Kay's affair (and Earl had one about Joy's), then finds it in his heart to forgive Kay.
  • In another episode, Earl has to make up for making fun of a foreign exchange student from France named Pierre back in grade school. It turned out, Pierre was a Kidanova who was trying to kiss as many girls as he could (because they all liked his accent, which, of course, doesn't do anything for him back home). Earl takes Pierre to find those girls (well, women now) so he could make out with them. They managed to find all but one (but she had a very willing sister), and they even found their (now elderly) teacher.
• Samantha from Sex and the City has this quest as her main character trait, and shows no signs of giving it up: She's the oldest character in the main cast.

Theater

• In Aphra Behn's play The Rover, Belvile, Blunt, Willmore and Frederick are on this quest for sex.

Video Games

• Dragon Age II has a quest to find a young mage who's run away from the Circle of Magi. When you find him, it turns out that this trope is the reason, and he's just about to have a one-night stand with the waitress from the Hanged Man. You can drag him back to the Circle before he can do it, get him to peacefully turn himself in in the morning, or convince him that he's better off skipping town.
• Largely the premise of HuniePop, once Kyu gives the player a nudge in the right direction.
• This is the premise of the Leisure Suit Larry series: in the first, Larry, rapidly approaching 40, decides to finally lose his virginity and sets out to Lost Wages, determined to have sex with a woman by the end of the night. He can actually accomplish this very quickly with a sleazy prostitute, but ends up realizing that he wants something more meaningful and spends the rest of the game and the next two trying to find (what he considers) true love. He does meet the woman of his dreams in the third game, but she vanishes with no In-Universe explanation at the end of the fifth^note Note that there is no LSL4 so he's back on the hunt for the rest of the series. The closest justification seems to be that LSL 3 ends with Larry and Patti landing in the real world, with Larry getting a job working for Sierra itself. Thus in every subsequent game he's an Animated Actor, but Patti is too expensive for them to hire; according to LSL 7's manual they're still together but haven't gotten married yet.

Visual Novels

• Double Homework gives a villainous example with Dennis, who will do anything if he thinks it’ll help him get some.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: Played for Horror with SCP-3512 ("The More You Know"), a satirical take on pick-up artists and their misogyny. Through body-mutilation rituals and creating a sentient doll-like construct from human fat and bones to take control of the person one desires, instances of the SCP turn women they want to fuck into living sex dolls. The affected victims undergo complete personality changes that leave them eager to please their brainwashers, and are completely aware of this outside force taking them over, but can only express it in bouts of screaming that eventually fade away as it takes complete control.
• Vinesauce: Hilariously, Joel's childhood cat Minus went missing for two years. He returned home twice as fat and every female cat in town pregnant. See to believe.

Western Animation

• In American Dad!, a majority of Steve Smith's storylines is about this, although he usually never succeeds getting laid. That is, until Season 13's "My Purity Ball and Chain", where he finally loses his virginity. This is deconstructed in "Steve and Snot's Test-Tubular Adventure". As Haley points out, the women they pursue are actual people, people's daughters, not just sex objects. When Steve and Snot raise a pair of clones into adulthood to have sex with them at prom, Steve is hit with the realization that he has come to love his clone daughter. He finds himself not just unable to view her sexually but is horrified when others do so.
• There are several episodes of Beavis And Butthead where the titular characters come up with plans to score. Said plans always fail. In Beavis And Butthead Do America, the two travel cross country to Washington, D.C., thinking they're going to get paid to "do" someone's wife.
• The South Park episode "Erection Day" has Jimmy trying to get laid, under the impression that it will help his inexplicable erections before the talent show.

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