Playing With / Free-Love Future

Basic Trope: In the future, most of the sexual norms and politics we have now will be done away with.

• Straight: In the year 3000, sex before marriage is socially acceptable (encouraged even), 100% reliable birth control is available at any drugstore with no prescription or proof of marriage required, and children are taught about sex from a very young age. Same-sex relations are also socially acceptable. Pornography is freely available in all contemporary forms of media with minimal censorship or content regulation and prostitution is legal, regulated, and accepted.
• Exaggerated:
  • No one ever dates seriously or gets married anymore; they just have casual sex.
  • All sexual taboos are a thing of the past, including sex with relatives, sex with minors, and sex with animals. Additionally, consent is no longer required.
  • Sex is so freely available and engaged in by all, that prostitution is economically unviable and no longer practised, the very notion of paying for sex being amusing and quaint, if not flat out ridiculous.
  Alice: What, they actually used to pay women to have sex? How is that degrading? Sounds ideal to me!
  Bob: Degrading? Of course not! Ripoff more like!
• Downplayed:
  • In the year 3000, Polyamory is the norm, and monogamous marriage is rare to nonexistent. But sex still (mostly) takes place in relationships.
  • There is still a sexual Double Standard in place: men can do it with whomever they want, but women are still expected to do it only with a spouse or significant other.
  • There are multiple recognized genders/gender identities beyond just "male" and "female".
  • No form of sexuality is outright banned, but authorities don't really encourage it either. Decriminalized but not legalized. They just don't really care anymore. Likewise, citizens don't care too much about each other's love lives, and will neither condemn them for anything nor support them. It's mostly a "Good for you, now shut up" thing.
• Justified:
  • Marriage is no longer seen as the only right or reasonable choice.
  • The institution of marriage no longer exists, or consists of what we call today "cohabitation". Nobody has weddings or anything like that anymore.
  • The definition of marriage has been broadened to include polygamous relationships.
  • Society has increased acceptance of LGBT+ people.
  • Sex is not the only means to make babies in this setting, and has pretty much been divorced from baby-making.
  • New types of contraception are available.
  • The world has either done away with religion (especially religions that might object to casual sex, homosexual sex, or nonprocreative sex), or most religions have relaxed their stances on sex/birth control/etc. Alternatively, the religion might be one with a relaxed or even encouraging attitude towards sex.
  • Sex is no longer associated with shame or "dirtiness."
  • STD Immunity: Either science has wiped out all the pathogens that ever made sex risky, or such things never existed in this setting.
  • The population is in decline and the government/leading religion(s) encourage(s) sexual intercourse to boost the population.
• Inverted:
  • In the year 3000, sex before marriage is no longer acceptable, and even within a marriage, it may only (or primarily) be used to make babies. Birth control is either not available, or comes with an inquiry about one's marital status. Same sex relations are not acceptable (and might even be illegal). Adultery is punishable by death... and even includes sex before marriage. Pornography is unavailable, and illegal, with media subject to strict censorship rules enforced by the Culture Police, and both being a prostitute and soliciting one are capital crimes. One reason for these changes is that the bacteria and viruses that cause STIs have evolved to become resistant to antibiotics and antiviral drugs, making it simply too risky to be promiscuous.
  • People in the past have wild and largely unrestricted sex lives.
  • In the future, no one is allowed to have sex.
  • In the future, everyone is asexual and no one has sex.
  • The future has a whole array of additional sexual taboos which are bizarre by the standards of even radicals of the past.
• Subverted:
  • Although men are allowed to have all the sex they want before, during, and after marriage with as many women as they'd like, women are expected to be virgins before marriage, and chaste after marriage.
  • Although men and women can engage in all the heterosexual sex they want, homosexual sex is a no-no.
• Double Subverted:
  • However, in order to "practice" for marriage, young women are encouraged to "experiment" with each other, the idea being that sexual activity between two girls doesn't count.
  • The prohibition against women having premarital sex is rarely or never enforced.
  • Or, this only applies to upper classes; those lower down the social ladder can do whatever they want, with whomever they want.
  • Or the higher classes are the ones with the power to get away with it.
• Parodied: Daily orgies are held in which the whole community participates; porn has become so mainstream that it’s shown on the equivalent of prime-time network TV and is reviewed by professional critics; literally All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles; and "Artistic Intercourse" is an Olympic sport.
• Zig Zagged: The future eras keep switching between this and more conservative sexual norms.
• Averted: Sexual norms in the year 3000 are more or less the same as now.
• Enforced:
  • Sex Is Good.
  • It’s a porn series.
• Lampshaded: "I can't imagine living in a world where we can't just have as much sex as we want with whomever we want. How did people manage to live like that hundreds of years ago?"
• Invoked: Bob tries to have sex with Alice on the basis that "It's the fourth millenium, girl! Get with the times already!"
• Exploited: A Fish out of Temporal Water uses the opportunity to get laid.
• Defied: People in the year 3000 are reluctant to have sex outside of marriage, in public, for reasons unrelated to baby-making, with members of the same sex, etc.
• Discussed: "So, like, what if there were no laws or taboos against sex?"
• Conversed: "Dude, she's taken. Let her go, man. This isn't like one of those sci-fi novels where everyone sleeps with everyone else and no one cares."
• Implied: Bob is a time traveler who's gone back into the distant past and shows no qualms about sizing up others or even outright asking if he can have sex with them. When called out on it, he simply asks, "What?"
• Played for Drama: Bob feels lonely because he knows that even though he slept with Alice she's perfectly free to sleep with anyone else she likes, and he can't stop her. He'd like to keep someone for himself, and be faithful to that person in return, but society would marginalize him for being "selfish" at best and make him an outright outcast at worst. He feels all alone in this world not just because he knows anyone he sleeps or falls in love with can just as easily make love with anyone else at the drop of a hat, but because he can't even talk to anyone about his feelings - everyone else, as far as he knows, would see him as a freak.
• Played for Horror: In the year 3000, the right to consent, and even the age of consent are abolished, thus allowing rape and pedophilia to rage like wildfire across the world. As a result, Bob, a victim of child rape, is violently gang-raped by multiple people in an alley, and his attempts to get help are refused by the police, not based on any kind of double standards involving male victims anymore, as even female victims of rape are given the exact same handwave as male victims. As an result, Bob is Driven to Suicide from the trauma, and he is not the first one on the list of rape victims that had committed suicide, and will not be the last one either...
• Deconstructed:
  • Sir John de Rouen, a medieval knight brought to the year 3000 via time travel, is horrified by the changes to society and is socially isolated. He can not fall in love because his refusal to be in an open relationship makes him a pariah in the eyes of society, he can not join the clergy because he's one of the few religious people left, and even his desire to personally remain chaste is not respected. After fighting off one too many rape attempts, he flees into an isolated place and becomes a recluse. The story also makes it clear that while John is the only one who speaks out about it, there are people in the society who have the same problems he has.
  • The ethics of the future free-love society have been stretched to the point of having some potentially horrifying implications, such as blurring the lines of meaningful consent, a very low or non-existent age of consent, legalizing incest and the like. Combined with this, there is extreme social pressure for people to constantly engage in sex (leading to, for example, asexuals being marginalized and discriminated against), and government attempts to make sex a "right" or using it as a form of social control. The question now remains, how free is too free? How much sex is too much sex? Might there be anyone you shouldn't have sex with after all?
  • Problems such as sexually transmitted disease and unplanned pregnancies have not gone away, and the birth rate is leading to overpopulation issues as a result of the latter. Either these issues are conveniently ignored by a society not willing to face up to it, or dealt with by draconian measures such as parental licenses; mandatory contraception; forced abortions; compulsory, regular, invasive sexual health examinations; and long-term STD-sufferers being interned in prison-like quarantine facilities.
• Reconstructed:
  • Sandra, wanting to sleep with John, lies about wanting a monogamous marriage with the intention of breaking it off after sleeping with him. However when Sandra finally does have sex with John it's the best she's ever had because love and passion were actually involved. Because of this, and because of the trust John's placed in her, Sandra has a monogamous marriage with him for real. Hearing about this, other outcasts try associating sex with love as well. Eventually being monogamous is no longer seen as terrible or abnormal.
  • Being a free-love society doesn't mean abandoning all ethics. Consent is taken very seriously: after all, sexual freedom includes the freedom not to have sex or consent to sex you don't want, too. Sexual health and contraception is taken seriously too because that's what people want- avoiding life-altering unintended consequences is worth the inconvenience.

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Back to Free-Love Future. Everyone else has done it, so why shouldn't you? It's normal these days! Embrace yourself! Everyone goes back to the main page sooner or later! Just do it and don't feel bad.

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