By Jennifer Kelton

Let’s get straight down to the hard and fast (yes, the sexual innuendo is intended) bottom line—none of us would be here if not for sex and it’s genetic, primal, and uncontrollable driving force.

Sex is the motivation and behind many great movies, raunchy porn, music, and art.

Sex has created multi-billion-dollar business empires like Video Exclusives and Girls Gone Wild, not to mention the glossy and not-so-pin-up-girl pages of Playboy and Hustler magazines.

Words such as sexting, smushing (via the term originally from MTV’s Jersey Shore, meaning to have sex; see smush), and hooking up are as commonplace in 2011 as the word for one of the oldest professions on the planet: prostitution.

But even with the newest verbiage, it all boils down to the one primitive word—SEX—and I’ve had plenty of it!

During my 20s and 30s, while I was working in fashion and music and living a very Rock n’ Roll lifestyle, my overactive and carefree sexual life led me to a great number of “sex-for-the-sake-of-sex” encounters. I’m not thinking of just one or two occasions but, in all honesty, many more than I could count on two hands or actively recount the dirty details of now.

Yes, it felt good in the moment, with all those female DNA-hardwired bonding chemicals rushing to my brain and body. And it felt good in those moments of afterglow, naked on a kitchen counter or in the bathroom stall of a smoky nightclub. But I can say that 60 percent of the time these experiences actually made me feel pretty gosh-darn sexually empty, lonely, and worried about STDs.

What’s most interesting to me now, looking back some 20 years later without seeing through beer goggles or the lens of carefree sexual experimentation, is that despite the heated passion of those moments, I can only remember a very small number of the men—both for good and bad reasons.

Now that I’m in my 40s, I still am presented with plenty of steamy, random sex-for-the-sake-of-sex situations that, in the end, may or may not get my and/or his rocks off, especially when I’m traveling.

This just happened last week. After a few beers, he was looking hotter and hotter. I even had visions of what he may look like naked, wondered whether he was a good kisser, and whether he “trimmed.” I was in a Colorado mountain town, after all. But when he texted me after our first encounter, I bypassed seeing him, along with any naked sex-for-the-sake-of-sex bodily action.

Sex feels good—so it’s not that I was not tempted by an inviting booty-call text! However, knowing my own personal sex-for-the-sake-of-sex odds, I realized something after looking at the text. With my busy, happy, and fulfilled life, I don’t have any need or desire to potentially feel lonely or empty just for the sake of sex.

What do you think, does sex-just-for-the-sake-of-sex ever make you feel lonely or empty?