You understand that football is a sport, a game, with few long-term consequences outside of the game; sex is usually a deeply emotional experience with many short and long-term effects on body and mind very different from sports.
Eh. I'm not sure about the comparison, but sports certainly have many short and long-term effects on body and mind. My knee still hurts from high school football 10+ years ago and my experiences playing heavily influenced my personality today.
Historically, antibiotics and birth control have a well proven impact of that sort. This was not just a phenomenon of the 1960s. Other historical times and places where you could prevent pregnancy and disease also saw the flourishing of "free love" philosophies.
Actual serious consequences is a big part of what drives people to view sex as very serious business. Most people are happy to see it as just another form of play time if you can nix the threat of death, maiming and babies with a fairly high degree of confidence.
Sex has long been a far more casual activity than commonly portrayed. So, people often have huge misconceptions about people's behavior both past and present.
When I have spoken about sex with people older than myself, I have sometimes been told "Well, TV went off at 9pm and there just wasn't anything else interesting to do between 9pm and going to sleep" or words to that effect. (Hippies explained: "It was 9pm and we were bored.") Similarly, I knew someone who traveled a lot for work and casual hookups were just a thing to do when trapped in a hotel in the middle of nowhere.
Sex still has some difficult biological consequences such disease but vr or robots could be fully sterilized of disease. Though zika virus and various stds are still here sadly, if we don't get cures I could see bots becoming big especially with disease phobic millenials.
