Sexual hookup culture
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Since 2005, Paula England, a sociologist at New York University, has been collecting data from an online survey about hookups. If this was sexual liberation, it was hard to pan how it was helping women. Marriage depends upon the good of fides, or a fidelity in which husband and wife alike can depend upon a monogamous bond of mutual love that extends beyond the stormy vicissitudes of the affections. American Journal of Public Health. Tomorrow, we will ring some solutions that aim at the heart of the problem—a culture that reduces sexual activities to the level sexual hookup culture recreation—but in order to arrive at a solution, we first need to understand the reality of the problem we face. Using the term hookup in research is problematic if some believe it to solo having vaginal sex but others believe it to be any intimate behavior e. Contributor Information Justin R. As a result, Garcia and others argue, young adults are physiologically able to reproduce but not psychologically or socially ready to 'settle down' and begin a family. That is, evolutionary for influences why emerging adults engage in uncommitted sex and the way young men and women react to these encounters ultimate level explanations.
Rape culture has reared its ugly head in the media once again. In no other case has the narrative of a toxic campus rape culture been so compelling. This incident raises the usual questions. Is this horrendous crime symptomatic of a larger social trend? Or is it an aberration, disturbing but with few implications for decent people? But it will help if we zoom out and examine our sexual campus culture as a whole. Consider, then, what typical incoming freshmen might think about sex. Their Spotify playlists, almost regardless of the genre, will consist of overtly sexual lyrics sometimes bordering on pornographic. Many will already have active porn habits. Suffice to say, their attitude is likely at the permissive end of the spectrum. Freshmen are still teenagers, with raging hormones and undeveloped brains. This is no less true for being cliché. Some of them may have had moral foundations, in family or faith or community, to promote some sexual restraint. Most of them will be eager for their first taste of the fabled college party scene. College parties, stripped down to their raw components, are about booze and sex. To make it more palatable, these are encased in elaborate ritual festivities. Students get dressed up or undressed, as the case may be , and maybe pre-game a little with their friends before stepping into frat houses where cheap beer stains the floor and the most responsible person presiding is the 22-year-old who bought the keg. Games like beer pong turn drinking into a pursuit in and of itself, enticing even the reluctant to imbibe. Jell-O shots and Long Island Iced Teas mask the taste for those unaccustomed to it, allowing the effects to work more insidiously. People laugh at the antics of the puking freshman. Everything about the college party environment is designed to wear away at inhibitions, to normalize debauchery. Most people will make it home, exhausted and less-than-sober but otherwise safe. A few who went too far might catch drinking tickets or hospital stays. Certainly, not all college freshmen will lose themselves in this scene right away, or at all necessarily. For various reasons, they might not be ready to sink into full-fledged hedonism. Party Culture Meets Hookup Culture Thus emerges the hookup culture, in which unattached casual sex becomes a lifestyle. The party scene is the launching pad for hookup culture, but not the crux of it. As students age and mature, they might— might—grow out of these freshman thrills. But the parties work to strip away former mores and foster an appreciation for carnal pleasures. The more we cross a line, the less we like to acknowledge it was ever there. They can just go through the numbers in their phones. We crave intimacy as much as we fear it, and with sex familiarity breeds pleasure. So students move from the raucous party life to a less extreme, yet more deeply entrenched, dynamic of sexual semi-attachments. Universities enable these destructive behaviors. For practical reasons, seriously addressing the party problem is a difficult undertaking. The party scene attracts students and the tuition fees they bring. More importantly, though, universities simply lack the sense of mission to crack down on the party and hookup culture. In human sexuality courses students watch porn and then discuss it, under the guidance of tenured professors. Students are encouraged to write about their sexual fantasies and share them with the class. In the unlikely event students hear anything about chastity, it will only be as an arcane historical artifact, met with some combination of amusement and contempt. In real-life terms, students learn that hooking up is the healthy and natural thing for them to do. Their sexual practices and proclivities, whatever they may be, are wholly innocent, basically human. They need to figure out what kinds of sex will truly fulfill them, and find the partners one may not be enough with the right kind of compatibility. The only rule in their pursuits is that they be themselves, true to their own desires, as defined by each individual and nobody else. Consent to What, Exactly? This is at best confusing, at worst profoundly incoherent. If sex has no inherent meaning, no significance other than what we assign it, how ought we to go about policing ourselves—and why should we? What justification do we need to pursue any sexual whim, other than the mere presence of desire? How our behavior might affect our partners is a moot point. This is about self-expression and satisfaction. So let me do my thing while you do yours. The fact that we happen to be doing it with and to each other is merely incidental. Hookup Culture Breeds Rape Culture Subjective sex leads seamlessly from hookup to rape culture. This is for two reasons. One, an offended party can subjectively define herself as having been violated at any time, during or after a sexual act. In this case, a student may find himself the subject of a sexual assault investigation even when the legal criteria for rape are nowhere in sight. This danger is already much discussed. It makes no sense to tell someone any sex act he might desire is either innocent and laudable or heinous and deplorable, with nothing in between. Two, less obvious but equally problematic, is it makes no sense to tell someone any sex act he might desire is either innocent and laudable or heinous and deplorable, with nothing in between. Sexual morality yes, it is a real thing exists on a spectrum. To deny this is to remove a necessary guide to personal conduct. Subjective sexual ethics are hard enough to comprehend even on a theoretical level, and well-nigh impossible to implement in real life. But damned if you set foot across it, knowingly or not. Students are invited to frolic near the edge of a cliff. From the safety of a classroom, employing the full use of our cognitive faculties, we can talk ourselves into this kind of incoherence. But at a behavioral level, subjective meaning is no meaning at all. Rape is a horrific crime, and instinctively we all know this. His was a reprehensible, criminal act, without any excuse or justification, and should be treated as such. The trial she was subjected to was nearly as unconscionable as the assault itself, and her courage in enduring it for the sake of justice is admirable. We should be grateful she was willing to. This is no case of a or a. This is the real thing. Our youth need to learn that apart from legal and illegal, there are questions of right and wrong. So what can we learn from this horrendous crime? Had he not been invited into the gray area, he might not have pressed on into the black. If we really care about keeping women safe, we need to reshape or rather, reclaim our cultural understanding of sex altogether. Our youth need to learn that apart from legal and illegal, there are questions of right and wrong. At the university level in particular, we need to alter what we teach and what we condone. If we want to curb campus sexual assault, we need to target all the factors surrounding it, from alcohol consumption to dorm regulations to academic curriculum. As my activist friends would say, we need to make systemic changes. If we want to tear down rape culture, we have to dismantle hookup culture first.
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