The esteemed Tribune Editorial Board approached me a few weeks ago, smooth with the lines, and propositioned me. C’mon, baby, they said, write an article against hookup culture. Flustered and blushing, I said yes. I figured I’d just go with the flow. I wasn’t passionate, per se, about the experience, but I was totally open to exploring a new thing. That’s what college is for, right? Now I’m at home, bent over my desk, thinking, how did I get here? Was this a bad idea? Am I contracting STDs (Sexually Traditionalist Dudes)? But no! The intimate act of writing an article is more than just an act. I bet the Tribune really cares about me… I still have their sweater.
I’ll start by making something clear: The best opinion you can have about someone else’s sex life isn’t one. I think society has turned itself inside out attempting to reconcile broad moral dictates—rational, religious, or really religious—with such a personal and primal activity as sex. At the extremes, obviously, we must prioritize safety and stability. But sex is so emotional, so powerful and murky, that too often I see the proponents of a “traditional” sexual lifestyle succumb to subtle bigotry, fear, and perversion. We (especially college kids) could all do better at offering suggestive, not normative, opinions. Judgment serves no one when we’re all on the jury.
That being said, the argument emerges: not to be against hookups—casual sexual encounters without an expectation of romance or commitment—but to be against hookup culture. Our generation seems not merely to accept a divorce between emotional and physical intimacy, but to expect it. Where gay rights and free love offered genuine liberation in the 60s, hookup culture actually reinforces gender norms; what began as a queer movement became a heteronormative performance. And where contraceptive technology reduced the risks of sex, the internet is on its way towards utterly trivializing it.
It’s empowering for young people to explore their natural urges without fear of judgment or, as has been the case for women in many societies, social death. The catch is that young people are young, and aren’t yet capable of fully navigating the aforementioned web of emotion, gender norms, and self-esteem that come from a sexual encounter. We can do it satisfactorily (brief research suggests not always to satisfaction), but when it becomes a campus culture, we cannot avoid hurting ourselves and our worldviews.
We’ll start with the men. Masculinity is a big discussion these days, and young men have been failed on more than one account. Hookup culture, the sense that young men are and should be having sex with lots of people, produces shallow and damaging male expectations. Those that aren’t having sex feel left out, like failures on a deep, evolutionary level. At the extremes, they are driven to unprecedented pits of self-loathing, even to kill, at the perceived pain of their “involuntary celibacy.” The other case, those lucky dudes that are shtupping it up, see hookups as a means to validate their masculinity. While “boys will be boys,” these new partnering norms reinforce the pretty problematic notion that women are simply the means to higher self-esteem and status.
Women were the original winners of sexual empowerment, yet I can’t help but feel we have wandered from the first feminist victories. The notion of femininity is slow to catch up with the modern female. While boys use hookups to feel like men, society now holds girls to conflicting standards of both chastity and promiscuity. We’ve all heard interminable gossip, from both sexes, about who has failed to toe the line between prude and whore. Sex workers are more tolerated (not quite celebrated, as it would sometimes seem), but the dominating male gaze is inextricably locked on the industry. And let us not forget the real danger women face as a tragic concoction of alcohol, entitlement, and ignorance so sickeningly turn to sexual violence on college campuses.
Enter the internet. Enter social media, enter Tinder, enter PornHub, enter a million other sites that ultimately do two things: show you what you want, and sell it to you. As our generation took to the screens, this technology took the ultimate physical act and turned it into the ultimate commodity. I think this is when a healthy acceptance of casual sex metastasized into pluralistic ignorance, a false reality, a culture of expectation. From Andrew Tate to OnlyFans, hungry kids consume media to feed their sexual understanding. It’s junk food, amplifying every other problem, and it’s really just depressing at its core.
Depressing, numbing, hollow—we can return to emotion as our guide. If you crave connection on a deeper level, the odds are most people do too. We’re caught in a prisoner’s dilemma where nobody is willing to be vulnerable first. Hookup culture itself does not deserve the moral panic it sometimes receives, but it is a symptom of the gradual cheapening of human interaction. We all deserve a little more from each other.
Ah shit, I’m gonna text the Tribune.
Artwork by Nicole Mousad