Saturday, August 27, 2016

Hookup Culture: Fact or Myth?

To promote her new book American Hookup sociologist Lisa Wade has taken to the pages of the Guardian to shine some light on the hookup culture.  The book will not appear until January, 2017, but Wade’s thinking is a welcome addition to the debate about the hookup culture.

In particular, Wade debunks the notion, recently promoted, that since only a smallish percentage of students actually hook up-- that is, actually engage in random, anonymous sexual encounters-- the hookup culture is a myth.

She begins by describing a midafternoon hookup in an American dorm room. A student named Cassidy decides to have sex with some man in her room. She shows no consideration for the fact that her roommate is still in the room, within a few feet of the action. She is following a new precept: When the spirit moves you, you take action. Cassidy is an inconsiderate wretch. She thinks that she is cool. In truth, she has made herself a slave to the yearnings in her loins.

She is emulating the behavior of porn stars. She is disrespectful and shameless, but she believes that she is showing off. She does not just want to get off; she wants to set an example of amorally superior behavior.

It’s one thing to do it; it’s quite another to be indiscreet. And it's yet another problem to be proud of one’s indiscretion. With that gesture we are scraping the bottom of the moral barrel.

Wade analyzes:

Students like Cassidy have been hypervisible in news coverage of hookup culture, giving the impression that most college students are sexually adventurous. For years we’ve debated whether this is good or bad, only to discover, much to our surprise, that students aren’t having as much sex as we thought. In fact, they report the same number of sexual partners as their parents did at their age and are even more likely than previous generations to be what one set of scholars grimly refers to as “sexually inactive”.

One conclusion is to think that campus hookup culture is a myth, a tantalizing, panic-inducing, ultimately untrue story. But to think this is to fundamentally misunderstand what hookup culture really is. It can’t be measured in sexual activity – whether high or low – because it’s not a behavior, it’s an ethos, an atmosphere, a milieu. A hookup culture is an environment that idealizes and promotes casual sexual encounters over other kinds, regardless of what students actually want or are doing. And it isn’t a myth at all.

Indeed, Wade is entirely correct. It doesn’t matter how many students are hooking up how often. The hookup culture, in its raw shamelessness, is an ethos within which students are obliged to function. Or not. The unhappy few who hook up maintain the highest status. Everyone else suffers because in the hookup culture dating and courtship and relationships are considered to be an outcast, not part of the in-crowd.

You can refuse to hookup, but you still live in its culture.

In Wade’s words:

These numbers show that students can opt out of hooking up, and many do. But my research makes clear that they can’t opt out of hookup culture. Whatever choice they make, it’s made meaningful in relationship to the culture. To participate gleefully, for example, is to be its standard bearer, even while being a numerical minority. To voluntarily abstain or commit to a monogamous relationship is to accept marginalization, to be seen as socially irrelevant and possibly sexually repressed. And to dabble is a way for students to bargain with hookup culture, accepting its terms in the hopes that it will deliver something they want.

Hookup culture makes dating more difficult. Even if you are involved in something like a relationship, the hookup culture makes you feel inferior. And besides, since no one respects commitments, the chances for cheating abound.

Again, students who hook up have the most prestige on campus. They are the wealthiest and come from families with the most status. They maintain their position, not only by hooking up, but by being especially shameless about it—as though theirs must be the standard for good behavior. If it is going to set the standard, everyone must know about it.

Wade writes:

Hookup culture prevails, even though it serves only a minority of students, because cultures don’t reflect what is, but a specific group’s vision of what should be. The students who are most likely to qualify as enthusiasts are also more likely than other kinds of students to be affluent, able-bodied, white, conventionally attractive, heterosexual and male. These students know – whether consciously or not – that they can afford to take risks, protected by everything from social status to their parents’ pocketbooks.

Hookup culture, then, isn’t what the majority of students want, it’s the privileging of the sexual lifestyle most strongly endorsed by those with the most power on campus, the same people we see privileged in every other part of American life. These students, as one Latina observed, “exude dominance”. On the quad, they’re boisterous and engage in loud greetings. They sunbathe and play catch on the green at the first sign of spring. At games, they paint their faces and sing fight songs. They use the campus as their playground. Their bodies – most often slim, athletic and well-dressed – convey an assured calm; they move among their peers with confidence and authority. Online, social media is saturated with their chatter and late night snapshots.

The morning after, college cafeterias ring with a ritual retelling of the night before. Students who have nothing to contribute to these conversations are excluded just by virtue of having nothing to say. They perhaps eat at other tables, but the raised voices that come with excitement carry. At the gym, in classes, and at the library, flirtations lay the groundwork for the coming weekend. Hookup culture reaches into every corner of campus.

Note well that if the conversation revolves around last night’s hookup, those who have abstained are excluded from the conversation. They are treated like pariahs. Their views and their experience are not respected. They have come to think that any kind of relationship commitment labels them as outsiders, hopelessly retrograde.

Obviously, this does not date from yesterday. It helps us to understand why the millennial generation is so widely reputed to be so utterly lacking in good character. Would you trust someone who is willing to have sex in front of her roommate, without even asking permission?

7 comments:

  1. Wade is a day late and a dollar short, and despite self-promotional twerking in The Guardian, her book will probably land on the remainder tables in short order. How many people truly want to read sociobabble and numero-flummery about college sex @ $27?

    I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe beat her to the punch. And it's a great read.

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  2. As weird as this might sound, I actually feel sorrow for a lot of young women. The pressure to meet their peers' supposed sexual liberation pushes them to make mistakes that they would probably have not made.Though I have to state that they had a chance to reject feminism as it currently exists and did not.
    Given this http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/26/science-confirms-millennial-men-pansy-handshakes/ and given http://thoughtcatalog.com/janet-bloomfield/2014/08/5-legal-rights-women-have-that-men-dont/ and http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/where-feminism-went-wrong/article/2600279
    A little thought might have gone a long way.

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  3. Charlotte Simmons--$0.01 plus 3.99 shipping plus tax at Amazon.

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  4. Sociologist Lisa Wade: The morning after, college cafeterias ring with a ritual retelling of the night before. Students who have nothing to contribute to these conversations are excluded just by virtue of having nothing to say. They perhaps eat at other tables, but the raised voices that come with excitement carry. At the gym, in classes, and at the library, flirtations lay the groundwork for the coming weekend. Hookup culture reaches into every corner of campus.

    I don't know why I feel no pity for the poor youth who are excluded from morning after conversations. Yes, the obvious answer is to leave that table and join another, perhaps the nerd clique or whatever.

    At best it reminds me of the summer after 10th grade, when I suddenly found many friends who were smoking and drinking, and whatever else people do after they're drunk. I wasn't impressed. I was a little sad to feel different, but no inclination to follow at all.

    In college I did go to the drinking parties sometimes, but I never drank alcohol myself, and often had some very interesting conversations after midnight. And drunks are entertaining, like seeing you can "ice skate" across a floor riding watermelon rinds. Such creativity!

    In my day, party people discreetly disappeared to bedroom for their hanky-panky. I admit I don't know what I'd do if people started having sex right in the open, and even excessive kissing in public seems like rude behavior. And in a shared dorm room, it would seem strange to have to make a rule "No public sex", but it seems like a defendable idea you could discuss without being called a prude.

    Anyway I feel no moral superiority over the adventurous young souls, male or female. I probably did think I was too smart for that. I accept people are different, although I wonder how things would be without drugs to reduce inhibitions. I was just never socially secure enough in my self-image to do things in public I can't undo later if I decide it was stupid, no virtue there.

    Sex is such a strange drive, and its fully unclear to me that moral argument in general makes it any more civilized. And the modern assumption that smart people shouldn't start families until their 30s makes for a troublesome predicament whatever solutions are found to delay a biological imperative.

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  5. p.s. I am trying to square this article with the real or imagined hookup culture.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/there-isnt-really-anything-magical-about-it-why-more-millennials-are-putting-off-sex/2016/08/02/e7b73d6e-37f4-11e6-8f7c-d4c723a2becb_story.html
    ---
    Recent research also shows that, overall, millennials — people born between the early 1980s and 2000 — have fewer sexual partners than baby boomers and those in Generation X, the group immediately preceding them.

    Granted, the vast majority of young adults are still having sex, but an increasing number of them appear to be standing on the sidelines.

    Delaying sex is not necessarily bad, experts say: Being intentional about when to have sex can lead to stronger relationships in the long run. The trend may also reflect that women feel more empowered to say no, said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families.

    “As people have gotten much more accepting of all sorts of forms of consensual sex, they’ve also gotten more picky about what constitutes consent,” Coontz said. “We are far less accepting of pressured sex.”
    ...
    Alexandra Wolff, 19, had hoped to find romance in college. In high school, she and her friends were so focused on schoolwork that they did not date. But as a freshman last year at George Washington University, she found that between meeting new friends, attending classes and participating in extracurricular activities, she still did not have time.

    “I don’t involve myself in the scene of frat parties and hookup culture . . . but it seems like every other option is so time-consuming and very hard to seek out,” said Wolff, who has never had sex. “It’s not like I’m saving myself for anything; it’s more like, I’ve been busy.”
    ---

    Anyway, my bet is the hookup culture is first and last about alcohol, and thus not greatly different than the past decades, and "my dorm roommate had sex in front of me" is a statistical outlier, insignificant.

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  6. Yet another reason why I feel sorrow for young women. http://quillette.com/2016/08/26/what-i-learned-in-my-womens-studies-classes/
    Imaging being inundated with this drivel for a good part of your early education through undergraduate/graduate? Some of the comments are interesting in the fact that some women are beginning to see Women's Studies as the Marxism it is. Does not take much to change patriarchy into capitalism, or fetus into Black, et al. It wasn't until I began to see the evil of feminist thought when I started to substitute the word "fetus" with Jew, Black or any group of outsiders to the cause. Works with other issues as well.
    Most ideas like the "hookup culture" are never as prevalent as those who espouse them or in this case try to disprove them. Much of what is considered the facts in "blue" areas about the rest of the country is in error.
    I am still asking the question of why it took so long for women, as a whole, to see the lack of real intellectual thought by accepting this feminist drivel. How could you have convinced yourself that almost 50 percent of the population was evil and oppressive? Did you not have brothers, fathers, sons, et al?

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  7. Dennis said...
    ... It wasn't until I began to see the evil of feminist thought when I started to substitute the word "fetus" with Jew, Black or any group of outsiders to the cause. Works with other issues as well.
    Most ideas like the "hookup culture" are never as prevalent as those who espouse them or in this case try to disprove them. Much of what is considered the facts in "blue" areas about the rest of the country is in error.
    I am still asking the question of why it took so long for women, as a whole, to see the lack of real intellectual thought by accepting this feminist drivel. How could you have convinced yourself that almost 50 percent of the population was evil and oppressive? Did you not have brothers, fathers, sons, et al?
    August 28, 2016 at 6:24 AM

    * * *
    Most of the radical culture-changing movements throughout history were driven by minorities, sometimes very very small ones, but they were able to succeed by cowing the majority into submission (by intimidation or outright force). The mask is coming off of many of our current groups, however.
    Will it do any good? Depends on how much governmental power the radicals can acquire before the general public fights back -- historical precedent doesn't give a good prognosis.

    As for your final question: how many Germans signed on to the Nazi persecution even though the Jews they knew personally were good friends or fine fellows -- and we all know the Soviets trained people to rat out their own families.

    It isn't all that hard; the jihadis are doing it now.
    The Left does it all the time.

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