thealternative
When you got to campus as a freshman, maybe you'd never really partied hard nor had much of a history sexually. Maybe you were a kid who liked to go out and have fun, but who never felt much pressure to jump into things you would have preferred to avoid.
But then college arrived and you went out just like before, except now there was a huge pressure to do two things: drink heavily and hook up. The expectation on campus was that you would have fun by pre-gaming and drinking, going to parties, drinking some more, flirting until you scored someone cute, and then either hooking up with them right there or taking them back to your room to go beyond just a make-out.
After the hook-up, you learned you were supposed to ignore your hook-up partner the next day and brag about the experience to all your friends. Your friends bought into this ‘shagging and bragging’ culture, and before you knew it you did too.
This culture is not only the default, but it’s also way less fun than advertised. The value placed on boasting about (and often exaggerating) your sexual ‘feats’ means that it’s easy to think everyone else is hooking up more often than you, or that your friends are going farther than you sexually. (1,2)
A Strange New Normal
The pressure to be ‘normal’ can force you to hook-up even when you don’t want to. One student at Princeton says, “I am convinced that most of my hookups happened because their occurrence assured me that I was desirable and that I was normal. It’s fine to feel desirable and normal, but it’s perverse and counterintuitive when one of the only ways I felt desirable and normal was to do something I wasn’t completely comfortable with.” (3)
The crazy thing about this culture, in which hooking up equals social acceptability, is that it’s actually now the default mode by which young adults interact with the opposite sex. Opting-in requires zero effort – you do so by just going with the flow – yet opting-out means fighting tooth and nail against the norm and possibly losing friends along the way.
And it’s not even like there’s a good alternative.
Research shows that hooking up, not dating, is far and away the norm for college students.(4) One study at a college in the Northeast found that 78.3% of men and women interviewed had hooked up, with an average of more than 10 hookup partners per person. (5)
And a general college survey revealed that 35% of women and 50% of men took part in casual sex, usually with friends. (6) Clearly, on most college campuses, dating really isn’t the normal way to approach romance. When you want to interact with the opposite sex or find a romantic relationship, instead of going out to dinner you probably lean towards hitting the club or party scene, where you hook up without actually getting to know someone. You get in someone’s pants before you even scratch the surface of who they are.
An Upside-Down Culture
The upside-down culture of hooking up extends far beyond college and into the real world. Hooking up in college teaches bad habits—such as lack of commitment within a relationship, over-emphasis on physicality, and selfish motivations for sex—that translate into significant social problems. Society is more open sexually than it has ever been before, and the uncontested assumption that this is always a good thing must be challenged. One of the side effects of the hookup culture is that it is no longer considered cool or normal to be interested in the sort of long-term, devoted relationships that begin with traditional dating—and that studies show can be the most fulfilling.
Here at The Alternative, we believe that dating obviously can be fun, not to mention healthy. But we also believe that at a school like Princeton, where the student body is both bright and thoughtful, it is a great hidden secret that the hookup culture is actually a social injustice.
The Hookup Culture: A Social Injustice?
We talk about social injustices like poverty, hunger, discrimination, domestic violence and racism, and we rightly are indignant. Yet as a culture, we chuckle as we ponder the hookup culture: "Ahhh, college life."
Yet in that instant, we are missing a well-considered long-term perspective. We are missing the reality that the hookup culture can be (and has been) shown to contribute directly to bad marriages and divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, broken families and pornography.
Is the hookup culture a mere case of college students being college students? Or is it something more? Could it actually be something profoundly destructive, shrouded in the name of "harmless fun?" We think so.
This is why we want to create a new counterculture: one that values human dignity, smart choices, satisfaction and self-respect. Join us.
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- 1 Bogle, K. A. 2008. Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. New York, NY: New York University Press.
- 2 Lambert, T. A., A. S. Kahn and K. J. Apple. 2003. Pluralistic Ignorance and Hooking Up. Journal of Sex Research 40:129–133.
- 3 http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2012/09/20/31166/
- 4 Bogle, K. A. 2007. The Shift from Dating to Hooking up in College: What Scholars Have Missed. Sociology Compass 1/2:775-788
- 5 Paul, E. L., B. McManus and A. Hayes. 2000. Hookups: Characteristics and Correlates of College Students’ Spontaneous and Anonymous Sexual Experiences. Journal of Sex Research 37:76–88.
- 6 Grello, C. M., D. P. Welsh and M. S. Harper. 2006. No strings attached: The nature of casual sex in college students. Journal of Sex Research 43:255-267.