Pajamas Media

28 Comments

1. Typewriter King:

“Sure, they may have had their wild years in college, but the thought of their children experiencing the same thing brings on panic attacks.”

Ma’am, I’m 25, and the thought of being propositioned for ‘hooking up’ can give ‘me’ a panic attack!

From everything I see, twenty-somethings are practically celibate these days by default (they’d rather play MMOs), and I can’t account for how far off the literature is on this.

Dec 27, 2008 - 3:39 am 2. Spider79:

I have 12 and 9 year old little girls. This ain’t the article to start your morning. Hooking up. Good grief. Hovering like a helicopter and purity pledges would sure make me feel better!

Dec 27, 2008 - 3:48 am 3. RE:

Convenience. Disposability. Superficiality. Vacuity. Unaccountability. Relativism.

What an excellent recipe for depression, insecurity, and substance abuse! I’m sure all those free spirits of decades past are quite proud of their slut days. The mental health industry has a very lucrative future with likes of Ms. Berry in the field.

Dec 27, 2008 - 5:04 am 4. blank:

How true. Being the father of a teenage girl who will be starting college in September I have to keep reminding myself that “we all did it” and most of us seem to have turned out okay.

Dec 27, 2008 - 6:35 am 5. Ron Wagner:

Sounds very mechanical and unromantic. The allusions to drugs is frightening. Ever heard of drug addiction and frying your brain with drugs? I work with such people as a psych RN. Drugs are very bad to mix with sex because they lessen judgment. HIV is a very real danger also, along with some other nasty diseases. I am no Puritan, but there is a far better way to value and relate to people as spiritual beings with real feelings and high ideals.

Dec 27, 2008 - 7:07 am 6. trangbang68:

At the risk of being tagged a prude; there is no such thing as cost free sex. Every meaningless hookup, you give away a part of yourself that you no longer have when it is time for committing to a lifelong mate. The attempt at finding joy in exchanging body fluids rather than loving a mate for life only cheapens the whole meaning of love and further frays the social fabric. Hook-ups, shack-ups, no fault divorce, shameless illegitimacy, serial abortions are all part of the problem and not recipes for happiness.

Dec 27, 2008 - 9:13 am 7. Nate:

The fundamental problem is an unnaturally prolonged childhood. A 15 year old shouldn’t be considered a child, much less a 17 year old. The lack of responsability leads to voting adults who still want a nanny and the stigma or even illegality attached to early marriage eliminates a stable and, for those of us who believe in such things, moral expression of sexuality.

The elimination of the no fault divorce and the stigmatization of bastardy and prenatal infanticide are important, but they’re not the biggest issue.

Dec 27, 2008 - 10:11 am 8. Susan Walsh:

As college students in the 70s, we straddled the worlds of traditional dating and casual sex. Both options were available to women, depending on their needs and desires at a given point in time. The problem with hooking up today is that it rarely leads to relationships. Consider the following statistics (see About page of http://www.HookingUpSmart.com for sources):
• 91% of students reported that hooking up was very common or fairly common on their campuses.
• 87% of college students report having hooked up.
• 73% of girls wish dating was more common.
• 12% of hookups eventually lead to relationships.
• 60% of sexually active teenagers will at some point have sex with someone they are not dating.
• 49% of students who had intercourse during a hookup never saw the other person again.
• 61% of women who say hooking up makes them feel desirable also say it makes them feel awkward.
• During hookups, guys have orgasms 44% of the time. Girls have orgasms 19% of the time.
• 12% of women say that it is sometimes easier to have sex with a guy they don’t know than to make conversation.

While it is very positive that girls and guys hang out in groups and form close friendships, it is unfortunate that the majority of guys strongly prefer No Strings Attached sex, and strongly resist committed relationships.

Dec 27, 2008 - 12:16 pm 9. Jack Fields:

“Also, for all of their experience, they’ll probably be pretty darn good in bed.”

If by that you mean “experienced” in multiple techniques, then perhaps. But if/when the time comes for these kids (despite their age, they have obviously not attained the maturity for serious relationships) to match emotional and physical intimacy, they won’t know the first thing about being “good in bed”– or out of it, for that matter.

Dec 27, 2008 - 8:17 pm 10. Allison:

The idea that hooking up leads to a better idea of who you are, let alone gives you any idea about who other people are, is silly.

If you’re a woman, hooking up denies you the chance to build a relationship based on trust, common values, or anything deeper than immediate chemistry before you’ve become emotionally attached. That’s because the sexual component, the spending nights together regardless of specific sexual activity, and disproportionate time behaving like a “couple” without actually building towards joint decision makes most women feel deeply for the person in question. This is confusing, because it means the woman feels attached but never gets anywhere near knowing “the type of person” this partner is. All she knows is if he likes Thai food.

And she won’t have tried out many types at all. She’ll have tried out one type, repeatedly: someone who thinks she’s disposable. That person comes in white, black, brown, american, french, indian, spanish, korean, and every other nationality. But it won’t have taught her anything about who someone is.

But worse, it confuses most women, leading them to wonder why they aren’t being loved in return as they love, often times leading them to misery and depression when they do try to “appreciate” hooking up without getting “Attached”, and even more, leads them away from self respect. Wanting intimacy and companionship is healthy. Substituting a warm body at night isn’t.

That daughter on her way home may think she’s dating. But she’s not. Dates respected you. Or at least, pretended to do so.

Dec 27, 2008 - 9:59 pm 11. whiskey:

Susan — Society can have female sexual freedom, or commitment from men. It cannot have both.

Girls are hooking up because:

1. Outside elite colleges the gender ratio is 60-40 Women/Men.
2. Men don’t commit because women … well don’t either. Simple Game Theory.
3. Therefore if women (or men) want sex, it will be the hook-up

It is also foolish to think that the pattern will be any much different post-College. In fact, the post-College path is lots of men in the workplace, most guys go through their twenties fairly celibate, women have lots of partners (defined as about 3-4 per year in urban professional settings), leaving to fairly loveless and unhappy mating prospects for both men and women in their thirties, as women age out of being able to attract the dominant, powerful “Alpha” male and the rest of the men build up a nest egg.

The men in their thirties would prefer a more attractive, fertile, and less sex partner women. The women would prefer a more socially dominant, aggressive Alpha man. Neither is happy, both are visibly settling, for last rather than first choice, and therefore divorce rates are very high. At a minimum the sex hormones released during sex that promote pair-bonding (at the height of physical attractiveness) and learned love/affection are short cut by all those partners.

We are in a single mother world. We might as well get used to it. It’s not going to change. Women will simply have to put up with little average commitment from men and men will have to put up with lots of sex partners by women they form whatever fleeting relationships with.

We can certainly say the nuclear family is quite dead. Welcome to the Brave New World. Created not by Big Brother but by women and men following their own devices, enabled of course by the pill, condom, better living conditions/income/status for women, and anonymous urban living.

Dec 27, 2008 - 10:33 pm 12. Confused in Virginia:

OMG! I never realized that the female college students were such victims! I have a 19 and 15 year old daughters, and an 18 and 10 year old boys. I have talked to them at length about sex, and we have very open communication about this and a whole range of other subjects.

I can assure you that if my children decide to “hook up,” it will be something that a lot of thought went into. I would not denegrate them by assuming that they have been forced or talked into doing something that they did not want to do. My children are intelligent individuals, who understand that the only way a “hook up” will take place is if that is what they choose.

Not all females see themselves as victims who need psychiatric care.

Dec 28, 2008 - 1:40 am 13. Myra:

Seems simple to me. Keep your kids at home, send them to a local college, save tons of money and when they are more mature, send them away for a graduate degree. Parents really should wake up to the reality that many kids are not prepared to deal with the social pressures of college. Be a parent first and help protect your kids from the harm that these hookups will almost invariably cause to them. Our society has been selling females a pack of lies that are too confusing for them to understand in their teenage years. Help give them a way out and some time to understand themselves and grow . Statistics have shown that girls who have waited to have sex and with the person that became their husband have never regretted it whereas the majority of girls who have had multiple sexual partners have definitely regretted it . Sounds like common sense to me

Dec 28, 2008 - 5:34 am 14. Interested Observer:

WOW!!! So I guess there is an up side to depersonalized, indiscriminate, sexual coupling. All those love making techniques that will make the ultimate mate Oh so happy in the sack. Too bad past generations had to settle for ho-hum sex, society not then being so indifferent to doing it just because it feels good and you feel like it. Great preparation for becoming a mature, responsible, self-controlled mate who will be the joy of their future husband or wife assuming they will ever marry.

Dec 28, 2008 - 11:17 am 15. myth buster:

How will it bring joy to their future spouse if the person catches a disease, or simply has no interest in remaining loyal through the hard times.

Of course parents are deathly afraid of their children repeating the same foolish decisions they made. What sort of parents wouldn’t want to teach their children how destructive having loveless sex is. These parents say to their kids, “Been there, done that, it sucks, don’t repeat my bad decisions.”

As for me, I’m 19, and I’d love to get married. Would that the woman I’m madly in love with would return those feelings. What I don’t understand is why most people don’t find sleeping around disgusting.

Dec 28, 2008 - 8:15 pm 16. LCpl Mosley:

Uh there is no evidence parents are forcing their kids to sign purity pledges you piece of garbage. From my personal knowldge every purity pledger is simply makin a public announcement denouncing this hell of a culture and is doing it of their own venition. But hey thats just every person I’ve known wse done it. Peole hate Chastity because it works, it protects from evil with 100% certainanty, it is productive, and oh yeah it moraly right.

Your title is disengenous and false, thi isn’t a historica lesson on fornicaton like anyone needs that, but a stupid “non-judgmental”(no presonal comdemnation) ode to a shitty generation of Americans.

Dec 28, 2008 - 8:16 pm 17. Berlet98:

HOOKING UP ISN’T HARD TO DO, OR CAMPUS SEX

Now that college freshmen are home for winter/holiday (no longer Christmas) break, toting his/her wash and maybe some of that “freshman fifteen” excess poundage, it may be time for another of what we used to call a sitdown.

That was our word for heart-to-hearts when the kids were in high school and in their early college years and we felt a need to impart more of our extensive, mature knowledge, mostly gained from years of making our own stupid mistakes.

Sitdowns, of course, were aimed at imparting sage parental advice on the pitfalls, temptations, and vicissitudes of growing up and moving on down that landmined road of life, delivered in solemn tones, and usually received with poorly-concealed and barely-audible groans.

One notable hazard on that road today is the practice of hookups, a contemporary alternative to dating which itself was fraught with dangers although hookups make those threats to physical safety seem miniscule.

And, despite decades of women’s lib propaganda and graphic sex classes on contracting what used to be called a “social disease”–a misnomer if there ever was one–members of the female gender tend to bear the emotional and physical brunt, no pun intended, of today’s sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s).

Hooking up, simplified, is the modern practice of avoiding relationships and emotional entanglements by having sex. It also serves to relieve the stress of all those books to read and papers to write, and parties to attend, by coupling with someone. In some cases, it simply serves to pass the time and stave off boredom.

That someone could be a “friend with benefits,” a euphemism for a good buddy with whom you copulate as a favor, as a reward, or simply as a way of extending friendship to an ultimate extreme.

Or, it could be someone you just met at a keg party…
(Read the rest of this article at http://genelalor.com/.)

Dec 28, 2008 - 11:37 pm 18. Anonymous:

Yes, college has always (in the last 4 decades or so) been a time for experimentation (or mistakes , take your pick), but this *is* different.

I think all the ’safe sex’ indoctrination has had a corrosive effect — just put on a rubber and everything is no biggie. I think the physical barrier to intimacy (the shallowness it promotes) interferes with developing a psychological one. I am *not* a “wait until you’re married” type — but pre-marital sex with someone you you care about (and whom you think reciprocates) is far different from outright promiscuity.

Anyway, proper “safe sex”, truly following the doctrine of “cover everything with latex” is CRAP sex, unless your idea of great sex just consists of sticking it in”. Real great sex involves intimate messiness and lots of mouths

P.S. I still find it very hard to determine when kids saying ‘hooked up’ means making out, intercourse, or something in between.

Dec 29, 2008 - 10:10 am 19. Bilwick1:

It’s simple. Dating is awful, but sex is great.

Dec 29, 2008 - 10:17 am 20. momof3:

Confused in VA, you need some serious help if you think ANY thought goes into hooking up. Do you think your (or any) young “adults” (quotes because how can one be an adult without any responsibility??) sit aorund and say “gee, a boyfriend might take my attention away from my studies, and I really want to be a Dr. I think I’ll just f*ck a cute guy I meet tonite to clear my head, and then on to class.”????

Condoms have about a 80% protection rate for HIV. That means they do NOT protect against HIV 1/5 of the time. HIV is most contagious before the infected person knows they have it or show any signs. That doesn’t even count herpes (painful sores on your privates your WHOLE life!) or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and kill you. I slept around a fair amount, have only HPV to show for it even with condoms, and am grateful that’s all I caught.

Besides, and I’ll date myself here-anyone remember that delicious sense of being SOO turned on your couldn’t stand it, making out with your BF? And ONLY making out? SO much of the greatness of sex is the build-up, the anticipation. That lasts what, now, the time it takes to drink a beer?

Never mind the possibility of pregnancy and the certain fact that no hook-up will be around to help raise the kid, if the girl doesn’t decide to save herself the “trouble” and kill it. Kids don’t really need fathers, after all, right? The current single-mommy generation is doing just fine, poverty and drop-out rates notwithstanding. Sure.

And, from my perspective, most hook-ups aren’t good in bed and are no more likely to be so when they finally marry. Being good requires communication and caring what your partner wants. Most hook-ups are there to get off, period. That’s why the only 19% orgasm rate for women in them.

Dec 29, 2008 - 10:26 am 21. aclay1:

As with all such justifications, this sounds great for the men and not so good for the women. Hooking up goes against female biology, making most women who engage in it less happy than they would be if they were in relationships involving intimacy. When looking to settle down, most men want a woman who is capable of stable, committed intimacy rather than one who is good in bed.

Dec 29, 2008 - 10:49 am 22. kevin:

i just want to be held

Dec 29, 2008 - 8:33 pm 23. vcb-tn:

when i see the word “hook-up”, i see two dogs stuck together at their asses.

Dec 30, 2008 - 1:03 am 24. Snowman from Chicago:

Are all of you seriously arguing AGAINST having consenusal non committed sex in collage? Most you you live in a world that is completely unconnected to reality. 15-70 year olds have sex. In most cases regular sex and always have. Religion has tried to stomp this out by forcing women into what can only be called slavery, preaching about an inevitable eternity in hell if you have pre-martial sex. When is everyone just going to grow up and accept that sex is a normal healthy part about being alive. All this B.S. about you give up a little of your self or you damage your ability to have long term relationships are all FALSE. That talk is just fear, uncertainty and personal doubt in the person exposing those views.

You know I go to sites like this on the left and right, and they are both stocked to the rafters with the radical crazies. I would say you should get to know some of those crazies on the opposite side of the issues because you will find that you all are EXACTLY alike aside of your perspective on a particular view.

Dec 30, 2008 - 11:03 am 25. Lincoln:

From a male perspective, I would never consider a serious relationship with a girl who spread herself around like a cheap whore during her college days (and sees nothing wrong with it.) If she is willing to so freely offer herself as a sex toy to other men, it tells me that she doesn’t value herself enough to wait for the right person, and that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that she is desirous or even capable of staying in a monogamous relationship. Why would I want to be with anyone like that?

Oh and by the way Snowman: you’re an idiot. Go back to spanking your monkey over Glamour magazines, nimrod.

Dec 30, 2008 - 2:36 pm 26. Snowman from Chicago:

Lincoln,
Thank you for your deep and well reasoned response to my comments. You make my point for me.

Dec 31, 2008 - 7:24 am 27. Lincoln:

There’s no sense in reasoning with dillweeds who are without a clue. I mean really, to imply that promiscuous sex (unprotected or not) is healthy and normal in the face of all the rampant STDs and sociological evidence to the contrary has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever read.

But you go enjoy plowing the field with your limpy noodle. I’m sure you’ll find a nice herpes infested girl someday who will help you appreciate the important things in life.

Happy New Year!

Dec 31, 2008 - 7:52 am 28. Miklos Hollender:

Perhaps this is the reason that I’m, at 30, being celibate for the last 5-6 years… I just cannot imagine having sex without love. I don’t agree with the media stereotypes that all men are after having sex without strings attached… I for one am not. I need love to be able to do it. Sex without love is nothing, it’s like screwing an inflated doll, a wholly boring enterprise…

And love is very hard to get in the music clubs and music pubs of contemporary Britain… so I think I’ll just stay alone until people come back to their better selves.

Jan 2, 2009 - 3:34 pm

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