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February 16, 2010Hookup Culture: Mostly a Myth
Last Sunday's NYT piece only perpetuates the idea that college students are hooking up frequently, and that if they aren’t, they should be.
When I picked up the Style section of The New York Times last Sunday, I was excited to see the front-page feature, “The New Math on Campus,” a look at how the gender imbalance on college campuses (60 percent women, 40 percent men at some schools) is affecting the dating scene. I research, write, and lecture on sex, romance, and abstinence on college campuses, and especially on how these life experiences relate to students’ quest for meaning in general and spiritual and religious commitments in particular. The article quoted young women bemoaning the dearth of datable guys at UNC Chapel Hill, which they say means all the guys get to be players — at least for a while, living it up with any girl they want because the girls are desperate:
“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.” Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.
This kind of talk from women on campus is something I hear all the time during lecture visits to university campuses and in my research. So I wasn't surprised when reporter Alex Williams mentioned hookup culture. He turned to sociologist Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, for more information.
“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” [Bogle] wrote. “This results in more casual hookup encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hookup, women end up losing out.”
Yes, this is true; women do say this, and my research supports it. But there is another side to the story that we don’t hear often enough. It’s something many college men say when safely behind closed doors, about how they like hookup culture about as much as the women do — which is to say, they don’t like it one bit. They just feel pressured to say they do in public. While it’s socially acceptable for women to admit that hooking up is not for them, it’s generally considered social suicide for a man to say the same thing.
While I was reassured that Williams quoted a few guys on campus who said they didn’t simply want to take advantage of all the “bed-hopping” available, overall I worry that this front-and-center NYT piece about dating on campus is going to exacerbate what is likely mostly myth: that not only are college students hooking up all the time and loving it, but that at colleges where there is a greater gender imbalance, guys go even crazier with hookups so it’s even better for the guys, and girls just have to live with it and join in. My guess is that your average guy on campus is not interested in bed-hopping and would rather go on a nice date and find a long-term relationship. But articles like Williams’s help to perpetuate and even ratchet up the pressure to hook up all the time and pretend you are loving it, even if you are not.
Which brings me to my last and most important point, one I always make when I am talking about the topic: Hookup culture on college campuses is a culture of pretend.
People hook up, sure. And the chances that students at Catholic, private-secular, and public institutions will hook up at least once during college are high. (The chances are substantially lower at evangelical private colleges.) But the reason I talk about hookup culture as a culture of pretend is because students believe their peers hook up far more than they do, and the feeling that everyone is hooking up all the time and loving it is pervasive, even oppressive. What drives the pressure to hook up, to pretend you are hooking up if you are not, to say you like hooking up (even if you don’t, especially if you are a guy), is not so much the desire to be sexually intimate as the sense that everybody is doing it, and I need to do this too, because it’s part of what it means to be in college.
So take "The New Math” with a grain of salt. Hookup culture is everywhere, and its effects are dramatic on the college experience, but it is always more talk than action. It’s the effects of all the talk that we need to really address — getting a handle on that side of things will do more to transform hookup culture than anything else.
Donna Freitas is a visiting religion scholar at Boston University and author of Sex and the Soul. She wrote about one way to encourage abstinence among young people in the January 2010 issue of Christianity Today. She spoke with associate editor Katelyn Beaty about her research in August 2008. Her.meneutics contributor Lisa Graham McMinn reviewed Sex and the Soul in the same issue.
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Comments
I am hopeful that the waning influence of the New York Times continues to wane. I am also hopeful that we can instill independent, stable moral convictions in our young people that are based on traditional Christian teaching. It's rather ironic that red-faced, militant feminists have screamed bloody murder about equal admission-rights on college campuses and now we have more young women than men in college, and it's the young women who are suffering in the social context. My niece, who has a master's degree, recently married a high school dropout. I pray her marriage goes well, but there should be some concern about the growing under-representation of males in college.
Posted By: Truthmeister | February 16, 2010 1:34 PM
There are lots of reasons for concern regarding the gender imbalance for this mom of a college senior - male. But I'm not sure that this "don't talk about it or they'll start doing it!" attitude is the most healthy.
Burying our heads in the sand has never helped us culturally. When I was in high school/college, people dated. You got asked out by a boy early in the week for the weekend. But when my kids got to be "dating age," that just didn't happen.
I hope we talk about hooking up. I hope we talk about meaningless sex as a substitute for really getting to know someone. I hope we talk about how people are afraid to talk to someone they've had sex with because they really don't know them. I hope we talk about it because there's no other way to change it.
Posted By: TamiM | February 17, 2010 7:19 AM
In any case, the statistics on campus (and in most churches) mean that young men are not required to work for the affections of young women, but the reverse is the case. With such an abundance of attention from women, more men will be tempted to delay committment in any form, sacrificing deeper attachments for omnipresent sexual/emotional "butterflies" that our culture is so obsessed with. If the wedding is the climax of the story (not deepening and faithful marriage), why not delay it? Today's church needs to offer a different screenplay.
Posted By: Mat | February 17, 2010 10:46 AM
That New York Times Article was absurd. I am in university to obtain a degree and education, not snag a man. If I get married someday, that's fine, but it is NOT my primary purpose in going to school. Articles like that are so irritating, they reduce the great strides that women have made in getting equal access to education to sexual politics. Women are hardly suffering because they have better education and better jobs now than they did 40 years ago.
Posted By: deedee | February 17, 2010 4:59 PM
I don't believe that the presence of more women on campus is specifically the cause young women's social suffering. That seems to remove any responsibility from males at all, putting womens success to blame for a culture that has shifted over the past 10 years due to a variety of factors.
I don't know when exactly it happened, but far too many adult children are living with their parents with expenses paid. I know many people in their mid to late 20s, and even some in their 30s, living with mom and dad taking classes here and there and all of them have nice cars, the newest ipods, flat screen tvs in their room and don't pay rent. Maybe I am the exception now having gotten an apartment after college and stayed out of the house for the past 8 years. The idea of leaving the nest and creating our own life has gotten away from many of my generation and the next. I know it's a bad economy, but this has been going on prior to that, it's a trend. You can't have HD cable, the latest this and that and go out all the time when you're first on your own, and it seems my generation and the next are increasingly not willing to sacrifice material things and instant pleasures for building longer term success. This absolutely carries over to relationships.
Men and women not growing up seems to be a bigger reason to me that marriage is delayed and meaningful relationships are put off for hookups and instant gratification like our instant culture. When we talk about family values, I think those are pretty basic and fundamental: teach your children how to be self sufficient (cooking, budgets, wise spending, manners etc) instead of providing every little thing for kids and expecting them to act like adults when they turn 18.
Posted By: SJ | February 18, 2010 11:35 AM
Great points all by SJ. Sometimes we have to be kicked out of the nest for our own good.
Posted By: Truthmeister | February 18, 2010 12:24 PM
I wonder how many factors were involved that led to the the development of the 'Hook-Up' culture. Rebellion against values of the prior generations? (Which always happens) The increased accessibility of Porn. The over sexing of our culture. The values of the cyber culture where most communication is done on-line through social networking sites and through texting friends and rarely face to face.
Posted By: Basil | February 18, 2010 12:24 PM
I think it'd be interesting to see a study beyond college. Seeing as more young adults are waiting to get married later in life, the culture seems to be redefining the terms of "relationships" that develop in the meantime. As a young Christian professional in the Boston area, I am never surprised at the whispers of in-church hookups among our age group.
Posted By: src | February 19, 2010 9:40 AM
Biblical social ethics rise and fall together. Increased pressure for women to put career over marriage and family leads to sexually, as well as vocationally, liberated women as the norm for society. The same goes for men. Hearkening back to Mark Regnerus' CT cover story, the delay of marriage and child rearing is intimately connected to the increased priority of career and financial establishment. This delay, in turn, is intimately connected to the increased sexual promiscuity among students and other young adults.
Posted By: Matt Stephens | February 21, 2010 6:18 PM
Interestingly, the desire for financial and sexual independence sometimes leads to just the opposite, owing to failed relationships and the financial/emotional carnage that goes with them.
Posted By: Truthmeister | February 21, 2010 8:44 PM
I'm actually a former UNC student. I spent the majority of my time in college in classes with all women (nursing major) and I never dated anyone at UNC. I had a high school boyfriend who went to NC State, about a 30 minute drive away (whom I married). The church group I was in barely had any men and about half of them had questionable sexuality or were already taken. While I never experienced dating troubles and I often found myself having lunch with 4 or so other guys, other friends of mine who did not come to school with a boyfriend already are still single.
Perhaps because of the circle of friends I had I didn't notice the "hooking-up" as much, or as stated in this blog, it is not as rampant as people believe.
Posted By: KAD | March 1, 2010 10:04 AM
I attend a catholic univeristy and the majority of all the conversations on campus revolve around "who did what at the party last night." The hook up culture is pervasive there.
Posted By: Kara | June 2, 2010 3:00 PM
When you say "the new math" what is this based on?....Is there any evidence to suggest a significant change in the patterns of behaivour (not actual male/femail ratios) you have described compared with say 20, 30 or 40 years ago?
Posted By: dating site owner | July 28, 2010 6:13 AM
It may interest you all to see a group of young people who are truly on fire for the Lord, dealing with the everyday challenges young people face:
http://www.youtube.com/itsc1988
Posted By: Lindsi | August 1, 2010 3:31 AM
I have to disagree on a personal level on this issue and a few earlier comments. While on my own campus there seems to be an imbalance, I realized it was only because I saw that none of the many guys were datable in my opinion and many other girls must feel that way as well.
However, when I began college I was in a long term, long distance relationship with discussion of marriage before I left home and later in the year reevaluated my priorities. This year I tried to date again. He was a nice christian boy who was waiting for marriage. It just so happened that he was not my type, for character flaws that I will not divulge, but barring that I realized that I am in college and have been happiest when I am single.
Admittedly I have not waited for marriage myself, I have participated in this "hook-up culture" without the expectations of, in fact, avidly avoiding in most cases, a relationship. (Not to say that I sleep around, I am selective, careful, and have high standards) I have been told that this is unfeminine of me but perhaps not rightly so. I am young and not looking for, or wanting a relationship until much later, preferably towards the end of college or after. To assume that this is ultra-feminist is unfair to both girls who are being hurt by these pressures as well as painting girls like myself in a harsh light.
Posted By: Melly | October 27, 2010 10:32 PM