Concerned About the New "Hookup Culture?" It's Not So New, or Worrisome, After All

It seems like every so often, the media and others can’t resist a story about how college students — especially girls — are going wild with lots of meaningless sex. The implication is usually that these young women are destroying both themselves and society.

For example, a 2009 ABC news piece actually uses the word “sluts” in the headline. Almost 15 years ago, Tom Wolfe’s novel “I am Charlotte Simmons” raised some of the same criticism, often focusing specifically on the behavior of young women.

The topic was recently in the news again, thanks to a New York Times article “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too.” Like those before it, the article largely looks at “hooking up” as something new, even though that may not be the case.

Following the trend of focusing on the “problem” of women having sex, there’s been a lot of questioning as to whether female college students are missing out on prime husband-finding time — or simply making their own choices during a period when relationships are not high on their to-do lists. Disturbingly, The New York Times story takes a detour to explore drinking and campus rape, as though non-consensual activity is somehow linked to what women enthusiastically consent to.

Given all the hand-wringing, you’d think today’s college women just discovered sex outside of long-term relationships. Yet according to research results released at a recent American Sociological Association meeting, 18- to 25-year-olds are probably not having any more sex or sexual partners than women their age 15 to 25 years ago.

The main researcher commented, “College students overestimate the degree to which their peers are hooking up. It feels like something new, but they might be surprised to know the actual frequency of sex, the number of sexual partners, etc. don’t appear to have increased from their parents’ generation.”

It may also be helpful for students to know that when Guttmacher researchers looked at rates of “premarital” sex in 2002, the percentages of women and men who had sex by age age 20 (74 percent of women, 77 percent of men) was extremely similar to the overall rates for 20-year-olds in the 1970s (72 percent), 1980s (76 percent), and 1990s (74 percent).

As Kate Harding puts it in this column on “hook-up culture’s bad rap,” none of the drama over hook-up culture — which is often based on misogyny and what people want from girls instead of for girls — is really that helpful:

If we encouraged girls and women to place real value on their own desires, then instead of hand-waving about kids these days, we could trust them to seek out what they want and need, and to end relationships, casual or serious, that are unsatisfying or damaging to them, regardless of whether they’d work for anyone else.

She later adds:

[I]f we teach all kids that there’s a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships, and the only real trick (granted, it’s a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there’s room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else’s expense.

And that’s a fact.

Also see:

“Let’s Talk About Casual Sex, Baby” by Jaclyn Friedman

“Breaking News: Casual Sex Won’t Ruin Your Life!” by Jessica Wakeman

“Thoughts on the ‘Hook-Up Culture,’ or What I Learned From My High School Diary” by Nona Willis Aronowitz