Hookup culture is “a girl giving and a guy receiving”? We don’t think so.
Today, Donna Freitas’ new book, The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy will be published by Basic Books. Her scathing (and, at times, moralistic) assessment of today’s youth being corrupted and dissatisfied by their pervasive practice of casual sex makes a lot of interesting points, but mainly does a lot of panic-mongering. And people hooking up? We’re not all that unhappy. So, here are our reasons why we like boning strangers and why we actually aren’t confused or unfulfilled by that decision at all.
1. Nobody is an emotional zombie because of hooking up.
“Hookup culture teaches young people that to become sexually intimate means to become emotionally empty, that in gearing themselves up for sex, they must at the same time drain themselves of feeling.” DF
Let’s give us all some credit: Women aren’t all starving would-be wives and men aren’t walking sperm guns. Freitas is proposing a reality where we are all shambling around as shells of people, completely devoid of the ability to achieve intimacy and romance after entering relationships, sexual or otherwise, where we engage in sex that doesn’t fulfill our “true” deepest desires. But all relationships are different animals. To say one type of behavior makes someone “emotionally empty” or drains an entire generation of feeling, is assuming that our sexual encounters not only limit our range of emotion, but stunt all future encounters for the remainder of our lives. Which is just completely unfounded.
2. Hooking up is just as enjoyable for women as it is for men
Hookup culture is “a girl giving and a guy receiving,” and “Women and men who learn to hide their true opinions and any aspect of themselves that might mark them as outside the norm, despite the fact that their colleges boast communities of tolerance.” DF
The idea that women are still serving men through hookups, that they aren’t actually interested in casual sex, is a tall tale Freitas would like to perpetuate. She reveals in much of her writing that behind closed doors, women don’t actually want to participate in the culture and would rather date. But that ignores basic facts. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, did extensive research on hooking up in 2009. Her findings? “Nearly as many women as men (85 percent and 89 percent, respectively) report enjoying the sexual activity of their last hookup “very much” or “some-what,” and less than half of women report interest in a relationship with their most recent hookup.”
3. Female agency and upward mobility
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