About a quarter of students thrive in this culture, at least at first.
Is campus hookup culture actually empowering?
At the same time, about a third of students opt out altogether; they find hookup culture unappealing and would rather not have sex at all than have it the way this culture mandates. The remaining students are ambivalent, dabbling in hookups with mixed results. And one in ten says that they have been sexually coerced or assaulted in the past year. Notably, my research suggests that hookup culture is a problem not because it promotes casual sex, but because it makes a destructive form of casual sexual engagement feel compulsory.
Hookup culture encourages a punishing emotional landscape, where caring for others or even simple courtesy seem inappropriate, while carelessness and even cruelty are allowed. At its worst, it encourages young men and women to engage in sexual competitiveness and status-seeking while meeting impossible standards of attractiveness.
Hookup Culture Isn’t As Bad As You Think It Is | Thought Catalog
It privileges immediate pleasure-seeking and heightens risks that students will become either perpetrators or victims of sexual crimes. Understanding that the forces shaping sexual relationships on campuses are cultural — that problems lie not so much in particular encounters as in hookup culture overall — is the first step toward clarifying what needs to change.
Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, many people need to work together to make changes happen. Especially because of the strong ties in student bodies, campuses can transform themselves faster than one might suspect. They are well-positioned to usher in the next new sexual culture. But colleges as institutions must change, too. Institutions of higher education need to put substantial resources and time into shifting cultural norms in two ways: Colleges also need to change the institutional arrangements that give too much power to subsets of students who are most enthusiastic about hookup culture and who benefit from it at the expense of their peers.
Doing this may mean disbanding fraternities and sororities as they have existed, because as long as these organizations and their ethics remain power bastions on U. Share pdf twitter facebook. This experience showed me that with hookup culture come types of behavior and a set of expectations perhaps just as repressive to college women as any of the traditional gender norms or societal gender roles entrenched in our communities and institutions.
But I still felt like those conversations invalidated what I wanted. I felt like I was wrong — weak, somehow — for having feelings at all and that I had inadequately acclimated to existing within this culture of ephemeral, often meaningless relationships. Many an op-ed has been written about the hookup cultures prevalent on college campuses across the country. These depictions overwhelmingly portray hookup culture as one of apathy, in which men and women alike take advantage of the anonymity found in the dimly lit basements of frat houses, where vulnerability is feared and intimacy scorned.
What these articles often fail to relay, however, are the powerful — and even at times, debilitating — feelings of self-doubt and shame that can come with breaking this most important of rules and catching feelings; wanting something more. And for many young people in the present day, the drive for professional success is both more realistic and more desirable than the pursuit of boy-meets-girl happily ever after.
- Hookup Culture Isn’t As Bad As You Think It Is?
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Hookup culture seems to provide an easy shortcut for integrating our romantic lives with our professional ones. While the stickers reference fighting political apathy, I believe that we need to take the same attitude toward our personal relationships. The apathy of hookup culture is a nationwide epidemic with the potential to be just as harmful to our mental health and emotional well-being as political apathy can be to the state of our union.
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True empowerment does not and should not necessarily mean trying to feel nothing. Those feelings are valid, too. Each stance is equally valid. Sign Up About Press Donate. Back Status of Women in the U. Media Reports and Research Infographics. Back Articles Conflicts Witness. About WMC Fbomb is an intersectional teen feminist media platform created by and for socially conscious youth. Back Articles Online Abuse Resources.