Hookup culture in college

They're very much about status. So the idea is to be able to brag about or having sort of gotten someone who other people might also wish they could have gotten. So it's all about being able to say, I got that guy over there or that person that everyone's looking for, I managed to be the one who hooked up with him tonight. One of the unspoken rules you talk about in "Hookup Culture" is that it's really important that the hookup be meaningless.

One of the young men we spoke with described a situation that almost seems Kafkaesque. We really liked each other, but she would not have sex with me. But I also knew that she was hooking up with someone. And this was such a confusing concept, which is that people will have sex with people that they don't like but won't have sex with people that they do like. And, of course, what this young man is saying, he can't understand why this young woman who likes him and that he likes is having sex with someone else whom she doesn't like but won't have sex with him. What the students are confronted with is this artificial binary between careless and careful sex.

On the one hand, we have this idea that when we get into romantic relationships, we're supposed to be loving and kind. And the sex that happens in those kinds of relationships is very committed. And on the other hand, we have this concept of casual sex, which is the opposite of that.

And that means that all of the kindnesses that go along with romantic relationships are considered off script once casual sex is on the table. So if two students are going to hook up together and they want it to be meaningless, then they have to do some work to make sure that both they and everyone else understands that we're over in this meaningless camp and not this powerfully meaningful one.

And so to sort of convince themselves and other people or to show themselves and other people that it was meaningless, they have to find a way to perform meaningless. And they do that by, for example, making sure that they're drunk or they appear to be drunk when they hook up. So my students actually speak in pretty hushed tones about sober sex. Sober sex is very serious. But if the students have been drinking, then that helps send the message that it's meaningless.

Another way is to make sure that they don't hook up with the same person very many times. So if they really don't like the person in a romantic way, just hook up once, maybe twice and then cut it off.

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And then the third thing they have to do to try to establish this meaninglessness is to sort of give that person a demotion in their lives afterward. The idea that it's meaningless means that we're also not supposed to care about that person at all and in any way. You talk in the book about how even though, you know, talk about hookups is ubiquitous on college campuses, that doesn't necessarily reflect how much of it is actually going on. So there's a lot of consternation about the students' sexual activity.

But it turns out that they are no more sexually active by most measures than their parents were at their age. The average graduating senior has hooked up eight times in four years. So that's once a semester. And half of those hookups are with someone they've hooked up with before. And in fact, about a third of students won't hook up even a single time their entire college career. But that doesn't mean that they're not surrounded by these really powerful ideas about what they should be doing.

And it doesn't mean that they can change how their peers interact with them or the way in which higher education works.

So even though campus hookup culture might actually be something that is endorsed by a relatively small number of people who are enthusiasts, one of the points you make is that these are people who often come from groups who have traditionally had a lot of power and privilege in society.

About 15 percent of students really, really, truly enjoy hookup culture. It gives them exactly what they want out of college. And studies show that if you ask those students - and they're the students that are hooking up the most - if you ask them if they're having a good time, they say, yes.

And I believe them. About a third of students are completely opted out. The rest of the students are somewhere in the middle, and they're ambivalent about the idea of casual sex. But if you look at the students who enjoy hookup culture the most, those students are disproportionately going to be heterosexual, white, come from an upper middle class or wealthy background.

They're going to be male, they're going to be able-bodied, conventionally attractive. Racial minorities face all kinds of complicated problems that white students don't. And it depends a lot kind of on what particular intersection we're looking at. So some racial minorities are embraced by white students more than others.

So African-American men and Asian women are usually considered hot and exotic, whereas Asian men and African-American women are considered less so. So it very much depends kind of on what intersection of race and gender and class, too, that students are sitting in.

But overall, we see lower rates of hooking up among racial minorities for both push and pull reasons. So part of it is they're pushed out because of racism and an erotic hierarchy that privileges whiteness. But they also tend to get pulled out because racial minorities are more likely to be religious.

They drink less alcohol. They maybe had to be more squeaky clean to get into college to begin with. So racial minorities aren't as welcome in hookup culture. And they also don't find it as attractive.

For students who don't identify as heterosexual, and we actually still need to do more research on this, but what it seems to - what seems to be happening is that on small campuses or campuses where people aren't very out, there's not an alternative hookup scene for students who don't identify as heterosexual or bisexual. And the hookup scene that does exist is hyper-heterosexualized. And in those cases, students participate at their own risk, risking homophobia in either behavior or attitude, or they go off campus.

And that is why Grindr hit college campuses way earlier than Tinder did because a lot of students who identified as non-heterosexual were using it to find hookups off campus. When we come back, I'm going to ask Lisa about the effects of hookup culture on the emotional lives of young people. This is Hidden Brain. One argument that some make, and this includes feminists on the left and libertarians on the right, is that hookups can be liberating.

People have a chance to experiment, try new things. They're empowered to discover their preferences. But one of the students we spoke with, Lisa, said that what sometimes starts out sounding like empowerment often becomes something else.

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I did have experiences where the expectations once the hookup had already started would start to come out, and they wouldn't come out kindly. You know, it's not a - it wasn't a conversation of, hey, are you willing to try this? Or, hey, you know, I really like it when my partner does this to me. It would be a little bit more of you're going to do this now. So, Lisa, does hookup culture have anything to do with what some people would call rape culture?

Yes, I would argue that hookup culture is a rape culture in that it facilitates and excuses behaviors that translate into sexual assault. Can you expand on that? I mean, there are enthusiasts who would basically say, you know, we're just exercising, you know, our free choice, we're not constrained by the norms that might have hindered a prior generation. What's wrong with people experimenting, trying new things, figuring out who they really are? So part of the reason we see hookup culture on college campuses can be traced back to the sexual revolution and the women's movement.

And the women's movement wanted two things for women, both sexually and otherwise. They wanted women to have the opportunity to do the things that men do and to embody masculine traits and interests. And they wanted everyone to sit up and notice that the things women had been doing all along and the traits and interests that they were believed to have were also valuable. And we really only got half of that.

So the feminists succeeded in convincing America, for the most part, that women should be allowed to do what men do and even have masculine traits. But we never really got around to valuing the things that we define as feminine. So a young woman who's growing up in America today is going to - she's going to be told by most - not all parents are like this.

But most parents are going to encourage their daughters to mix in masculine traits and interests into her personality. And they're even going to encourage her to do so and perhaps reward her more so when she does that than when she incorporates feminine personality traits. So we're excited when she likes to play with engineering toys when she's a kid. And we're excited when she chooses sports over cheerleading.

And we're excited that she decides to major in physics instead of education. And so women have been getting this message.