A few thoughts on the article:
1. One of the girls only has sex at the guys' places, because she doesn't want to have to wash her sheets, thus violating the motto, "Never have sex with someone not worth washing your sheets for".
2. This article shows how capitalism dehumanizes people: These women value themselve solely by their labor, and their productivitiy, because that is how society values them. They measure their lives through cold economics, engaging in "cost-benefit" analysis, and discussing "trading up" verse "trading down", before deciding that in order to be the productivity-vehicles the modern economy requires, they have no time for human relationships.
3. The coerciveness of modern feminism is also at work: Women complain they feel they cannot be in serious relationship while young, because they will be ostracized, for having "given up" on a career. Society's attitude perpetuates the myth that career and romance are incompatible (for women, not for men, of course), and helps turn the myth into the reality.
4. Some of the women interviewed said that they started hooking up in response to the reality that they weren't going to get boyfriends, because men didn't want commitment. This shows that in formulating the laws governing pre-marital sexual contact, the rabbis were on to something: Yes, if you let people have sex without commitment, the incentive for commitment decreases, and more people opt out of committed relationships.
5. A researcher interviewed said that women get more sexual pleasure from committed relationships than hookups, because men in hookups care less about the woman's pleasure, whereas women tend to care about their partners' pleasure, even in a one-night stand. This makes sense: Women are taught to constantly please others, and their their worth is dependent on how much men value them sexually. Society teaches men neither of those lessons.
6. According to the article, "Women said universally that hookups could not exist without alcohol, because they were for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk. One girl, explaining why her encounters freshman and sophomore year often ended with fellatio, said that usually by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave."
In my opinion, any social phenomena that most people must be drunk to follow, and that results in widespread giving of blowjobs by ambivalent women, is a negatiave development.
7. The article points out that "The
close relationship between hooking up and drinking leads to confusion
and disagreement about the line between a “bad hookup” and assault."
It also gives an example:She went to a party with a
boy from her floor. She had too much to drink, and she remembered
telling him that she wanted to go home. Instead,
she said, he took her to his room and had sex with her while she
drifted in and out of consciousness. She woke up with her head spinning.
The next day, not sure what to think about what had happened, she
described the night to her friends as though it were a funny story: I
was so drunk, I fell asleep while I was having sex! She played up the
moment in the middle of the night when the guy’s roommate poked his head
in the room and asked, “Yo, did you score?”Only later did Haley begin to think of what had happened as rape."
The more interesting question, however, is what happens when an extremely drunk woman gives signs of consent to a man who doesn't realize the extent of her insobriety? What happens when two drunk partners sleep together, and one wakes up and in retrospect feels they did not give consent - yet had given no signs of lack thereof when the hookup occurred? Does a steep differnce in degree of sobriety between partners automatically imply some sort of assault?
These questions must be carefully pondered, because while victims must be protected, being too quick to classify ambivalent cases as "assualt" makes it harder to properly punish perpetrators of clear-cut sexual abuse. Today's hookup culture necesitates a term for something that lies in between consent and
assault, as well as a discussion on how to deal with people who
perpetrate acts in this third category.
8. The article also discusses how for some people, it is difficult to completely separate between sex and emotion. For such people, hookup culture is extremely difficult: Often, they will wake up the next morning craving an emotional attachment that the other partner is completely uninterested in. One such person found that her dissapointment with hookup culture changed her attitude towards marriage:
"Catherine
had thought she would wait to get married until her late 20s or early
30s. But her college experiences had made her think that she would
rather marry young than throw away a good relationship because it wasn’t
the right time.
That
might mean having to pass up certain career opportunities, for
geographic reasons. But Catherine thought that her peers underestimated
how hard it was to find the right person to be with — as hard, perhaps,
as finding the right job.
“People
kind of discount” how “difficult it is to find someone that you even
remotely like, let alone really fall for,” she said. “And losing that
can be just as impractical and harmful to yourself, if not more so, than
missing out on a job or something like that. What else do you really
have at the end of your life?”
Catherine's wise words remind me of the midrash that God sits in heaven all day, pairing people up - because when two people find each other, and are able to love each other, it truly is a miracle.
