How the Young Screwed Up Sex

Legendary comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to tell a story about the first time he made love. When it was over, he turned to his partner and asked, “Was it good for you?”

She replied sourly, “That wasn’t good for anybody.”

You could say the same thing about “hookup culture,” which is apparently pervasive on college campuses these days. Today, according to experts on these things, large numbers of college kids don’t really date or have relationships. Instead, they drink to excess (okay, so did I) and then hook up — i.e., they have sex with someone at the party, or from their dorm, or whomever.

The sex is impersonal and brief, and from the way it’s described in books about hookup culture, not very enjoyable.

According to Lisa Wade, author of American Hookup, The New Culture Of Sex On Campus, the main thing for women in hookup culture is not to look “desperate.” In other words, a woman’s job in this setting is to appear emotionless and uncaring about whether the man ever calls her back.

Which he typically does not.

Which leaves the woman feeling a lot of emotional pain and rejection. And leaves the man with bragging rights and not much more.

I heard Lisa Wade interviewed on NPR this week, after having read Donna Freitas’s new book The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy,

Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy, which really says it all.

These encounters, according to both authors, take place late at night, and the participants prepare by numbing their feelings with alcohol so they can get through the encounter without evincing emotion.

It sounds so bleak.

On NPR, Wade was saying that women feel they have no alternative to hookup culture, because if they don’t participate, they won’t have a chance to have a relationship.

Here’s the challenge: how many of your friends can you name whose long-term relationships began as a result of a practically anonymous late-night, alcohol-fueled physical encounter?

I’ll wait.

And yet, college students (not all, but an awfully high number) have become convinced not only that this is the right thing to do, but that it’s the only thing to do.

As the President would tweet, SAD.

You could say hookup culture is an outgrowth of the overall “failure to communicate” problem facing the iPhone Generation, people who never knew life without a smartphone in their hands. One of my friends points out that all of the key methods of communication these days — Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter — were invented by young men who weren’t comfortable with face-to-face encounters. So they used their technology skills to create means by which they could communicate with “you over there, and me over here, and we don’t have to look each other in the eye.”

And now our whole society — the whole world, even — functions that way. No eye contact. No empathy. Just a love affair with a device one never lets go of. People are taking their phones into yoga classes, and actually texting during class.

Some even sleep with their phones.

If that’s the communications climate today, hookup culture is an unsurprising byproduct.

The problem is that sex is a little too powerful to be boxed into an emotion-free 3:00 a.m. session with ground rules that include no calling the other person for a second “date.”

Now, I’m from New York and from the 1970s, and my attitude is, do whatever you want to do. Your behavior is none of my business, so I’m not approaching this as a prude, or a moral scold.

I’m just saying that it’s unfortunate. Here you have people transforming the ultimate act of connection into, well, an aerobic activity with no sense of specialness.

No real regard for the feelings of the other person.

Just something you do, because it’s what everybody else does.

The real pity of it is that this is a generation crying out for connection. They have ersatz “friends” on Facebook, a false sense of “community” online in general, and now, they’ve debased sex to the point where it’s a ritualized act and not much more.

A box to check.

To repeat the key point, the existence of hookup culture leaves women (and probably some men, too) feeling that they must participate, that they have no other choices. It’s FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out.

My point is this: you do have choices. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing, and if you just think the whole thing through, getting drunk so you can have sex (and still be up in time for class) probably isn’t going to be the most satisfying way to go through college.

Of course, we’re talking about people in their late teens and early twenties, who will have to figure these things out for themselves. I think I’m glad I’m my age and not theirs.

As Rodney Dangerfield would have said, this wasn’t good for anybody.