“College is all about hookups and having tons of having meaningFUL sex. You can settle down when you’re forty, drive a porsche, and have hair in the most unseemly of places. But for now, carpe diem spitter. carpe the volleyball team.”
-Cappy, from abcfamily’s Greek, giving advice to one of his pledge brothers.
I found this article on loquitor.com and it makes some pretty good points on the ambiguity of the term hooking up. We’ve already discussed how confusing it can be when someone says that “he hooked up last night” or “oh, we just hooked up” because it can mean any variety of things. They hung out? They made out? They rounded third base?!
What this article points out is that there is a reason for this lack of definition for the term. It is the new way to say “we did something yada yada yada” or “et cetra et cetra.” This allows young men and women to admit to having had some sort of sexual contact with another but saves the person from having to give details on what exactly happened.
But what this article says exactly is that it saves “the girl” from having to admit how far she went. I think it’s interesting how they have to fill the gender roles and claim that it is the female who is expressing a form of sexual liberation but that it is something she is ashamed of. Even if this could be what is happening with some girls, making this claim that some women are ashamed only perpetuates the notion that women should not embrace their sexuality and sexual desires.
A search of The New York Times archives allowed me to stumble upon this article called Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter provided a really interesting insight into the thoughts running through the hormone driven mind of a teenage boy. Researchers at the State University of New York at Oswego surveyed 105 tenth grade boys to determine the various “reasons why they asked girls out, dated and pursued physical relationships.” The most interesting outcomes were that 80% of the boys said that the primary reason for dating was not that they were physically attracted to someone but rather because “they really liked the person.”
The article also went on to ask the boys who had been sexually active what their reasons were and the answers ranged from”physical desire and wanting to know what sex feels like were among the top three reasons they pursued sex.” But what was particularly interesting was that the boys were “equally likely to say that they pursued sex because they loved their partner.”
I think that looking at this survey and article is great in the context of this blog. We spend a lot of time thinking about the thoughts of women and the effect of hook ups on them, but this survey is an indication that boys are not on a one track mind to sex and that there are certainly layers of emotions that we’re overlooking on the side of boys.
Can men and women be just friends? For years my friend Kelvin has been trying to convince me that there is no such thing as a platonic relationship between men and women. He claims that at least one party must have been attracted to the other party at some point in the friendship. My comeback has always been that I have had many guy friends who were just friends. His rebuttal was that they’ve probably had crushes on me and I just never knew about it. I suppose that boost to my ego made me start thinking more seriously about his claim.
So, say you make the decision to hook up with a friend and let’s also say that it wasn’t the clearest, well thought out decision you’ve ever made. What happens now? I love this clip from How I Met Your Mother because it does a great job of showing the awkwardness that could potentially arise the morning after Barney and Robin hook up.
Win Ben Stein's Money
A couple of days ago I came upon this article by Ben Stein in the NYT. Ben Stein, lovingly known to my generation for “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and his various movie roles, is known to my parents as a prominent American lawyer and former speech writer for President Nixon. What really caught my eye about this article was that it involves two of my favorite things: love and economics. Strange, you may say, but it makes sense once you consider that I am an economics major who is obsessed with supply and demand curves and a product of Disney movies where young children were taught that true love was just a glass slipper away.
Stein poses a great opening sentence: “What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.” I thnk anyone you ask – from the Sunday morning girl on her walk of shame/no shame/glory home to the woman on eharmony.com to the newlywed bride – will agree to the scarcity of love.
So to sum up Stein’s points, he tells us: Read the rest of this entry ?
My brother’s wedding is coming up on Saturday and that, in conjunction with a recent viewing of Wedding Crashers, made me think about the hook-up culture at weddings. As a pseudo-feminist, I know that I should reinforce the hook-up culture as a woman’s decision to liberate her sexuality and get what she wants without the commitment that she may not have time for or even want at all. But I can’t help but wonder about the other type of hook-up that we see in Wedding Crashers. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s character essential prey on vulnerable women at weddings. Read the rest of this entry ?
Women are hooking up casually and that’s a fact. So, for a woman who’s new to the game, don’t worry; there’s plenty of advice out there for you. I previously posted my thoughts after reading The Hook-Up Handbook:A Single Girl’s Guide to Living it Up but in my recent searches of hooking up, I have found tons more hook-up handbooks. It seems that people are aware that some women want to live it up and they are catering to these women’s needs. I feel like even ten years ago books like Read the rest of this entry ?
I’ve grown up well into the MTV generation and I can’t remember a time when The Real World wasn’t on television. One of the first examples of reality television, The Real World puts seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work together, have their lives taped. I think it’s pretty interesting to see how over the past 15 years The Real World has changed, paying particular interest to the hook-up culture portrayed. Although the older seasons portrayed the casual hook ups that took place in the house, it seems that the newer seasons put their primary focus on it. I remember things in the Miami house (1996) that involved a supposed threesome in a shower and the Las Vegas house where hooking up was rampant.
Having not watched this season too carefully, but having seen enough to get to know the characters and (semi)understand the reasons behind their actions, I think The Real World: Denver is a really interesting look on today’s hook-up culture. Read the rest of this entry ?
At the end of the article on young Indian women hooking up, there was mention of a new study which found that 9 out of 10 women believe that casual sex was immoral. The research was done by Dr. Sharron Hinchcliff, who found that only 10% of the 46 women that she interviewed in-depth believed that sex with no strings attached was acceptable.
It’s a very interesting idea for an experiment, but it seems that her sample size is much too small and the ages of the women she interviewed ranged from 23 to 83, making it more biased towards older women who were less likely to approve of casual sex. Nonetheless, Dr. Hinchcliff seems prepared to question whether “women have really gained the sexual freedom that they have enjoyed since the 1960s.”
But what I do find interesting about this article is Read the rest of this entry ?
