Susan McWilliams looks at a neglected factor behind the rise of hook-up culture

Our Hookup Culture

Mostly, this new round of cultural criticism echoes arguments that have already been made, perhaps most notably in Kathleen Bogle’s Hooking Up and Thomas Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. In addition to a general excoriation of hookup culture, these works tend to “blame” the dominance of hookup culture on one of the following things:

1) the sexual revolution, which legitimized sex outside of dating and marriage;

2) feminism, which told women to embrace their own sexual desires and act on them;

3) medical technology, which makes it easier for women to prevent pregnancy and easier for everyone to treat VD;

4) legalized abortion, which means that pregnancies can be made to disappear; and

5) lenient universities, where lax administrators all but throw students into bed with each other by offering up coed dormitories and keg parties and free condoms.

My immediate response to these explanations is “blah, blah, blah.” It’s not that there’s not some truth to them – there certainly is – but they smack too much of blaming the usual suspects, and they fail to take stock of the cultural whole.

A more holistic response, I think, would see the extent to which hooking up is almost bound to emerge as a norm among young adults in a large-scale society where mobility is highly prized and cultivated.