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Thoughts on the “hookup culture,” or what I learned from my high school diary

Jill

A guest-post by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Nona is a feminist journalist and co-author of Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism. She blogs at Girl-drive.com.

Debates about “hooking up,” swinging from genuine concern to hysteria on both sides of political spectrum, have been raging throughout the 2000s.* And this week, it’s seemed to bubble up to the surface again. I’ve spent the day reading ruminations by teen girl expert and Teen Vogue advice columnist Rachel Simmons, the always-thought provoking Kate Harding of Broadsheet, and Amanda Marcotte, who gives us a searing and passionate rebuff of any sort of nostalgia we might have about dating rules and traditions.

This rips open a wound for me–I spent most of 2007 contemplating this issue. But I’m gonna weigh in afresh now that I’ve just celebrated 2 years with my healthiest, post-high-school, Completely Committed Relationship (technically marriage, but that’s another story)–the sex-and-love “holy grail,” according to the many women’s and teen magazines Kate lists in her Salon piece. Before, it was my “sorta” this or my “fuck buddy” that or my “I wish I knew what he was thinking” friend-with-benefits. And I gotta say, no matter how much I railed against Laura Sessions Stepp and Dawn Eden and Miriam Grossman and all the other rightwing, anti-feminist cautionary matrons, the facts remained: I knew how it felt to agonize over a text message. I knew how much it hurt to hear that the guy I’d been hooking up with “didn’t do relationships.” And I knew what it was like to use sexuality to coax a guy into being with me, only to have it fail miserably.

Feminist or not, that shit sucks. And it happens a lot, to women and girls everywhere. And yet, if you consider me and the vast majority of America who eventually couple up, it seems to end up okay. What to make of all this?

Rachel asks in the aforelinked post:

Now, just to be clear, I’m all for the freedom to hook up. But let’s face it: despite our desire to give women the freedom to plunder the bar scene and flex their sexual appetites, it would appear a whole lot of them are pretty happy playing by old school rules, thank you very much. Incidentally, one of the women smart enough to figure this out just sold her 5 billionth book, or something like that.

Does that make me a right-winger? Can I still be a feminist and say that I’m against this brand of sexual freedom? I fear feminism has been backed into a corner here. It’s become antifeminist to want a guy to buy you dinner and hold the door for you. Yet – picture me ducking behind bullet proof glass as I type this — wasn’t there something about that framework that made more space for a young woman’s feelings and needs?

I do feel where Rachel is coming from. But those old models are based on the idea that girls are fragile, that they need to be sheltered from the ills of the world. They’re based on, as Kate says, being the girl that guys want. They’re based on, as Amanda outlines, sexism plain and simple. So if we don’t want to go the “Girls Gone Mild” route and start waiting for dudes to ask us on candlelit dates, does that mean it’s hopeless to find a happy sexual medium as teens and young, single women?

Kate says no. “[I]f we teach all kids that there’s a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships,” she says, “and the only real trick (granted, it’s a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there’s room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else’s expense.” That’s one of the smartest statements I’ve ever read on this topic. Amanda, meanwhile, says we need to stop making women shoulder the burden of keeping men in check, and concentration on getting “boys to appreciate girls more as human beings.” A-fucking-men. (No pun intended.)

But there’s also this: We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity. This is, to be sure, skewed by sexism and restrictive gender roles to make sexual coming-of-age worse for girls. But beyond that, maybe discovering what you want sexually and emotionally is just part of growing up–and that’s okay.

And for that matter, what’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls should want a monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend? I wanted relationships from fantastic fucks all through high school and college, but something tells me that I repeatedly confused lust for love and convinced myself that I wanted a boyfriend, when really I just wanted a screwfest (although I can’t be sure). For the record, I am not–I repeat, am not–saying that when girls write Rachel about the pain they’re going through, they’re not being honest with themselves. I know better than anyone how that pain feels. It’s just that we never consider the power of cultural messages amid the mysterious phenomenon of girls wanting relationships more often than boys. I agree with Amanda that I don’t think it’s biological–there are societal patterns at work here. If we’re told that casual sex is unfulfilling and that we’re going to want relationships, chances are we’ll end up wanting them. And why not? That’s what Seventeen, Glamour, and all my friends always told me.

The interesting thing about my particular sexual history–the kind of narrative that I have yet to read about in all these books and articles about hooking up–is that I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time. Does that mean I shouldn’t have had sex with them at all–or does it mean I should have been honest with myself (and them, too) about what our relationship was really about? I do remember obsessing, crying, wishing he’d want a “real” relationship with me, as many girls who write to Rachel express. But do I regret the sex, do I feel like I “gave myself away” too early at 15? Hell No. It was one of the most exciting, fascinating, and interesting things about high school. Girls deserve to discover themselves sexually at their own pace, to be neither rushed into having sex nor shamed into not having it. They deserve to have their very own “This is bullshit” moments without wearing a chastity belt.

So, as Rachel worries: Was I permanently affected by this nebulous, masochistic phase, from accepting less than what I wanted emotionally? Yes, but not in a bad way. In fact, I’d venture to claim that without all those past experiences, I wouldn’t have been equipped to be in the honest, nuanced, decidedly modern relaish I am in now.

The “hookup culture” must not be that new of a phenomenon if I was experiencing this stuff in the late nineties–and now at 25, I can employ my 10-year-old hindsight. Today, I found a fascinating piece of writing in my diary about “E,” my first “boyfriend” and first lay in high school who made it perfectly clear he was not into a relationship. In a rare moment of clarity, my 15-year-old self wrote this:

“I think people are wrong when they say that sex and love HAVE to be together. I figured out why me and E have good sex. Physically, we’re in love. Our bodies are perfect for eachother, we satisfy eachother’s sexual urges like we were born for one another. And we’re not really like that personality-wise. But that’s okay! I don’t know why that’s a bad thing, and why everyone looks down upon it. Just because mentally we’re not in love doesn’t mean it’s emotionless sex. It’s not. It’s kinda like our bodies have emotions. Like our minds don’t particularly click, but our kisses and heartbeats and waves of sex drive do. What’s wrong with that???? We’re not USING eachother; we just have a connection that is very hard for people to understand. If they saw us together, they would know what I mean. I’m fine with it, and I think it will go on as long as it takes for me to find someone I have mental AND physical perfectness with, because that’s what I need to be in a relationship…And as long as I got one half, why give it up because OTHER people think its morally wrong? I mean, I wish me and E had both, but it’s been clearly established that we don’t, so fine. It doesn’t automatically turn into a bad thing.”

There you have it. Love and sex don’t always go together, especially for horny 15-year-olds. I could be totally off-base, but I don’t think I was a freak for thinking this. If you’re comfortable with accepting that teens are sexual people with their own desires, there’s no getting around that boys and girls sometimes feel this way. I said this in 2007 and I still believe it now: Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful. It’s an emotional risk when you’re 18 the same way it’s a risk when you’re 40. Each time, as long as you’re safe and armed with the right info, it’s amazing to feel alive and take that risk.

Granted, I was armed with the right info. I had good sex education and candid parents. But many girls are getting scolded by their elders and pressured by their peers. Some are in abstinence-only education classes and told they’ll be too “used” or “dirty” for their future husbands if they have sex. The vast majority are not given the space they need to figure out what they truly want from their sexual relationships.

I agree with Rachel that it feels awful to have to compromise yourself, but testing out your sexual and romantic bottom lines may just be a rite of passage for teenagers experimenting with their sexuality–which is what the sexual revolution should have been about, rather than expecting women to simply indulge men’s fantasies. I doubt things will ever be perfect the first time a girl tries to define a sexual reality that works for her–especially if she’s told to follow age-old dating rules that clearly didn’t work the first time around. What I do hope for the future is that young women be allowed to take moments of sexual confusion in stride without conservatives breathing down their necks, without being called sluts by their peers, without feeling like they’ve ruined their chances at marriage forever, without being made to think that boys are emotionless sexbots, without letting an unsatisfying relationship cross over into the abusive zone–all while getting factual information about sex and STIs from their schools and families. Don’t girls deserve that much?

*Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happen in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.”

42 thoughts on Thoughts on the “hookup culture,” or what I learned from my high school diary

  1. Nona, this is unbelievable. I would absolutely love, with your permission, to publish this in the opinions section of my newspaper. You’re awesome.

  3. “And for that matter, what’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls should want a monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend?”

    What’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls are straight?

    “*Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happen in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.””

    What’s with the het-centrism around here these days? I guess this is meant to be some sort of disclaimer, but it utterly fails. Since when does critique just *accept the conventions of the dominant discourse* as legitimate?

  4. @Kristin–this was a pretty personal piece, so I can’t really speak to queer teen girls’ experience. What I was pointing out was that there doesn’t seem to be much moral panic over queer teens, which brings up a-whole-nother problem of the invisibility of their experience. I’d love to read a queer teen girl’s perspective on this invisibility–but I’m not the one to write it. Of course, I think that straight and queer teens alike need to discover their sexual happy medium–and in the last few paragraphs, my assertions about teen sexuality apply regardless of orientation.

  5. @Kristen I assumed the ‘boyfriend’ part was in a sense calling upon that narrative to be even more ignorant because it only spoke of heterosexual girls.

  6. I’m not sure how I feel about all of this, but I’ll point out that the neat division of emotional relationships and sexual relationships is not socialized. Jealousy is not just a social phenomenon, and monogamy and long-term coupling do not come from just having an awesome sexual relationship or just having an awesome emotional relationship. This struggle seems to be about the legitimacy of emotional relationships in an era where sexual relationships have become, if not more important, than certainly more openly valued than before. To the extent that sexual and emotional relationships may not be perfect companions, it seems to me that the only healthy conclusion can be that emotional relationships still need to be more important. I know that the less-traditional point of view is not that sexual relationships should be more important than emotional relationships, but there is something to be said for crafting a social order that compels people to seek emotional relationships in order to get the physical relationships they want. To the extent that social order is based around supporting the healthiest choices for the majority, some acknowledgment of either organic or socialized inclinations among women to seek emotional relationships, and the delayed tendency of men to desire the same, is a reasonable basis for supporting norms regarding the speed of developing sexual relationships.

    Basically, it’s a marketplace. If men are less desiring of emotional relationships than women, but social norms posit that sexual relationships should be available freely, then men will know that the social order favors their being able to have a sexual relationship without an emotional relationship, and they’ll have no pressure to grow up (these things tend not to happen purely organically, after all). By that same token, if women get the impression that they will never have an emotional relationship without making sex available, they can’t use the incentive of a sexual relationship to influence the man into maturing faster to be able to have an emotional relationship, because he can just it elsewhere if she makes things too difficult. Bottom line: everyone suffers, growing up. Do you suffer because you get an emotional relationship with a man who still needs to be shown how to be emotionally mature, or do you suffer because you’re having all this sex and can’t get a guy to commit? Or, to throw things back a little further, should we reexamine a paradigm of men in their 30s getting together with women in their 20s? Does the current structure of roughly-same-age matching really make sense, or should horny 15 year old girls be hooking up with horny 22 year old guys, and emotionally mature 25 year old women be with emotionally mature 33 year old men? To what extent does feminism, by proposing that women and men should couple with someone who is their equal, in an economic and social power sense (i.e. you can’t just relax and act like yourself if you’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t have equal economic/social power– you have to do all this self-policing that is a real bummer), undermine a system built around matching people who are emotional equals?

    Sex and emotion are inextricably linked and often in conflict, and there’s no ideological or feminist way to resolve that– there’s only managing the downside.

  7. This is excellent. Well done.

    I think the Boomer generation really thought they had finished all this and did not click that a lot of the advances they achieved – sexual liberation, civil rights – were on the terms of the formerly advantaged group. With civil rights, it’s things like “You may have affirmative action to get you into college aged 18 because correcting the immense underlying injustice and inequality that caused you to need it would undermine our power and is too hard.” With sex, it’s “You may screw around or not, and own your sexuality, on our terms, because correcting the immense underlying injustice and inequality necessary to enable everyone to own their sexuality (or lack thereof) on their own terms would undermine our power and is too hard.”

    That’s what people don’t get about feminism and why they blame it for incomplete solutions where some of the interim problems are nearly as bad as, or (in their eyes) worse than, their predecessors (eg, more STDs). We are not finished yet, not by a long shot.

  8. Flash – I think the emotional disparities you discuss do exist but certainly a 15-year-old girl should not be with a 22-year-old man, generally (some exceptions of course apply), just to find an emotional equal. Life experience counts for a great deal and the man will be the senior partner in more than just financial power. He has many rights she does not, and status in the world that she does not, being at a different life stage (graduate or worker vs highschool pupil). He will be more emotionally mature simply by virtue of experiencing more situations and understanding what things you can let slide without much consequence. Things that are incredibly important when you are 15 can seem trivial when you are 22, no matter your gender. This disparity shrinks with time so the 25 year old woman with a 32 year old man are more likely to be equals, if not in all regards, then in enough to render their relationship not hopelessly imbalanced.

  9. “If men are less desiring of emotional relationships than women, but social norms posit that sexual relationships should be available freely”

    But that’s a very big if! People just say, all the time, that the whole “men want sex, women want relationships” thing is biologically determined, but I’ve never seen the evidence for that. And in fact, anyone who reads, e.g., medieval or ancient literature knows that the stereotype used to be the reverse: women were so uncontrollably lustful that you had to lock them up and surround them with guards or they’d sleep with every man they could find, and “one cock can handle a dozen hens, but even a dozen men can’t satisfy one woman.” Whereas men were supposed to be obsessed with fidelity and (even more) paternity; there’s a very powerful fear of raising “someone else’s” child as your own.

    Of course, there’s some truth to the claim that, IN OUR SOCIETY, men are more willing than women to separate sex from emotional relationships. But that has a lot to do with the way men and women are taught to understand what sex means. There was a great post here the other day about how reluctant people are to accept the idea of a man not wanting to have sex when his female partner does; there’s a similar reluctance to accept the idea of normal women wanting to just have commitmentless sex, or, for that matter, men having a desire for an emotional and committed relationship.

  10. Romance was invented to encourage stupidity. I’m glad that sex has been decoupled from romance.

  11. Actually, I’m thinking about the fact that shortly after I became sexually active, my parents both described (entirely out of earshot of the other) very similar features of sexuality in the 1960s. They had lots of casual relationships with MOTOS involving dates that sometimes led to “making out.” It’s also interesting to me that Ebert recently published a similar essay about the 50s, and my grandmother was fond of embellishing on the supposedly loose morals of her mother. (Depending on how angry and sane my grandmother was at the moment, the implications ranged from serial monogamy to prostitution.)

  12. latinist wrote:

    People just say, all the time, that the whole “men want sex, women want relationships” thing is biologically determined, but I’ve never seen the evidence for that.

    FYI, the evidence for that, valid or not, is usually cited from the field of evolutionary psychology:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

    There’s elements of it which are strongly critiqued by feminists, especially interpretations which would seem to provide some sort of evolutionary purpose for rape, or possible perceived attractiveness for women in violent or exploitative behavior by males, but there’s numerous examples arguably feminist evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists, like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Hrdy

    …and few examples of overtly misogynist/anti-feminist evolutionary psychologists. For people who consider themselves well-versed in these critiques they may disagree and say that misogyny is rampant among evolutionary psychologists, and we sure could waste a lot of time trying to argue that point (and we have a consensus that we won’t). But it is accepted as a useful, legitimate branch of psychology/sociology/anthropology and the research and researchers are worth taking seriously, whether one agrees or disagrees with them.

  13. CBrach – I think it is partly cyclical. Eg in England, the loose sexuality of Merrie Englande during Elizabethan times gave way to the restrained Puritans, which spawned the Restoration debauchery, which generated the buttoned-up Victorians, who spewed forth the hippies and free love. The idea that it has been a long slide from one end of a spectrum to the other is false.

    I’ve read accounts saying things like ‘The young today are such sluts’ or ‘The young today are such prudes’ from ancient Greece. This pendulum has been swinging (or, staying monogamous!) forever. The corresponding pendulum, given that behavior hasn’t changed all that much (outside the chattering classes), is how hypocritical and judgemental we are – and I’m not saying a bit of judgement is necessarily wrong, eg of someone who uses their sexuality or that of another to manipulate.

    The only thing that will break the cycle is freeing women and men from the idea that (absent abuse or exploitation) their sexuality is anyone else’s business.

  14. southern students for choice-athens: Perhaps accepted by evolutionary psychologists. Most people in the fields of biology and psychology roll their eyes and get on with their work.

  15. CBrachyrhynchos: Critiques of evolutionary psych and sociobiology, as if they’re somehow pseudoscientific or tainted with prejudice like discredited theories of “race science” from the early 20th century run pretty much along the same ideological lines. We don’t mean to derail into a debate on that, but evopsych and sociopsych theories are relevant to the discussion here, especially with much of it hinging on the quote “sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity” from the post above.

  16. This is an amazing piece. I agree entirely, and I’ve always hated all the moral panic about hookup culture. Honestly, as an adult in a committed relationship now, when I think back on my various “fuck buddies” and whatnot in college, it’s always with a sort of loving nostalgia. While undoubtedly emotionally shattering to me at the time, there was something exciting or intriguing about agonizing over text messages, or the bizarre emptiness I felt when the person I hooked up with got a new girlfriend the next day… It was painful, but there was something sweet and fun about it, too. Not to mention that I think the constant opportunities for personal growth and introspection it provided me with were ultimately very positive; I believe those experiences have allowed to me form much more loving, considerate, and sexually satisfying relationships than I would otherwise have done.

  17. ssfc-a: The problems are methodological. In Evolutionary Biology you have two different ways of testing hypotheses. In the first case, you can use molecular biology to examine gene frequencies within a population and discuss how those frequencies may have come about (by performing statistical analysis of non-coding or non-functional genes related to the gene in question.) We can’t do that with most human behavior lacking a robust theory regarding environmental and genetic contributions of variance, much less analysis at the level of the gene.

    In the second case, you do a cladistic analysis across multiple members of a family of organisms. The problem here is that with our closest common ancestors at least 2.4 million years distant, we have few ways to construct hypotheses regarding the paleolithic or neolithic.

    The ideological fight is one initiated by the evolutionary psychology school themselves, when they choose to advance hypotheses that are unsupported by biology against a strawman of psychology. Developmental, cognitive, and neuro-psychologists have no problems with suggesting that certain features of human cognition are products of an evolved brain. The central problem is the creation of just so stories in an attempt to explain features where we don’t even have a good idea of how to measure the behavior, much less develop an operational understanding of environmental vs. genetic contributions to phenotypic variance.

    Trust me on this, developmental and cognitive psychologists have been concerned about the gap between sexual adolescence and abstract ethical reasoning for a few decades now.

  18. @ The Flash

    I think using sex to manipulate guys to “grow up” doesn’t actually work and is completely offensive to guys. Historically, this may have meant that if the woman got preggers, they had to get married, but I don’t see that as some kind of achievement or the ideal.

    I think the whole concept of men forsaking emotional attachments is more how we view and value masculinity more than any economic situation (i.e. I get to have emotionless sex in my teens and 20s, but then in my early 30s I’ll marry a good girl!)

  19. And to be blunt, a large chunk of the gap between sexual maturity and abstract ethical reasoning comes from a well-documented and almost certainly environmental shift in the age of menarche due to better nutrition and medical care. On a biological level, it’s a situation arguably unprecedented in human history.

  21. Your experience is similar to mine. When I first started college, I took it as an opportunity to explore my sexual freedom and I self-awarely engaged in a number of “hookups.” Some were one-night deals, others were longer-term hookup buddies. One sexual relationship lasted for almost a year, despite the fact that we could hardly converse beyond basic small-talk. Overall, I loved it. I could be free to be my own person – I could sleep with anyone I wanted, go anywhere at any time without consulting anyone, never have to worry about the way my actions related to a significant other’s feelings. I wanted sex, but I didn’t want a boyfriend, really…that seemed too limiting for someone like me who was experiencing the heady freedom of being out from under the thumb of her parents’ conservative morals.

    Of course, it wasn’t always that rosy. Relationships (of any kind) are rarely that easy. Sometimes, I too would be upset and confused and wonder why that relationship which worked so well sexually seemed to fizzle on a higher level, despite the fact that I thought he was really cool, funny, and smart. Several of those boys made my heart ache and my head spin in confusion. But every time I’d start to think maybe me and my hookup buddy had a chance together, I was confronted with the reality that we just didn’t click the way I felt we needed to. I wasn’t willing to give up my freedom for him, because it was so valuable to me that I promised myself I’d never let it go for anything less than the guy who was truly right for me. I was waiting to fall hard enough for someone that it didn’t seem like a sacrifice to commit to each other.

    Eventually, I found somebody that was worth my time and emotional energy, but I do not regret the “hookup” period of my life. It was what I wanted at the time, and I couldn’t have been patient enough to wait for my current amazing bf if I’d had to be celibate the whole time I was waiting. I “took what I could get” in terms of hookups, not because I didn’t respect myself, but because I genuinely felt happier with something rather than nothing. And although I suspected I’d wind up in a committed relationship eventually, I didn’t actively pursue it because I didn’t want to force something that wasn’t there. It took a little while for those barriers to come down even when I did meet the right guy, because I didn’t want my decision to date to be hasty, but my initial caution provided an opportunity for him to show that he wasn’t like all those other guys. We hooked up before we dated – but for once, he didn’t seem to forget about me afterward. He cuddled with me, he asked if he could take me on a real date, he texted me later that day. He told me he wasn’t going away, but that he wouldn’t push me to commit to something I wasn’t ready for. He just wanted to be with me. It was from being involved with guys who DIDN’T care that I could recognize a guy who DID care when he finally came along.

    As far as the difference between men and women’s emotional maturity timeline…my experience has been that there are a lot of guys in college who have just utterly failed to grow up yet. There is a type of emotionally immature guy that seems to dominate the social scene in college, who is perpetually stuck in the same experimentation phase I grew out of. These guys are so invested in their freedom that they WON’T give it up, for anyone, not even the “right” person. I don’t judge this behavior as long as it’s honest – if you say you’re not looking for a relationship, at least the girl knows what she’s getting into. I think a lot of this perpetual youth can be blamed on socialization, and there are definitely exceptions to this rule. But in all honesty, my experience has been that an emotionally mature girl has better luck with older guys. I’m starting to advise my friends who are frustrated with the “college guy” type I described above to go for a slightly older guy, because it just seems like it takes a lot of guys a little longer to be ready for an emotionally committed relationship. I’m falling in love with a grad student right now (he’s 24, I’m 20), another friend is happily dating a 24-year-old undergrad (he’s not dumb, he’s just changed his major a zillion times), my best friend married a guy ten years her senior and is still happy after two years of marriage, and my other best friend is having a blast with a 30-year-old who has grown up enough to maintain a healthy relationship, but not enough to stop partying (which is a good thing, because she’s at the same stage as a college sophomore). Although I have a couple friends in happy same-age relationships, they seem harder to find at this point in our lives.

  22. “Sex and emotion are inextricably linked and often in conflict, and there’s no ideological or feminist way to resolve that– there’s only managing the downside.”

    I disagree with this, because I’ve resolved it – for myself at least. It’s best addressed with honesty – most importantly with yourself, but almost as importantly with your partner. I have a current fuck buddy now – we both know it’s never going to be a relationship which is important for both parties to understand. And after that, sure, there are emotions. Sometimes I’m a little jealous and I tell him that. I don’t really like feeling jealous, so if it becomes unmanageable, I’ll take myself out of the equation. Sex is fun, but so are vibrators. So are other men (in my case).

    I disagree with this on the most basic level. The thought process that many people employ when discussing hook-up culture between men and women is that the women are at the whim of the man who decides when it is or is not a relationship. The feminist reaction to the emotion/sex circumstance is honesty with all parties involved and understanding that your priority is to make yourself happy. This is a result of the same guess and check/make mistakes model put forth by this post that has occurred in my own life.

    (The result with my latest fuck buddy? “You must have a lot of guy friends; I see you getting along well with guys.” SIGH – or maybe, just maybe, the dedication to making myself happy and the honesty it requires shouldn’t be gendered at all. But whatev – I’m just fucking him.)

  23. I think the problem with labeling monogamous relationships (including homosexual ones) as patriarchal- as many queers and feminists that I have known do- and non-monogamous relationships as inherently more “liberated”, is that the form is given precedence over the functioning of the relationship.

    I have been in non-monogamous relationships with both men and women that were downright abusive- of course this has happened in monogamous relationships as well, in a traditional “wife-abuse”y way. But my point is that being non-monogamous *does not* prevent relationship dynamics from being patriarchal or oppressive or abusive.

    For myself, my non-monog relationships with men have been very abusive and very traditionally patriarchal- I was being “used for sex”. I had emotional attachments to the other person, and they had none for me. Or if they did, they were incapable or unwilling to recognize these attachments. I was supposed to be happy and liberated and enjoying the sex, and I kept telling myself it was *my* fault that I was unhappy, because as Nora said I wasn’t “being honest with myself.”

    I think it’s that the virgin/mother/whore is still so prominent, when a het relationship is non-monog, in my experience the woman gets treated like a “whore”. I could tell myself I’m free and expressing my sexuality and blah blah blah, but my male partner still sees me as just a warm place to put his penis.

    Which, better or worse than “wifey”? Dunno…

  24. This is an awesome piece.

    I grew up entirely without dating culture anyway, and I always felt we were doing just fine without it (I’m German, and was a radical leftie before I was sexually active. Germans don’t *date*, and radical lefties – over here at least – tend to think relationships are bourgeois and somehow counterrevolutionary).
    In a way I’ve never known anything besides hooking up. I’m now 30 and a lot of people my age are somehow coupled off, but as a polyamorous bdsm practicioner I still hook up a lot.

    Both in the post and in the comments it’s sometimes implied between the lines that hooking up often prepares you for serious monogamous relationships and provides you with the emotional maturity they require.

    I tend much more toward maintaining that stage where you let relationships (as in, the ways you relate to people, not romantic couple relationships) develop into whatever seems to fit. And a lot of the time, having sex with straight men, *I’m* the one who “doesn’t do relationships”.

    And Nona, I’ll forever be thankful to you for giving me the term “physically in love.” I seem to experience that a lot, and well, as some people pointed out: as long as both parts are in agreement, that can be a beautiful thing.

  25. I can definitely identify with your story. I just had a conversation with my best friend about this, and we also discussed it a womens studies event at my university. I think I disagree with this:
    If we’re told that casual sex is unfulfilling and that we’re going to want relationships, chances are we’ll end up wanting them

    I think a lot of young women may be seeing the opposite message. That casual sex is fulfilling, and that empowered women don’t want relationships. And that is problematic because whereas before the young women who did want casual sex were marginalized, now the ones who do not want casual sex are. Girls who don’t put out face just as much judgement as those who do. And I can’t help but to think that so many of these labels are coming from other women just as much as men. (Ie, girly, old fashioned, overly emotional)

    I can only speak for myself, but I know I have felt like the some of the women in the article. I was with my high school sweetheart for so long and was not really prepared for the dating scene. Yes I knew about sex, and condoms, and STD’s, but no one really explained to me the dynamics of these sexual relationships. So there were times when I really was not looking for casual sex, and I really wanted a relationship, but figured I was not supposed to bring it up because that would make me one of “those girls” who had feelings and emotions and seemed to be looked down on. And when I was honest with myself, I didn’t feel happy, or empowered, or liberated. Because I was not asking for what I wanted, I was going along with what I thought I was supposed to be doing, and hoping it worked out.

    The idea that liberated women ‘hook up’ and only fanatical zealots with chasity belts didn’t left me with no space. And I wonder how many girls feel like they don’t have one.

  26. Also to be clear, I don’t think the issue is casual sex per se, but women engaging in casual sex when they may not want to, because they don’t feel like they can ask for what they want.

    That is empowering and liberating. I think the message should be about defining your own ideas about what works for you. Women asking for what they want without fear of negative labels. Can we not marginalize any group of women based on their sexuality? :sigh: I wish society would move from the virgin/whore or liberated/prudish dichotomy.

    ****I’m speaking from personal experience, so I can only speak for a hetero point of view. I’m curious if non cis women would maybe feel the same, or disagree completely.

    Thanks for posting this. I think this is an important discussion.

  27. This marketplace thing is really a terrible metaphor for intimacy and sexual relationships. Or most human interaction. It’s one that’s been imposed on us so yeah it gets used a lot, but it’s so dehumanizing.

  28. Well… it’s less dehumanizing when you study economics and you view “marketplace” as a conceptual lens for any human interaction, and not necessarily as an indicator of a financial transaction. The idea is just that everyone thinks of a world out there of people who they might have something with– an emotional or sexual relationship, or both. If you want a sexual relationship and are avoiding an emotional relationship, you’re going to be more likely to compromise and invest in the accoutrements of the emotional relationship if you don’t think there’s someone out there who will be in a no-strings-attached relationship with you (and this doesn’t even address the issue of condoms and their role in promoting monogamy). it’s deeply unromantic to say this, but it’s somewhat like the cliche that everyone’s only in the relationship they’re in because they don’t think there’s someone better for them. It’s a pessimistic way of looking at things, but the optimistic way of saying the same thing is sometimes you think your partner is so perfect for you there couldn’t possibly be anyone else in the world you’d want so much.

  29. As a man who wants sex as part of an emotional relationship rather than casually I feel that it is determined neither by gender nor maturity.
    It is more a matter of personality. That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t have casual sex but I am unsure how much that relates to the script that says men should never turn down a sexual opportunity.

    I’m really uncomfortable with the idea suggested by @The Flash that there is some social order which should determine what is correct behaviour in relationships. That’s because it tends towards oppression
    towards those who don’t fit into the socially approved roles. Even
    worse it leads to people trying to fix social problems by telling others how to behave.

    Something to remember about maturity is that it isn’t purely a function of age. When I was young the majority of youngsters left school at 15 or 16 to go into work. Nowadays many people do not leave education until their early 20s. That first couple of years in work was when I grew up and from observation I suspect the same is true for most people. So instead of two or three years between sexual maturity and emotional maturity it is now seven to ten years which is far longer than any variations in the age of sexual maturity could account for.

  30. i live in hook up mode now, and i am pretty sure i’ll stay that way for the rest of my life. i spent a long time trying to “make relationships work,” including a horribly abusive marriage to a man for a few years. i suppose that’s what “ruined” me. but since i came out for good, i couldn’t be happier.

    love, for me, is best found in family and non-sexual friendships. i enjoy being able to love my friends and family completely, and uncomplicated by physical desire. i also love what i do: political activism, writing, taking care of animals. there’s plenty of love of those activities such that i don’t need to have love in a relationship.

    i feel very liberated in this reality, freed from the annoying burden of always having to care for a partner. i suppose this sounds cold and selfish, but i don’t deny it anymore. i am what i am. and i’ve also overcome, completely, the scars of my teenage years. which are myriad. but after my divorce, and realizing that i could act like the rich, beautiful gay men i knew, it was really easy to forget all those silly drama ramas in my past. i look back at my marriage and realize, so much of what motivated it was borne of my teen years, and my need to have revenge and retribution and prove something to myself that i thought i had to prove, because of some silly relationship event when i was a teen.

    my plan is to adopt a gay teen or child out of an abusive situation, as my own personal “elder insurance.” really, i think that’s why so many mature people still chase for the Ultimate Long Lasting Relationship. fear of dying old and alone is powerful, and i don’t deny it. but since my nephew and nieces have been born, i’ve realized that love of someone you care for is easy, and you don’t even have to reproduce to do it. i’ve also come to understand that love is fleeting, and always in motion/changing. even the most solid marriages and long term relationships are different from day to day. i embrace that truth, and never expect anyone to love me or even like me, over time, despite how much we enjoy each other’s bodies, company, money, whatever. to me, the love i feel for people is much more special, knowing it is also fleeting and precious.

    ideally, i’d live in a commune with other gay people who are of the “hook up” type, and no one would have a ‘lasting’ relationship just as everyone would be free to have sex when they felt like it. i suppose this makes me very weird.

  31. or should horny 15 year old girls be hooking up with horny 22 year old guys, and emotionally mature 25 year old women be with emotionally mature 33 year old men?

    No. I hate this “girls mature earlier” bullshit, it gets used a lot by certain kinds of men to excuse completely catastrophic power imbalances, or to minimise the damage done to teenage girls who have “relationships” with adult men.

    Girls may be socialised into emotional “maturity”, ie being less selfish and self centred, earlier than boys are, because they’re not given the same license to be selfish. Doesn’t mean that they have more power. I’d argue it means the opposite, or at least, that male immaturity means the opposite. It’s very, very difficult to deal with an emotionally immature person who’s in a socially more powerful position than you. And emotionally immature men don’t have less social power as a result of that lack of maturity.

    So yeah, the difference in levels of emotional maturity gets wildly exaggerated by people with various agendas, but believing that a 15-year old girl has the same capacity to cope with relationships as a 22-year old man? The most charitable way of interpreting someone holding that belief is to think that they don’t know any women, or don’t empathise with the women they do know. I hate being so harsh but damn.

    Anyway, given the age-related variation in libido across both genders, it should be 40-year-old woman hooking up with 20 year old men.

    PS Of course the marketplace metaphor for relationships is dehumanising. It doesn’t become less so when you study economics, IMO. It may have some use for modelling aggregate human behaviour in the relationship area– I’ve read Gary Becker and I am not convinced; I basically think it was a precursor to evo-psych that filled the same cultural niche and had the same Just So Story quality but didn’t capture the public imagination quite the same way– but anyone thinking of their own sexual relationships in market terms, is someone to run the hell away from.

  32. “Well… it’s less dehumanizing when you study economics and you view “marketplace” as a conceptual lens for any human interaction, and not necessarily as an indicator of a financial transaction.”

    The “marketplace” b.s. does not become less dehumanizing when you study economics. It’s just that people who study economics becomes less likely to -view- it as degrading. There are those of us who actually believe that economics is in and of itself degrading, as well.

    Referring to people as being “on the market” reduces people to objects or chattel. I absolutely have little to no tolerance for any system or metaphor that reduces people to objects or chattel, thanks. And when it comes to “hooking-up”, guess who is most likely to be referred to as “on the market”? It sure as hell isn’t the men.

  33. You buy and sell things in the marketplace. I’m not a thing to be bought and sold, and relationships–even fleeting one-night stands–are far more complex than a simple sales interaction. FFS.

  34. As soon as I read this piece I sent it to like five people. I had to share.
    I remember my first time. It wasn’t the same, but it was one which societal “norms” would say is not advised. I wasn’t in “love”. I wasn’t in a relationship. Unlike Nona, it was not a pleasurable experience for me. But it was one I now look back on 12yrs later and appreciate for what it is. I decided I wanted to do it. I did it. I realised that sex didn’t equal love to me and wanted to try it. I started my journey. It’s been a fun journey. It has also been one littered w/the insecurities and inhibitions of social mores. I have not experienced have the pleasure I’ve aspired to b/c I start to buy into all the crap that’s out there about love and sex.
    The diary post could have been written by my 18yr old self. And reading it isn’t such a bad idea for my 29yr old self to remember either.
    As women we need to own our sexual journeys and destinies. I also believe that this article can be related to be queer or straight. I know b/c I’m queer and not once did I feel like I didn’t relate as evidenced by my first paragraph. This experience can be universal. Sex can be. Wanting someone to call and wondering what a text means is universal.

  35. @ Donald:
    “I’m really uncomfortable with the idea suggested by @The Flash that there is some social order which should determine what is correct behaviour in relationships.”

    There’s always social order. The project of activists and idealists is to reorganize it along more just lines. Right now, there’s a social order that says that if you don’t have sex prior to being in a committed relationship, you’re probably only going to find a willing partner in a religious or otherwise niche community (which have their own, parallel, social orders). Is that fair, and to what extent is it hurting more women than it helps (by reducing the risk of slut-shaming for “normal” levels of hooking up that previously weren’t tolerated, even though they were inevitable).

    @umami:
    re: the meme on girls maturing earlier– sure, a lot of it is about girls being socialized to the traits that are considered “mature” in modernity. That doesn’t come into conflict with what the OP wrote, that “I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time.” point being that she wanted a relationship and these douchebags weren’t ready for it. For all the exceptions that exist out there, the tendency is that, yes, women are frequently ready for the obligations and commitments of an emotional relationship before men are. Admittedly, 22 was an exaggeration. maybe 19 or 20 would’ve been the right pick. That doesn’t eliminate the point, though: there are gonna be imbalances of power in a heterosexual relationship where people are at the same level of emotional development, PROBABLY BECAUSE men are socialized to amass power without focusing on emotional development, while women are socialized to focus on those “emotional development” tags, so a man and a woman who are at the same level of emotional development are going to have an asymetrical power dynamic, because she’ll have gotten to that emotional point directly, while he will have stumbled there on the side while amassing money/power.

  36. I agree with S.L.

    I knew, when I was fifteen, that sex and an emotional/spiritual connection were intimately linked in my mind. I felt comfortable with that. I turned down possible relationships or sexual encounters which I didn’t think would last, and grew very comfortable with my own body and sexuality. When I was 17, I met another high school senior on the net with whom I clicked on a fundamental level; he came up to be near me during college, we were a couple for those years, and we married shortly before turning 22. We had – and have continued to have – everything I knew I wanted when I was fifteen: emotional intimacy, a great connection, and kickass sex.

    But the whole time, I was made to feel like shit. By peers who accused me of being a prude or not knowing anything about sex; by my doctor and my sex health instructor in high school who were worried that I wasn’t “interested” enough in boys and suggested I might be “slower to develop” than other girls (I didn’t point out I’d been masturbating since I was 12; I kept my feelings of hurt inadequacy to myself); by magazines, and television shows, and movies, which suggested that sexual relationships are a part and parcel of every highschooler’s life and only “losers” don’t have them; by relatives or, later, mentors who reminisced about the sexual revolution and said “everybody” has “urges” in high school and it’s “natural” to “experiment” with others; by people who suggested, yes, that I was not “liberated” or “empowered” by monogamy, that I was “inexperienced” and “couldn’t tell if I was having bad sex” since I’d only had one sex partner, that I was, in general, ignorant and repressed and not terribly sexual of a being (apparently enlightenment can only be found once a woman has had a certain number of other people’s body parts in her vagina).

    It was damn hard for me, at times, to not temporarily call for an open relationship with my S.O. and go have a couple of flings, just so people would get off my back. So that, when having “girl talk” with friends, people wouldn’t look at me askance if it came out that I had only had one sex partner. Whenever people talked about “slut-shaming” I wanted to grit my teeth, and point out that the flip-side of the coin is true, as well, and women are “prude-shamed” just as often. I knew I wouldn’t like sex without emotional intimacy – the idea made me feel hollow, bored, and vaguely nauseated – but for a good part of my mid-twenties I was honestly convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with me for not having wanted to hook up in high school and college. For a short while, it even affected my sex life, because I felt too shitty about myself during sex to enjoy it. I am not the only person (male and female inclusive) who I know this has happened to.

    So to Jill, yes, I also hope for a future in which teenage girls can have whatever kind of safe sexual relationships they want, secure in the knowledge that they are not ruining their lives, that they are not less of a person for doing so, and that their value is not based on who or what they do or do not allow between their legs.

    But I wish – wish, wish, wish – that we could stop using terms like “rushed into having” sex, as if the reason I have sex in high school was because I wasn’t mature enough to handle it, or mock those of us who wanted relationships by speaking about the desire for a “monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend”. I wish there was some acknowledgement that there have been some negative effects of the hook-up culture which aren’t just linked to us “not speaking up about what we want” or having to “use sex as currency when we want a relationship.” There have been judgmental aspects to the hook-up culture which DO pressure people into having sex, and which perceives hook-ups and casual sex as a “normal” part of life or of growing up (and, just like heteronormativity, it implies that the rest of us are “abnormal” or that there’s some fundamental part of living that we’re missing out on).

    We’re here, too, you know. We exist. We link sex to emotional intimacy.

    And there is nothing wrong with us, either.

  37. @Sarah–great, great point. Thanks for writing that. (Although let it be said–I don’t have any problems with monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriends. I have one right now. I just have a problem with that being the only circumstance under which some people think teen girls should be having sex.)

  38. Word to everything umami said @31.

    I saw how a few of those 20-year-old man with a teenage girl “relationships” worked out and it was just pathetic. A friend of mine in high-school met a guy online who was around 20 and he drove over a few weekends *from Canada* (we’re in the US) to see her. Then he cheated on/dumped her for a friend of hers; this resulted in girl A deleting the Facebook account of girl B because she was a “boyfriend stealing bitch” and it started a little war of retaliation that the guy happily sat back and watched. No one in that situation was mature enough to be dating; the girls called each other names in the hall and wrote mean crap on *Facebook* for godsake, and the guy was the kind of loser who had to go to another country to find a girlfriend and who then created a lot of drama with a bunch of underage teenagers.

    Teenage girls aren’t that mature, they just hide the crazy/insecurity/childishness better. The asshole guy probably thought the girls he cheated on *were* mature because they hid a great deal of the angst and backbiting from him, and tried to show each other up and act like “adults” for him, while he was allowed to play it like a dating sim and fool around and act like a childish idiot without losing his access to sex.

    When young women drop everything to impress older men (the only *valuable* people in the equation) of course these men are going to pretend it’s not fucked up; it’s validation for them that nubile women (read: little girls) find them attractive (if they pretend that they aren’t taking advantage of almost-children) and it also lets them get away with crap a grown woman is less likely to put up with.

  39. >>I knew I wouldn’t like sex without emotional intimacy – the idea made me feel hollow, bored, and vaguely nauseated – but for a good part of my mid-twenties I was honestly convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with me for not having wanted to hook up in high school and college.<<

    THIS. I can totally relate.

    Thank you Sarah and S.L. I agree completely. Wonderful points.

  40. Sarah, thanks for your post. I love this line
    We’re here, too, you know. We exist. We link sex to emotional intimacy.

  41. @sarah … I am the same way as you, and I am male. I spent my teen years (and early twenties) as a virgin. Although I told others and myself it was because no woman wanted me I can remember several times turning down chances at casual sexual encounters. What sarah said really resonates with me, I had so many of those feelings (and still do!)

    Frankly, I just wasn’t ready. I have a healthy sex life with my partner now, but for us sex is really just a small part of our relationship, and partnership seems to be so much more what we are. I fully endorse and support people who want to have as much sex as possible, but I also would prefer that the choice to have less or no sex outside emotional relationships was more accepted in feminist and sex-positive circles.

  42. I liked this piece a lot.

    It reminds me of something that Susie Bright said — “There is no pride in love.” If you’re going to be a free agent, sexually, there are going to be bad choices, and awkwardness, and heartbreak. It doesn’t always make for great propaganda against the socially conservative sex police. Sometimes you’re just lonely and confused. And yet, it’s worth it.

    I had exactly the opposite experience from Nona as a teenager; I was terrified of sex, ran away from boys I had crushes on, and my best friend was my #2 pencil. I found love in college. I loved the boy, loved sex, lost him through my own fault. And that, despite its monogamy, was very much a 21st century relationship, as much as hookups are — we didn’t “date,” in the formal, highly gendered sense. We were just friends, and then best friends, and then best friends who slept together. I actually preferred that to the dinner-and-a-movie kabuki that my girlfriends idealized. It leaves you more confused; but then I think there’s a tradeoff between clearly defined roles and sincere intimacy, and I’ll take sincere intimacy any day.

    Now I’m in the weird position, for the first time, of having a potential sexual relationship with someone with whom I’m not going to have a long-term relationship. (Logistical reasons; I’m moving away soon.) Can BadSarah get laid without collapsing into a puddle of slut-shame? Will BadSarah ever reconcile with God? Who knows. I want it very badly — I want the wild youth I haven’t had yet — I’m still not sure if my constitution can take it, but I’ll gamble. I have a right to gamble.

    You can’t present a real person’s romantic history as a feminist triumph unless you accept a certain degree of uncertainty and confusion as healthy or at least as a fair price to pay for freedom. I think that’s one thing Nona was saying, and I think it’s true.

    I think my equal aversion for the “hookup culture” per se, as well as “dating” per se, is that either way a woman fulfills a formalized role, rather than just interacting with another human being. If you relate to each other as people, then whether the relationship is brief or long, monogamous or non-monogamous, it’s a good, human thing, I think.

    If you don’t have good will for the other person, I think, it’s no good; “love” is a tough word to use because we don’t often talk about loving a near-stranger, or loving several people at once, but even when you don’t have Edward-and-Bella “love” you can have good will. Philia, which has connotations of liking, friendship, and love, is probably better than any English word. I couldn’t imagine enjoying sex without good will or philia. I could definitely imagine enjoying it without lifetime romantic love.

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