We’ve created new ways to listen to music through the I-Pod and Napster. We’ve developed new methods of communication through Sidekicks and G-Chat. We’ve made it cool for men to dress nicely through the term ‘metrosexual.’ We’ve become more comfortable with homosexuality through (believe it or not) shows like Real World and Will & Grace. We’ve even found new ways to have relationships. Through hooking up.
Personally, I think hooking up is one example of how our generation is struggling to handle the freedoms/liberties that the hippie generation and our parents worked hard to get for themselves, from political power (Roe v. Wade) to religious freedom (note the rise in young adults who say they are “spiritual” but not “religious.”)
So on the hooking up front, I’m talking about the ability to see how our past and present attitudes and behavior with regard to sexuality influences our future outcomes. Case in point, I believe something like 50 percent of all pregnancies are unplanned and a great many of these are to people under 30 years of age. The past or present behavior may be to have sex without any type of protection because a condom doesn’t feel good or you think the pill makes you gain weight (one of the biggest myths in women’s health), but the future outcome could be sitting at home on a Friday night changing diapers.
Still, I don’t pretend to think it’s as simple as past + present = future. Nor do I think fear tactics are effective to a great extent. There are some major complexities and intricacies in understanding hooking up. Here are a few of my thoughts on the issue broken down into the 5 Ws (what, where, when, why, who) and how.
What:
Hooking up, by definition, does not simply mean you had a one-night stand. Instead, hooking up can also mean using sex as the primary objective and outlet of a relationship. In other words, instead of going on dates or becoming friends in order to establish a connection, sex and intimacy are used to establish a connection. A colleague of mine recently called this “running the bases backwards.”
For example, when you go to a bar and meet a girl/guy then have sex that night, you’ve officially “hooked up.” Regardless of if the relationship develops into a more legitimate sort and you live happily ever after, hooking up was used as a method to establish a stronger bond with someone instead of the things our (non-hippie) parents used to do, you know like courtship, dating, and time.
Knocked Up was a great movie, but it was a movie written by Hollywood writers starring Hollywood actors and paid for by Hollywood producers. The outcome of hooking up is seldom so pleasing in reality. Unless your definition of pleasing involves another notch on your belt.
Where:
Hooking up happens in high schools, college, workplaces, even amongst individuals in supposedly-monogamous relationships, but I think that the root of the hooking up culture is the American college and university.
In my opinion, hooking up is most prevalent (maybe not statistically, but behaviorally) in America’s colleges and universities that have two particular aspects: 1) a diverse geographic population (i.e. students coming from various parts of the country) and 2) a large private-school, privileged, and/or Greek contingent (i.e. students coming from higher socio-economic backgrounds). Don’t get me wrong, people at community colleges and junior colleges hook up too, but its schools with affluent kids that helps drive the movement in my opinion not only because they can bare the cost socially (hooking up is seen as an OK thing for most 15-25 year-olds, but for the kind of kids that join fraternities and sororities it’s almost some type of ritual.)
This is not to say that the culture of hooking up is not existent in high schools and amongst young adults that aren’t in college or poor students, but I think college - particularly those with more affluent student bodies - serves as the hub for Americans to land and take off from the hook up airport. And, especially amongst affluent colleges and universities - perhaps not the Ivy League schools because they are so academically rigorous, but definitely the schools just below them - where drug use and other forms of experimentation are typical.
Schools like Georgetown and Southern Methodist is where you’ll find the ultimate trend setters for the hooking up culture. And this is projected both down, to high school students who have older siblings, and up to 20-somethings who want to continue living like college students.
Who:
While nearly every American from middle school to Middle America will be exposed to the concept of hooking up at some point, college students are almost guaranteed to participate in making that concept a reality.
Schools like Duke University and George Washington University, where students are coming from various parts of the country and bring a care-free attitude about what their lives will be like in 5 or 10 years - not because they don’t care, but because they don’t have to - make hooking up look easy (as evidenced by Lara Sessions Stepp’s book ‘Unhooked’). One of my theories on this is that these schools have the perfect mix of those two populations I mentioned earlier: geographic diversity and more affluent/upper-middle class socio-economic makeup.
In other words, when you get a bunch of girls or guys from, say, New England who went to private school and grew up in favorable socio-economic situations and mix them with girls or guys from, say, the South who come from similar backgrounds and put them on a college campus far away from home guess what happens? They become friends - because their similar backgrounds make them more likely to identify with one another (name how many of your friends don’t look like you or come from similar socio-economic situations) - and those friendships/associations often materialize in the form of intrigue.
For example, if you’re a guy from Boston and you grew up in a well-to-do family, and you become friends with a girl from a well-to-do family in Atlanta, there is more intrigue there than a Boston guy and girl dating or an Atlanta girl and guy dating because you already dated those girls/guys in high school.
Now, if we’re talking about relationships things get different because people tend to gravitate toward similar geography to establish a long-term connection - “oh, you’re from Dallas too? what part?” - but hook ups are far more reliant on intrigue than connection. Quick question: Name as many couples (that have been together for at least one year) as you can that didn’t come from the same part of the country?
I’m guessing it’s fewer than five couples. But if I asked you to name all the places people you or your friends hooked up with, I’d bet the list of people would be from everywhere from Timbuktu to Tennessee.
Why:
Our generation, while making great progress in the frequency of communication through cell phones, text messaging, IM, and email, has experienced a rapid decline in the value of communication. We call anyone we talk to on IM a friend and we pride ourselves in the 500 MySpace or Facebook “friends” we have. Many of us will never write another letter in our lives and I don’t think a Facebook message will ever replace the value of that type of communication. MySpace and Facebook are only two examples of how we’ve used technology to promote quantity over quality of relationships (and communication with others).
So although we have more ways to communicate, we lack the ability to communicate effectively because many of us have far more “petty” friendships and relationships than our parents ever did. Sociologists say a person knows 200 people “well” and that creates a network, but MySpace and Facebook - and G-Chat contact list - indicate we should value the number of friends/contacts over how well we know them.
The de-valuing of our relationships has made it difficult to have meaningful communication. While we’ve surpassed our parents in the ability to talk about things like race and sex, we’ve fallen behind in our ability to effectively communicate. I can’t tell you how many smart people I know, people with college degrees and people you would consider “intellectuals”, that struggle to piece together their thoughts either in conversation or on paper.
So to help our generation, slogans and phrases like “Just Say No” and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” are being used to help us communicate on key issues. Unfortunately, there has yet to be a “Just Say No”-level statement about sexuality. While the HIV/AIDS efforts have helped with some sexual behaviors, t hey have also indicated that it takes a widespread and sustained (and repetitive) campaign to reach our generation to enact positive behavioral change. And PSAs don’t work like they used to.
Think about this for a moment: Every time we go to bars, many of us are letting our friends leave with random guys/girls without wondering a) is he/she safe? b) is he/she healthy? or c) is he/she doing the right thing? Why? Because we’ve gained so much independence and lost so much communication ability that even the best of friends struggle to call each other out on personal behavior. It’s much easier to talk about it the next morning.
Now, I should make one thing clear, the actual act of hooking up is not new to America. Poor Americans have been hooking up for generations because the benefits of not hooking up (particularly marriage and socio-economic stability) were not as glamourous as those for more well-off Americans (who were promised the American Dream if they got an education, got married, then had sex in order to have kids), but the culture of hooking up has been greatly enhanced by middle income (while poor kids went to Vietnam, middle-to-high income kids dodged the draft, opposed the war, and spreaded the message of “free love”) and now higher income America (college students who don’t necessarily know how they’re going to improve upon what their parents had).
That said, it leads me to something I’ve discussed before: privilege. Privilege is based on having power and control of institutions, i.e. government, money, the church. And having the ability to manipulate those things to the elite group’s liking. But now that one of those institutions - marriage - has been broken down to about a 50 percent completion rate, young adults - even the children of the “elites” - are throwing themselves all over the field like Tom Brady passes. And why not? We’re all going to be divorced with kids later anyway so we might as well not concern ourselves with the long-term right now.
When:
I’ve already shared my thoughts on college so I’ll focus on another when: post-college. It is my full belief that the post-college years are the most critical years in our lives today. It used to be that from 12-18 you made all the important decisions about education, relationship behavior, sexual activity, etc. That remains largely true with regard to how important education is and what kind of adulthood we’ll set ourselves up for, but now, from 22-28, we’re making decisions that determine what type of life we’re going to have on the below-the-surface levels, i.e. instead of asking ourselves “will I get married?” we’re asking “will I be happily married?” and “when can we stop using condoms?” instead of “when can we start having sex?”
Unfortunately, we’re completely and utterly clueless as to how exactly to find answers. We’ve been looking through a window most of our lives for answers and our parents, teachers, and clergy have often been outside lecturing us while we sit inside. That’s the truth for the large part up through college where - even with the liberties that college entails - we still live very structured and formulaic lives for the most part. But after college, the double doors to adult decision making are opened for the first time and many of us retreat inside - move back home, stay with our college sweetheart even if we’re not completely sure they’re the “one” - while others struggle to come to grips with this newfound control that we were never really made aware of by doing things like traveling the world or freelancing throughout their 20s both with their careers and their relationships. There are a plethora of things we can do to try to control our outcomes during these years when it seems so scary to completely let it all fall into place the way our parents say it happened for them.
Hooking up is an outlet of control. Instead of opening one’s self up emotionally and introspectively to assess our decision making on a grand level, many of us seek the comfort of (and control through) something on the ground level and physical/sexual activity often serves as a stop gap for emotional discomfort. In other words, I don’t feel good or certain about my life right now, but I can at least feel good about tonight and I’m certain that sex is good.
For women, this can indicate low self-assuredness leading to low regard for one’s body (only recently have women been charged with the ability to choose for themselves what they do with their bodies). For men, it may mean low self-confidence (in becoming the successful, dominant man of yesteryears) leading to over-compensation through sex. While women have gained important rights and abilities and traveled new heights in society, there remains some hint of the typical female role of mother/wife/support system, especially in African-American and Latino communities where the single mother or matriarchal family is typical. Similarly, studies have proven that men, through the Y-chromosome, are biologically infused with a high concern over their ability to impregnate a woman and have children. It’s not too much of a stretch to see why it’s so hard for men to want to put that condom on, even when they know it’s the right thing to do.
How:
This is the most difficult part in my opinion. How does hooking up occur and how does hooking up effect our society and, perhaps more importantly, our generation?
Personally, I’ve never been the type to go to bars looking to “score.” Call me effeminate if you want, but I need real emotional connections. This is not to say that I’ve never “hooked up” because that’s far from the truth. But only recently have I realized that even when I did hook up, it was in the effort of filling the emotional gap that I had at the time more than trying to get off.
I think one of the reasons hooking up occurs is because we’re all trying to fill gaps and we think - whether we admit it or not - sex is one way. This is starting to show both short- and long-term ramifications on our society and generation in quality of life, quality of interpersonal communications, quality of relationships and friendships, quality of community, and sheer quantity of unplanned pregnancies, STD transfers, and the widespread pandemic that is low self-image. Our hooking up culture is forcing too many of us to look at ourselves as physical beings more than we look at ourselves and understand ourselves as mental and spiritual beings.
A lot of people in our parents’ generation know what it means when they hear “mind, body, and soul,” and each time someone in our generation “hooks up” I believe we lose touch with two-thirds of that equation. Perhaps our parents don’t know as much about the body as we do at similar ages, but they seem to have a much better formula for the mind and soul (even the hippies had that).
