by Alison Hoover | Quick and easy.
In the film Outdated, a Tufts female pointed out that when going over to a guy’s room after a frat party, “you’re not there to see his pet fish.” The film, produced by a group of student in the Tisch College program “Producing Films for Social Change,” was shown at a recent discussion about the alleged “Hook Up Culture” at Tufts. The goal of this event, sponsored by the Campus Violence Prevention Project at Tufts, was to discuss whether there is a hook up culture at Tufts, and if so, what sort of consequences this phenomenon has. This topic is also receiving increasing media attention, including the book Unhooked, by Laura Sessions Stepp, a writer for the Washington Post. After listening to students describe experiences from their social lives and comparing their experiences to those described by Stepp, the evidence overwhelmingly leans in the direction that [our generation] will become even more closely associated with the slightly older “Therapy Generation” as a result of the harmful consequences of the hook up culture.
At the hook up culture discussion, students first attempted to define the term “hooking up.” Students at the discussion and in the film Outdated defined a “hook up” as any encounter from making out to having intercourse that is separate from an actual relationship, but the general consensus was that an individual’s definition of this term relied heavily on that person’s circle of friends. The level of acceptability of different elements of this range of activities also varied, along with ideas of whether relationships or hook ups are more desirable. Stepp suggests this term is left deliberately vague because “it erases any guilt you may feel at what you’re doing.” Many comments from the film Outdated affirmed this sentiment. One student described the late night party scene by saying, “It’s almost kind of like a buffet when you go to a frat.” This characterization completely strips away all meaning from the human interaction that is actually taking place. In this type of environment, students no longer consider the emotional aspects of their actions. For many, spending time blowing off steam on a Friday night means finding some type of physical pleasure, without much thought for emotional, or even (heaven forbid) intellectual, pleasure.
Many students at the discussion questioned feeling guilty at all in response to hooking up, instead joking, “Gay or straight, alcohol lubricates us all,” as one student commented in Outdated. Essentially many students sidestep the issue of guilt when they decide that hooking up is pleasurable and what they believe they want to do. Stepp described this aspect of the hook up culture mentality by saying, “Young women are being raised with the idea that they not only can but should go for everything guys go for. They have taken that message to heart and essentially said, ‘We deserve to have as much fun with our sexuality as guys do. We should be able to pursue guys like they pursue us.’” This mentality ignores the physical differences between men and women. For example, after sexual intercourse, different chemicals flow through men’s and women’s bodies. Oxytocin, the chemical that enters a woman’s body, “makes the body want to hold and caress.” In a man’s body, on the other hand, different chemicals flow, which are more prone to causing sleep than holding and caressing. Stepp describes “the defining characteristic of the hook-up culture [as] the ability to unhook from a partner at any time,” which gives males a distinct advantage over females in the hook-up culture, in many cases leaving females with the difficult task of reconciling their emotions and their carefree desires. One student characterized this well at the hook up culture discussion when he described the “imbalance between emotional and sexual stages of a relationship,” which “makes communication more difficult.”
The hook up culture is a cancerous mutation of the movement of the past 100+ years to give women more rights. This is a mutation because it fails to address that women should strive to improve their lives and opportunities, not simply blindly fumble for exact equality. As Stepp says, “Real power is not having sex with every Tom, Dick and Harry. That gets dull, boring, has no meaning and can hurt you. Real power comes from knowing when and with whom to have sex, and what good sex is. Sex within a loving, committed relationship is good sex. Hook up sex is not.
Miss Hoover is a junior majoring in Political Science.
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