Last February, I blogged on the phenomenon of “Dudes” — college and college-educated men in their 20s who, during off hours, dress like skanks, drink a lot of beer, watch dumb TV shows, and have sex with as many women as possible as long as it doesn’t entail a relationship. I referred to Kay S. Hymowitz’s
article that had just appeared in City Journal — “Child-Man in the Promised Land,” in which she analyzed the significance of this new kind of male for society in general, and for young women, in particular.
Today, Charles M. Blow has a
column in The New York Times about how “hooking up” (i.e., having sex without any expectation of an emotional relationship) has now almost completely replaced dating. Hooking up and dudes both come out of the revolution that took place during the 60s, when young women began to think of sex before marriage as not just a right, but an obligation — to themselves.
In his column, Blow cites Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus (2008). (See also Bogle’s article, “Hooking Up”: What Educators Need to Know,” in the March 21, 2008 issue of The Chronicle.) On her Web site, Bogle says that her book is based on extensive interviews of college students and young alumni. The author’s purpose was to understand and analyze the phenomenon of hooking up — how it came about, how it works, how it affects women compared to men, etc. — rather than to engage in a moral discussion about it.
Blow, too, remains neutral on the matter, merely noting that hooking up has become thoroughly commonplace, that it affects young men and women differently, that it goes hand in hand with a lot of drinking, and that it’s “here to stay” (a bold claim, when you think about it, for anyone who recalls Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation about “the end of history”).
Like Bogle and Blow, I don’t see any value in agonizing over the morality of hooking up. Once sexual morals have experienced a sea change the like of hooking up, indignation is rather pointless. Besides, in some ways the demise of dating (and its predecessor, courtship) is a good thing. In a post-romantic age, where deep yearning is almost always the subject of irony, romantic courtship of any kind is almost quaint.
When I went to high school, dating was the norm. I hardly dated at all (l’ve always felt bad that I was never asked to a prom). Instead, I went to a lot of necking parties where I seemed to be relegated to standing around talking to other wallflower girls. But I dated just enough to learn that it was a hybrid of awkward friendship and raging hormones. And it bore no resemblance whatsoever to courtship of the kind I’d encountered in novels, where at least one of the characters would feel a deep longing for another. High-school courtship meant deep longing, all right — for me, deep longing for the wretched evening to come to an end. So hooking up seems vastly preferable to even one of those tortuous dates spent with a guy I didn’t really like who in turn didn’t really like me.
Hooking up at least encourages a sort of friendship between the sexes — flawed and imperfect as it might be. People talk to one another after sex, and remain friends. Yet without any place for repressed desire, it also strikes me that hooking up is profoundly sad. It destroys the possibility for romance.
Perhaps this is all for the good, since romance — as we know from history and novels both — can be so very dangerous. I can’t quite figure out, however, how young people who grow up entirely within a system of hooking up, suddenly can turn around and love a partner for life. Or even, for that matter, manage to understand and feel for Anna Karenina and Vronsky, or Héloïse and Abelard.
Perhaps I’m not really getting it. Perhaps after young people hook up and are lolling about afterwards, smoking cigarettes and talking about Shakespeare (ha!), they say things like, “Antony and Cleopatra hooked up,” or “Romeo and Juliet never hooked up.” Maybe they find some empathy with those couples — neither of which, after all is said and done, was capable of sustaining a long-term relationship, either.
