My mom is clueless when it comes to new slang. She still says things like “coolio” and “that’s the bomb” with little to no understanding of what it actually means. Usually I find it amusing and let it slide, but when she called me and told me she “hooked up with the rabbi this weekend” I was quick to correct her.
“Mom, you did not ‘hook up’ with our Rabbi.”
“No, but I did! We had a meeting at the temple to discuss plans for your sister’s batmitzvah.”
As I’m sure most of you are well aware, ‘hooking up’ means something very different from just getting together to hang out with someone (although that’s usually how it starts.) Hooking up is popularly defined as “Any form of getting some type of [sexual] action, such as making out, feeling things, oral pleasure, or sex. A ‘hook up’ is what’s referred to as doing those things when you’re not [formally dating] the person” (
Urbandictionary.com). Though hooking up has existed on college campuses for as long as there’s been alcohol, it seems it has never been quite so prevalent, or at least not openly so. Some students even feel that hooking up has replaced the dating scene altogether. Recently
Kathleen Bogle conducted a study on the college hook up culture, entitled,
“Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus” based on a qualitative analysis of data gathered from many interviews at both a small private university and a large public university. Her findings explain some surprising things that you probably already know, like defining “
friends with benefits” (friends who hook up but don’t have romantic feelings for one another), “
booty calls” (when you call someone to hook up with), and ‘
hooking up” (a vague term for any kind of sexual activity.) But perhaps one of the most interesting findings of the study is that a lot of college students don’t really know what’s going on. It’s as if someone threw away a gigantic rule book and said, “Eh, lets just kinda play it by ear.” Bogle writes, “When I asked students to explain how someone would end up hooking up with someone with whom they had no prior sexual interaction, they would often answer by saying, ‘alcohol’ or ‘I don’t know, it just happens.’” In fact, the answers to most of her questions were confused mumblings and explanations of how it depends on the situation. But the main problems
Bogle identified were these:
The term “hooking up” is vague. Students gage what is normal behavior based on stories from their peers, so when you’re not really sure if your peers are kissing or having sex every weekend, it makes a difference. People might choose to go further during a hookup than they would otherwise based on what they assume their friends mean by ‘hooking up.’ Additionally, many women in the study admitted to developing feelings for men they were consistently hooking up with. But much to their dismay, “Too much sexual interaction in the early stages of meeting someone was seen as ruining any chance you might otherwise have to pursue a relationship with that person.” This puts women with a sex drive in the unfortunate situation of having to sleep with people they don’t actually like if they want instant gratification, and hold out with the guys they’re attracted to the most.
The “passé” dating scene was much more give-and-take. The man would take the woman out, and a relationship would develop before any sexual activity took place. It was almost as if sex was the motivating factor for dating. With casual random hookups becoming so common on college campuses, men are finding fewer reasons to commit to a relationship. So why do women seem to want relationships more than men do? The study has a few explanations for that too, and it’s not the evolutionary “Men want to spread their seed” reasoning that you might expect. It’s the sexual double standard that men and women face. If a guy has a lot of sexual partners, he is perceived as being cool, whereas if a girl has many sexual partners, she is seen as a “whore” and gets a bad reputation. We can talk all we want about women’s sexual liberation, but as long as that stigma is there, women are hardly sexually liberated. Sexually active women in the hook up culture usually opt to avoid that bad reputation by hooking up with the same person again and again, although that usually results in attachment and heartbreak over time. Many of the women in the study grew sick of the hook up culture, and toward the end of their college career were looking for more substantial relationships. However, with the dating scene growing increasingly rare, they felt like they had to hook up and leave the fate of the relationship in the hands of the guy. What that leads to is a male dominated relationship culture. The female bargaining tool of sex becomes less persuasive when it can be easily found elsewhere, allowing the man in a multiple-hook-up situation to dictate the entire future of the relationship. Many times these types of relationships have no definitive end. As one interview in the study explains:
“Rebecca: …I think most girls want to try to find [or] stick with one guy so they can pretend they’re dating them. I do it all the time. I haven’t had a boyfriend yet, but I’ve had two fake boyfriends…You can kind of think that you’re together because you think you’re the only one in his life and he seems to care about you, you know?...You can kind of just make believe that [you’re together], like whatever he says you can twist it around to make it seem like something else. And all your friends are telling you that he loves you and that you are bound to be married, but you’re never [truly] together. So, it’s kind of that whole fake relationship thing.
Bogle: When do you figure out that you’re not really together?
Rebecca: Umm, when there’s another girl.”
As William Shakespeare once said, “The course of true love never did run smooth”…In bed.
