Hookup Culture Spreads Beyond College
“Hooking up” has replaced dating for young people across America. Once largely confined to universities, this type of fornication, the practice of having sex with no relationship strings attached—marital or otherwise—is now mainstream.
Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus and a professor of sociology and criminal justice, has studied the cultural shift toward hookups. In the past, she found that young people “hooked up” while they were at college, but they mostly stopped after graduation. Now she’s found that the trend is catching on among young working adults.
“The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening,” said Bogle. “In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating.”
Social networking and texting are helping the hookup culture spread beyond the campus. “What that means is that you have contact with many, many more people, but each of those relationships takes up a little bit less of your life,” said May Wilkerson, 25, when interviewed by National Public Radio. “That fragmentation of the social world creates a lot of loneliness.”
“We’ve moved away from a dating culture where plans were made days in advance,” said Bogle. “Now everything is spur of the moment, since technology allows people to make multiple plans for the night with various groups of friends.” If someone ends up alone late at night, they can easily arrange a hookup.
Elizabeth Welsh, 25, who lives in Boston and graduated from college in 2005, said that dating was a joke among her and her friends. “Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing,” she said. “Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It’s so cliché—isn’t that funny?”
Young people are finding that dating gets in the way of their career plans and hanging out with friends. A casual hookup takes much less effort.
Avery Leake, also 25, found that women just weren’t interested in a relationship. Most “just wanted sex.”
Bogle traced the hookup culture back to the ’60s and ’70s, when co-ed dorms became common and universities relaxed rules about members of the opposite sex visiting each other’s rooms. Now, even co-ed rooms are allowed in some colleges. “What you see on college campuses now, even in some cases Catholic campuses, is that young men and women have unrestricted access to each other,” said Bogle.
Today, only 28 percent of college students say they are virgins.
“Has dating become a lost art?” Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Plain Truth, asked. “It would certainly seem so. … It seems young people no longer know what to do with themselves on dates. Perhaps most dates today are spent either in a car, parked by the roadside in a dark and secluded spot, where the time is spent in ‘necking,’ or in sexual intercourse, or else in a darkened motion picture theater letting their minds drift with a ready-made daydream. Dating is no longer stimulating mentally, upbuilding socially and intellectually beneficial. It tends not to build but to destroy character.”
That was in his time, the 1980s. He would be shocked to see how much further the trend has degenerated a single generation later.
For more information on how dating should lead to a happy, fulfilling relationship, read Mr. Armstrong’s book The Missing Dimension in Sex.