Hooking-Up Culture Examined

Inside Higher Ed today offers an interview with sociologist Kathleen A. Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus. For those with an interest in the way undergraduates tend to live their lives these days, the interview has significant data, expressed with remarkable insight.

Some findings that we found interesting, though unsurprising:

• Students believe that there's more hooking up happening on their campus than actually is, though there's still a lot.
• Alcohol abuse plays a big role in hooking up.
• Students who engage in the hooking-up culture as undergrads find it difficult to transition to dating, which most attempt after leaving college.
• Women who hook up express dissatisfaction at the way that hooking up tends not to lead to long term relationships; men who hook up are mostly unconcerned.
• Students, mostly women, express discomfort with the "walk of shame," i.e. walking home in the morning after a hook-up, wearing the same clothes they wore the night before.

It's not hard to draw some conclusions from this:

• Humans function best sexually in permanent, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, and practices that deviate from that are destructive to their humanity.
• The present, dominant view of sexual relations in the dominant American culture represents the triumph of selfish men at the immediate expense of compliant women but ultimately to the degradation of all.
• Despite our best efforts to talk ourselves out of it, most of us can't escape feeling shame for things that we intuitively recognize are wrong.
• People should realize that if they need excessive alcohol to be willing to do something, that something shouldn't be done.