This is a paper I wrote on November 3, 2006. I want it to be read.
Let’s say your best friend has just told you she hooked-up with a super-hot guy last night but didn’t know his name. If you’re a seventeen-year-old girl like I am, you might be putting on a congratulatory face but really praying to God your friend doesn’t get hurt. If you’re not a seventeen-year-old girl, however, you’re probably wondering right now, “What the hell does hooked-up mean?” Don’t be afraid; you aren’t the first person to ask this. To my generation, hooking-up is just something we’re expected to do. We know what it means. To others, it is something way beyond comprehension.
After polling 10,000 readers, Seventeen Magazine, along with sexetc.org, defined “hooking-up” as: “Slang expression that can mean different things to different people. Generally refers to when two people are sexual with one another -- kissing, touching or having sexual intercourse” (seventeen.com). This seems pretty reasonable. However, this definition doesn’t touch on the horrible truth that hooking-up always occurs outside of a relationship. In fact, a good portion of hooking-up occurs between two people that have met just that day.
So now that we’ve established what exactly (or, rather what generally) hooking-up means, it’s time to focus on the consequences of this trend. Can I let you in on a little secret? Shhh, don’t tell the boys our age. Hooking-up is ruining us girls. We won’t admit this is true; we’ll “do shit” with guys, and we might even brag about it afterwards. But all of us girls know how damaging this is to our emotional and sexual health. If you’ve hooked-up with a guy, you’ve probably cried about it later.
The expectations placed upon us girls these days leave us no room to say No. If you’re not hooking-up with people, and talking about it the next week at school, you’re considered a prude. If you like a guy, he expects to get a few good make-out sessions out of it. If he likes you back, you go out with him (which in our generation is like the equivalent of marriage) and you’re expected to have sex sooner or later. This is the situation we face.
Our parents wonder why we don’t casually date anymore, but we have a hard time explaining why. Basically, it’s because boys have grown used to getting what they want without putting forth much effort. Forget flowers and candy. We’re lucky if a guy takes us out to a movie before taking us back to his house to “get some”. Our version of dating is called “hanging-out” and it usually entails watching a movie with a guy you like. If this is as far as the relationship goes, you can say you had a “thing” with the guy, or that you hooked-up a few times.
I would be lying if I said girls never want to hook-up with a guy. It’s fun to let it happen once in a while. We rationalize it to ourselves by saying things like, “you’re getting good experience for when you have a guy you really like,” or “oh well we were drunk, it happens.” But we never really feel great about it later on.
We’re naturally the more emotionally needy of the sexes. Girls can’t get by on sex alone. And how often does a recurring hook-up turn into a relationship? It’s very rare. In fact, it will usually occur to a girl after hooking-up with someone that “Oops, I guess I ruined my shot with him.” This is how girls end up with broken hearts. Those boys get our hopes up and then play it off like it meant nothing.
I heard of countless girls that got too emotionally attached to a guy they had hooked-up with, but it had never happened to me. Then it did. I fell really hard for a boy I had never liked until the third time we hooked-up. He told me we needed to hang-out more often and promised me we would. But months passed, and he didn’t call. It hurt. I felt used. I knew I couldn’t blame anyone but myself, however. So I lost him as a friend, and I had to force myself to get over him. I hate to portray myself as the victim here, since it takes two to tango, but it really wouldn’t have played out like this if it had been up to me. It was after this situation that my friends and I realized this has to stop.
How will this problem be reversed? The boys our age aren’t about to change their ways. They’re spoiled, and they know it. Why would they go back to the whole White Knight/Chivalry thing when they get more sex as it is? This issue is so hidden that no one can change it except those it affects. To bring this problem to an end, we would have to look back in history and emulate the sexual morals of our forefathers. Today’s situation had to have come from somewhere. Societal morals have degenerated to this point. Can’t they go back to how they were? When discussing this issue with a guy friend, he said, “Shit, we’re just screwed, man” (Manlove). He was as torn as I am.
The other major question I ask is: Who is to blame? I’m not asking where the strange term hooking-up came from (I mean, think about it, what a weird name). I’m wondering who told our boys, somewhere along the way, that girls are okay with putting-out and being ignored. Blame is often placed on the media, and rightfully. Just look at James Bond, the man that must be mentioned in any discussion of womanizing. The character is never chastised for bedding woman after woman outside of a relationship.
But here’s my ultimate theory. The Big Dilemma is something we’ve inherited from our overzealous parents, along with our college funds and our big ambitions. Our parents have invested more in us than any other generation’s parents ever did. I know I’m generalizing here, but pretty much anyone my age can tell you how their parents told them every day, “You can be anything you want when you grow up!” Our entire childhoods, we were encouraged not just to go to college and get good jobs, but to dominate the world and please, oh please, not to waste all their effort and settle for anything less. With the sexist boundaries all but obliterated by the feminists of the ‘70s, we are now all free to be highly successful adults. There’s a lot of pressure on us.
So these days, marriage is not what we all go to college searching for. In fact, in all our ambitiousness, we have to push the idea of marriage far into the future, where we can’t think about it. There is a time and a place for everything, and your college years and early professional years are for ensuring your success in this world. My dad tells me the next ten years will be the most important years of my life and the choices I make will determine the rest of my life, blah blah blah. “Me Time,” I call it.
In the mean time, dating is a tricky thing. Slightly scared by the idea of falling in love at a young age, we tip-toe around the opposite sex in a game of feigned intimacy. We have made up a culture of hooking-up and called it normal because it is the only way we know how to relate to one another. God forbid we should find true love at such a young age! Yet we want fun and we want it now. Bring on the boys and the booze and the gossip and we will make believe this is what we want.
In order to fix this giant effing hole in our lives, we girls are going to have to assume some responsibility for these circumstances. We’ve gradually let more and more things slide. I think it got harder and harder for us to let the guys know that we’re not okay with things how they are. We need to learn how to do this. If we can start demanding something more- perhaps a little romance- we might save ourselves from the damage being done. I don’t wish upon any girl this bleak outlook towards men that has emerged in my generation. We whine about how sucky guys are these days, but it’s really the situation that sucks. Hooking-up needs to end.
Works Cited
"2006 Hookup Survey." Seventeen Magazine. 2006. 7 Oct. 2006 http://www.seventeen.com/health/smarts/articles/0,,625884_694391,00.html
Brockman. "Get Some." Urban Dictionary. 15 Sept. 2003. 3 Nov. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get+some.
Manlove, Luke. Interview. Minneapolis, MN. Spring 2007.
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