Colleges these days are hotbeds of casual sexual activity, says Donna Freitas in a new book , The End of Sex. And if that sounds sexy, well it's kind of the opposite. As the rest of her title β How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy β suggests, Freitas doesn't think much of how college students today are apparently trading intimacy for explicitly no-strings-attached sexual encounters.
It's not that Freitas is against college as a place for sexual experimentation, she says in The Washington Post. But after eight years of on-campus research, talking to more than 1, students, faculty members, and university administrators, the religion and sexuality scholar has concluded that hookup sex is so prevalent as to feel almost obligatory, and thus "can be just as oppressive as a mandate for abstinence.
When students are expected to hook up with lots of people, doing so becomes dutiful, not daring. Older ideas of sexual exploration β be it same-sex encounters or one-night stands β have become a basic expectation. Not everyone agrees with Freitas, of course. Here are six ways of looking at America's collegiate hookup culture:. Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Undergrads should cut down on β or zero out β the sex. But it ends up being numbing, empty, even boring. What about abstinence? When young people are expected to be regularly sexually active, true experimentation can lie in refusing sex altogether In today's college culture, it seems that taking a break from carefree sex, or even embracing dating, are a lot like having premarital sex in the s Today, sexual experimentation might be getting to know someone before having sex, holding out for dates and courtship focused on romance rather than sex.
From where I sit, meeting a student confident enough to say she's not hooking up and is proud about that is as experimental as it gets. The solution to the hookup is promoting better sex. Still, while her indictment is spot-on, her solutions are "rather weak and unpromising. No, "pop culture is in the best position to reframe the romantic approach of teenagers and somethings. A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day β and the best features from TheWeek. Freitas convincingly demonstrates how Sex and The City, despite its flaws, depicted sex as fun, exciting, and pleasurable, while Girls equates sex with misery and boredom.
