The State of Our Hook-Up Culture

As an enthusiastic blog-following liberal feminist, I welcome new theories that challenge traditional assumptions about men and women’s sexual “natures.” I’m naturally drawn to critiques of the stereotypical view that women seek meaningful relationships while men look only for sexual pleasure. I was therefore intrigued when Hanna Rosin provocatively questioned the tired tropes about the American college “hookup culture” as bad for women in her September Atlantic article “Boys on the Side,” instead claiming that we should understand the hookup culture as an “engine of female progress” — one that empowers women sexually and socially. I was eager to believe her argument that the hookup culture is “bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012 — the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself.” I celebrated Jezebel’s headline that “Finally, Someone Says It: Hookup Culture Is Good for Women.” And I was thrilled by the idea that today’s college women have ushered in a new age of independence and control, a radical shift from the male-dominated social scene of generations before.

As much as I wanted to wholeheartedly subscribe to Rosin’s claims, however, I’m afraid I cannot. After sifting through the Middlebury College archives in preparation for the Women’s and Gender Studies (WAGS) program’s 21st anniversary, I discovered that, in reality, our campus has not seen a radical change in its social scene in the past quarter century — aside from the important shift from fraternities to social houses. Instead, there continues to be an alarming disconnect between how women are treated on weekday mornings in the classroom and on weekend nights in the basements of social houses.

In my search through the Status of Women at Middlebury reports, I found numerous comments like this one, from 1990: “Academically, the status of women is good. They are taken seriously by faculty and equal to men. Socially, though, women are still second class citizens.” Almost two decades later, in a 2008 report, students echoed this same sentiment: “Women are treated equally by the school in terms of athletics and academics. It is more the social experiences where women are being discriminated against,” one student observed. In 2008, numerous students commented on the “wholly unhealthy and disgustingly unsafe” party scene and the “aggressive, violent and very dangerous” sexual atmosphere. Another revealed the pressure she felt to have sex with a man “simply because he took what I was wearing, and my attempts to be polite, to mean that I wanted to hook up with him. I was made to feel like I had been lying, or acting deceitful, and leading him on when I said no.”

While I recognize that Middlebury’s hookup culture is nuanced and evolving — and certainly contains some elements of female sexual control — as a campus, we cannot applaud it uncritically as a triumph of “feminist progress.” True progress, I think, would look different.

If, as Rosin seems to argue, the current hookup culture is so reasonable for women, why is alcohol such a central part of it? As a junior on this campus who has spent numerous weekend nights at social houses and other parties, I know how differently people — including me — act after a few drinks. Alcohol blurs the lines between desire, agency and consent, and we must acknowledge this. Perhaps Rosin’s female empowerment argument would be more convincing in a sober environment, when women and men are fully in control of their choices and actions. It doesn’t resonate as well in a setting that so heavily depends on alcohol as part of its social scene.

Can we really understand — as Cody Gohl ’13 asked in his widely read Middblog post last month titled “Sluts, Whores, Hoes, OH MY!” — the “drunk 18 year-old girl in a bra screaming at the top of her lungs that she’s a whore” as empowerment? Yes, women and men at Middlebury exert agency in dressing and behaving in certain ways, but is this what “liberation” really looks like? I don’t think so.

My larger problem with Rosin’s hookup-culture-as-empowering thesis is her overstatement of how much the larger sexual culture has changed. Even at a relatively enlightened institution like Middlebury, both men and women suggest that a woman’s behavior and dress somehow invites sexual assault. Last year, I overheard one guy say to his friend of a drunken woman in a short skirt, “Man, that girl is gonna get raped tonight.” And just last week, I heard one girl say to another about a third drunken woman, “Geez, is she trying to get raped?”

Indeed, our hookup culture does not grant absolute “freedom” to those involved, but instead continues to foster an often unhealthy and sometimes dangerous environment. Accepting this status quo in the name of “feminist progress” is neither correct nor constructive.

Ultimately, women have made great strides at colleges like Middlebury in the academic and athletic spheres, but we still have a long way to go in the social realm. We’ve moved beyond the simplistic notion that men by nature want sex and women want relationships, but in today’s hookup culture, people still assign sexual behavior to how one dresses and falsely accuse girls of “asking for it” simply due to the length of their skirts. To me, that’s not true empowerment.