All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (37 page)

There is simply no reason for Ross Douthat, or any of the other social conservatives, to break a sweat over the romantic and familial fates of these privileged and empowered women. Unless, of course, what they're actually worried about isn't their future marital happiness but rather that their circuitous route to getting there, which involves establishing themselves economically and professionally and thereby exerting more social and sexual control over their circumstances, is actually a signal of increasing female strength.

That's how Mundy sees it. And Hanna Rosin, who writes in
The End of Men
that the girls-as-victimized-by-casual-sex critique of hookup culture “downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation.” For young women who Rosin argues are “in their sexual prime,” and also at the most potentially propellant moment of their careers and social lives, there is a recognition that “an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.”
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The fact that hooking up is a habit depicted in the media as of those most statistically likely to marry is just one of the facts that the hubbub over hookup culture often conveniently obscures. Among the other realities that you'd never quite absorb if you just read coverage of blow jobs and beer pong is that, actually, uncommitted physical encounters on campuses are not a particularly recent phenomenon.

“Hookup culture” was certainly the norm when I was an undergraduate in the mid-nineties. Back then, women made out with boys at fraternity parties and in dorm rooms; they performed oral sex (and more rarely had the favor returned); they had sex, sometimes one-night stands, sometimes recurring assignations, sometimes with strangers, but more often with friends with whom they also drank too much, and with whom
they talked and gossiped and danced and ate dinner and breakfast. A few women got into very serious committed relationships that lasted months or years. One friend was with her boyfriend from high school; they stayed together through college and are still married, with three children. Lots more women rarely ever hooked up.

Assault and rape, Greek fraternity hazing and extreme binge drinking were serious, often horrifying, campus problems. But they were not hookup culture. Hookup culture was ordinary. Ordinarily fun, ordinarily frustrating, ordinarily heartbreaking, ordinarily weighted in favor of guys? Yes, like most of life. Completely ordinary for a bunch of sexually curious eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds living in close proximity to each other, beyond the reach of their families.

In fact, the only thing that is unfamiliar to me when I read the keening over the steady degradation of heterosexual collegiate relationships is that in my day, I don't recall many—or any—explicit female renunciations of commitment in favor of education or professional life, which is what leads me to believe that it's the careerism, and not the casual nature of the encounters, that is so rankling.

Lots of social scientists have backed up that hunch, with evidence that hookup culture is nothing new. University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong argues that sexual habits on campuses have remained largely unchanged since the sexual revolution of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and points out that today's college students are not having more sex than their parents.
²⁰
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that, between 1988 and 2010, the percentage of sexually active teenage girls dropped by 8 percent, from 51 to 43 percent.
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As Rosin writes, “by many measures, the behavior of young people can even look like a return to a more innocent age.” Research conducted by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge and published in 2015 suggests that Millennials are on track to have fewer sexual partners, on average, than their Generation X and Baby Boomer predecessors. Although, interestingly, Twenge's research compares the number of partners people have had by age twenty-five, a cut-off point that is less final for today's young people, who are far less likely to be married by twenty-five than any generation before them.
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Paula England, an NYU sociologist, has done research that shows that students have an average of only about seven hookups, which may include anything from kissing to sex, over the course of their time at college. That means that they're getting busy with fewer than two people a year. She also found that a rather vast majority of college students, 80 percent, hook up less than once per semester.
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In her story about hookup culture at Penn, Kate Taylor cites research that shows that three in ten college seniors have
never
hooked up during college, and that four in ten have either never had sex or had sex only with one person. Sociologist Lisa Wade turns up similar findings, estimating that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of students hook up during college, but that about 32 percent of those hookups end with kissing, and 40 percent end with sex. As journalist Amanda Hess interpreted Wade's research, “that means . . . that [romantically unattached] college students are engaging in as little as
one makeout every four years.
” Hess also crunched numbers to conclude that “less than fifteen percent of [single] college students are engaging in some form of physical contact
more than twice a year
.”

The rest of the women, presumably, are doing different things: Some are in committed relationships; Rosin cites England's research showing that 74 percent of women, and about as many men, have had a college relationship that lasted six months or more.
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Some are not in relationships. They're writing their honors theses on erotic art, they're wondering whether they're straight or queer, they're doing work-study jobs at the campus day-care center, or getting up early to work the breakfast shift at a sandwich shop and fantasizing about their shift manager. And a very few of them are planning their weddings, because yes, young people still do marry each other, just in far smaller numbers than ever before.

What everyone is doing, in one way or another, is working out who they are and where they fit. They're figuring out who they want to be, what they want to do, who they want to do, whether they enjoy only meaningful sex or are excited by meaningless sex, whether they are sustained
by the pacific companionship of romantic stability or electrified by the crackle of argumentative tension, or whether they prefer, simply, to be alone, or with their friends or their books or their pets.

“This is what the hookup trend pieces get wrong,” writes Tracy Clark-Flory. “Women are different. We are not all the same. Some of us learn about ourselves and other people from serial live-in monogamous relationships; some of us gain more from pursuing the cutie at the end of the bar. Some of us want to get married; some of us do not. Some of us are straight; some of us are not. Some of us want kids; some of us do not. Even if we all wanted the same thing, there wouldn't be any reliable prescription for how to get it.”

And there would be no reliable prescription for not getting hurt while at it, both as human beings, susceptible to hormones and cracked hearts, and as women who still, despite gains in power and sexual determination, tend to get stuck with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

Sex and love, especially the sex and love we experience as young people, whose emotional cement is not yet dry, are full of risk, pain, and disillusionment for both sexes. England found that while about 66 percent of women confessed that they wanted their hookup to produce some longer connection, the notion that women are solely being left bereft and abandoned doesn't hold: 58 percent of men told her the same thing.
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It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having really bad sex. It also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and of learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people's bodies work.

The fact that women experience any more disillusionment or shame than men in hookup culture is at least partly attributable to the remaining pressures on them to measure their worth by the degree to which they can hold male attention. And there is an argument that the lingering, systemic sexual injustices and pressures placed on women in a liberated sexual universe mean, for today's young women, a version of the unsatisfying sexual objectification that Shulamith Firestone so glumly imagined
fifty years ago that, in liberating sexuality from marriage, women will be consigned to be “chicks,” or the modern equivalent.

Rhaina Cohen, an undergraduate who worked as a researcher on this book, conducted interviews with women, gathered data, and talked endlessly about the subject of hookup culture with her undergraduate friends. She expressed reservations about my putting too positive a spin on a culture of casual sex. “Maybe the subject hits too close to home,” she told me in 2014. “I've seen the way friends my age have turned to hooking up not for the reasons Kate Taylor writes about”—a deferment of commitment for professional ambition—“but because they think that's what's expected and it's all men will permit.”

Are these dissatisfactions and double binds inherently worse than earlier iterations of sexual impossibility? By some measures, that doesn't matter, if you're the women living through them.

But the argument that this pain and disappointment is somehow tied to a biologically determined, as opposed to a culturally encouraged, female preference for long-term commitment has been thrown into question by journalist Daniel Bergner, who recently published
What Do Women Want?
, a lengthy study on the nature of female desire, in which he argued that gender bias has long made invisible the power of the female appetite for sex. One German study Bergner cited showed “women and men in new relationships reporting, on average, more or less equal lust for each other. But for women who've been with their partners between one and four years, a dive begins—and continues, leaving male desire far higher.”

As Ann Friedman has written, “Women like having sex. They don't like being socially punished for it.”
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But they continue to be punished.

The studies quoted by Freitas and the experiences of emotional discontent and disappointment recounted by Rhaina Cohen speak to individual experiences of heartbreak, but also of something more gendered. They confirm that, despite the strides that women have made, they still wield less sexual power than men, are still more likely to feel commodified, to feel pressured into encounters that don't satisfy them physically or emotionally, to still sometimes feel bad about their sexual boldness, or their sexual acquiescence, then blame themselves for feeling bad.

As members of the gender that still holds most of the power, men remain the ones who get to dictate punishing sexual standards to which women are held. Male sexuality is considered normal, healthy; female sexuality is still liable to be viewed as immoral. Heterosexual male
abstention
from sex, meanwhile, is still often understood as a judgment passed on the desirability of a woman in question, while female abstention from sex is regarded as a symptom of prudishness, perversion, or lack of femininity. Male pleasure—the orgasm—is the accepted conclusion of the sex act; female orgasm is still considered a somewhat mysterious bonus. Young women give far more oral sex than they receive; pornography remains unduly focused on male release and is increasingly driven by an impossible, nearly inhuman vision of female physiology. The majority of sexual assaults are against women; the rape and assault of teen girls often ends with the victims being blamed not only by the alleged assailants but also by communities and media for being loose or “asking for it.” Many of these inequities are on display in contemporary hookup culture. As a study reported by the
New York Times
in 2013 revealed that “women were twice as likely to reach orgasm from intercourse or oral sex in serious relationships as in hookups.”
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But that doesn't make any of them the fault—or the creation—of hookup culture.

Inattention to female gratification and to women's anatomy extends back centuries; female pleasure has certainly not always been a reliable feature of supposedly serious relationships. According to historian Rachel Maines, it wasn't until the eighteenth century that doctors bothered to distinguish between the parts of the female reproductive anatomy, before they could tell “the vagina from the uterus,” or were able to recognize a labia, a vulva, or a clitoris. Though it's true that other cultures and countries have at times been interested in female sexual climax (largely, as for example in the early Modern period in England, because they believed it to be necessary for conception) in more contemporary Western society, Maines points out, doctors and psychologists thought it “both reasonable and necessary to the social support of the male ego either that female orgasm be treated as a by-product of male orgasm or that its existence or significance be denied entirely.” As recently as the 1970s, medical authorities “assured men that a woman who did not reach orgasm during heterosexual
coitus was flawed or suffering from some physical or psychological impairment.”
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In addition, marital rape was legal in some states until the 1990s.

Long before colleges lifted their parietal rules and men and women lived in dorms together, women were raped, were treated badly, and felt shame, regret, and guilt—far more intense shame and regret and guilt than their counterparts today—about their desires and their sexual behaviors.