[Previously: Casual Sex Cultures In Comparison.]
All right, fine, I was wrong about hookup culture.
Pearl-clutching articles about the demise of dating and the rise of hookup culture are a magazine staple, and I viewed them with skepticism. I certainly knew various people who had drunken one-night-stands (as well as various people who had sober one-night-stands). But in general people seemed to form relationships in an ordinary way: using dating sites, acquiring crushes on friends and acquaintances, informal matchmaking by extroverted friends. Sure, sometimes people started dating their friends with benefits. Sure, if you were dating a friend, you were more likely to cuddle and watch Netflix early on in the relationship than to go on a formal dinner date with chivalry and the picking up of checks. But it was perfectly possible to obtain a relationship without having casual sex with anyone. People liked their sex partners, like normal people, instead of pretending that they didn’t exist. And the death of romance seemed greatly overstated.1
A friend who participated in college hookup culture recommended the ethnography American Hookup to me, and a different friend confirmed that its description was basically accurate to her experiences. I have my questions about the research quality2 but I do think the evidence I have establishes that this is a thing anyone is doing.
The thing I missed was that “hookup culture” is—contrary to the opinions of thinkpiece writers—not The Way We’re Doing Dating Today. It is one particular college subculture, based around straight people drinking, dancing incompetently, trying to have casual sex, and gossiping about the casual sex they may or may not be succeeding at actually having.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Thing of Things to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.