hooking up is nothing new
Unpublished post, originally written 12/18/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.
The other day the New York Times ran an op-ed by Charles M. Blow lamenting the advent of hook-up culture.
The piece cited a study by the Washington research group, Child Trends, which found that high school seniors don’t date seriously. The writer concluded that instead they were simply hooking up without commitment.
He then talked to Kathleen Bogle, the author the 2008 book, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus. She helped him understand that, “Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date.”
I have to say, this reeks of alarmism.
In fact, the next day I was indulging in a guilty pleasure and reading the same newspaper’s wedding section. In it, I came a across a newly married couple in their fifties. They had actually been together thirty years before, but things had been different then. As the woman reminisced of their 1975 romance, “People didn’t date. You hung out and then you slept together.”
Um, that sounds a lot like this new phenomenon of hooking up that folks find so shocking.
People love to act as if teens today are loser morally than they were at any other time in history. But if history can teach us anything, it’s that when it comes to young people and sex, trends may come and go, but we aren’t really reinventing the wheel.
