“Eve Ensler hit the G-spot with [The Vagina Monologues]”, Kathleen Parker, Washington Post columnist wrote in her column February 14, 2007 – a day when a lot of columnists wrote about V-Day, Eve Ensler, vaginas, and violence. “V-Day is a political vehicle in the gender wars”, writes Parker. It is celebrated on the nation’s college campuses by young women, a global movement involving “talking publicly about your privates”.
V-Day is a metaphor for the phenomenon of 2007 campus sex.
If timid groping outside the girl’s dorm at curfew time, passionate kisses in the woods behind science hall, and dancing pressed tightly together at the spring ball were characteristic of your campus sex experiences, you may not even be aware that orgasm workshops and sex toy parties have replaced the frat party carnivals, pajama dances, and smokers of earlier generations on the campuses of residence colleges in the United States.
Hooking-up, the deliberately ambiguous term that has replaced other dating and mating rituals has everyone talking about the subject everyone thinks about but no one used to talk about. Only the pronunciation of it – hooking-up or hooking-up – gives a clue to what sex act the speaker is really talking about when she says the words.
There are those who call this whole new sexual environment an illustration of feminism gone awry. The frightening prospect of women shouting “Vagina” and taking charge has, on the surface, created a sexual playground for college men. What motivation does a guy have to phone a girl to arrange a dinner date, study date, or coffee break? He doesn’t need to win a woman to develop personal intimacy – not when young women walk into his dorm room, disrobing as they move closer, to give without invitation what men used to seek in measured steps.
It’s not an idyllic situation.
The whole atmosphere is hostile. Young condom-toting women have taken charge. They don’t want relationships. They want sex. They have recast college men in a new role: playthings. Like women’s other competitive sports, sex is a challenge, and playing means winning. Is it any wonder that impotence among college men is epidemic?
What young women are winning can be challenged. Laura Sessions Stepp in her best seller Unhooked describes the “decoupling of physical and emotional intimacy”. The book reveals the problems which occur when bright, educated, privileged young women call “o.k.” what isn’t okay and never has been. The quest may appear to be for sex, she writes, but – in fact – these young women both really want relationships and really fear them.
The young adults privileged to attend residence campuses fulltime with being a fulltime student as their only occupation live in a remarkable world. ( The life costs $40,000 a year at Duke University.) Those who have already been given so much define their college years as a time to party. They are looking ahead to degrees, even graduate degrees, and delayed marriage. Society has constructed a prolonged adolescence for them.
Is it possible that a vocal few are responsible for all the books, editorials, blogs and discussions on the subject of today’s college kids and sex? It would seem not. Elizabeth Paul, Professor of Psychology at College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, has released the results of 2004-2006 research which reveals that 76% of the 2,000 college students she interviewed have had hook-ups; one-half of these have included intercourse, and less than one-fourth of them turn into relationships. Of the 76% of college students who are participants in the hook-up society, the median number of hook-up partners in 5; the average is 6.9; and 29% have had more than ten hook-up partners. It is spin-the-bottle-on-steroids. Sex partners are as disposable as paper plates!
The “friends with benefits” program is discussed as a “no attachments” series of encounters, but many of the experts writing on this subject agree that women cannot separate physical and emotional intimacy, and despite their posturing that they are savvy women getting good sex – pleasure without commitment – many are praying for a romantic musical comedy moment when the young man says, “I love you.”
The hook-up culture is relationship-less, explains gynecologist Melissa Holmes (whose book Hooking-Up and Holding Out will be published in September, 2007). Because young people have no emotional intimacy before physical intimacy, they “grow up not knowing how to connect with a partner on an intimate level.” Hooking-up’s defining characteristic is the ability to unhook from a partner at any time, “just as [you] might delete an old song from your Ipod”, writes Laura Sessions Stepp. She tracks this same impermanence in the other commitments of the young women she studied for her book.
Sex has become the primary currency of social interaction.
When Stepp ( as a visiting lecturer ) asked a classroom of college juniors to define hooking-up for her, she got these responses: 3rd base and beyond; immediate gratification; fast food. Young people also told her about sexiling (telling your roommate to leave for the night when you bring a hook-up back to your dorm room ) and the roll-and-scream (“You roll over in the morning so horrified at what you see next to you in bed that you scream.”) These are the conditions the dating/mating rituals of the past have become: women are no longer at the mercy of men to make the first move, and men no longer fear that their first moves will be rejected. There is “no flirtation, casual banter, or using mutual friends as messengers”. Women have chosen McNugget relationships because they have no time for “we” and agree that there will be plenty of time to fall-in-love later.
Kathleen Parker suggests that if Western civilization has been dominated thus far by a patriarchy, we are moving rapidly toward domination by a vagina-obsessed matriarchy. Few authors ( in fact, only Amber Madison, author of Hooking Up: A Girl’s Guide to Sex and Sexuality ) believe that this is a good idea. In fact, having quoted the hundreds of young women she interviewed over a four-year period for the first 300 pages of her book, Stepp writes an open letter to mothers and daughters as the last chapter in which she advises both in the words of a wise old crone, one who knows that if you do not respect yourself, you cannot respect another, and that sex with a person you have grown to know and love is enormously superior to the “quick fix” with a stranger.
There may be sex on the playground, but there is not satisfaction.
Sad, but true. Some brilliant writing here.