Sex and the single girl - a cultural shift
“Young women have virtually abandoned the idea of dating and replaced it with a group of get-togethers and sexual behaviors that are detached from love or commitment – and sometimes even from liking. Relationships have been replaced by the casual sex encounters known as ‘hookups.’ Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold, or seen as impossible; sex is becoming the primary currency of social interaction. Some girls can handle this; others, like Morgan, are exhausted physically, emotionally, and spiritually.” So writes Laura Sessions Stepp in her book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.
Stepp got up close and personal with the lives of several high school and college age women and followed them around, “partied” with them (at observational distances) and interviewed them.
“The freedom to ‘unhook’ from someone – ostensibly without repercussions – gives them maximum flexibility. Although I use both phrases, this is not a hook-up culture so much as it is an unhooked culture. It is a way of thinking about relationships, period.
Stepp continues, “One can see the same impermanence in some of their other commitments – to their jobs and their life plans, for example.”
Stepp told me on the air today that “unfortunately, the ‘hookup’ culture even affects those women who want no part of it. Peer pressure dominates where girls tell each other to “go for it, go ahead and sleep with him anyway.”
Where does this put men? In the driver’s seat, of course: “To the delight of guys who no longer have to work very hard for girl’s attentions or their bodies. Young women’s goal, at one time, was to save their bodies and their reputations for someone they loved, while young men were expected to play the field. Young men are still expected to play the field, but now young women have jumped into the arena with them.”
Stepp focuses not on empty moralizing, but on this: how do women feel about their new freedom? Great or used? Loved or lonely? Free or trapped in unexpected ways?
What studies are showing, according to Stepp, is that “having sex with lots of men might limit their ability to sustain a long term commitment as well as their ability to actually conceive children.”
The issue, ultimately, is feeling love and feeling capable of love.
For some the whole notion of flirtation is just “playing games” and that love itself is a pipe dream. However, I have noticed in my broadcasting career, that cynicism itself is never a substitute for insight.
Laura Sessions Stepp has discovered that the post-feminist women’s movement has spawned an almost gay male sexual predatory aesthetic. And it doesn’t work. It is not working for women who grow up and realize that they should have slept with fewer people
The need to be connected intimately to others is as central to our well-being as food and shelter. In Stepp’s view, “If we don’t get that right were probably not going to get anything else in life right.”
“I hope,” Stepp says, “to encourage girls to think hard about whether they are ‘getting it right,’ whether their sexual and romantic experiences are contributing to – or destroying – their sense of self-worth and strength. Their studied effort to remain uncommitted convinces me only of how strongly they want to be attached.”
The post-feminist movement appears to have come full circle. Off air with me, Laura Sessions Stepp mused about my notion of how the pendulum has swung too far, and that women have fallen into a male trap.
So, what about the parents? “It is clear that adults are complicit, either by their neglect, cluelessness or even subtle encouragement.”
The only way to win at the hookup game is not to play; because love is not a dirty word. It never was.