Hanna Rosin
has written an article on the hookup culture. She did it to counter the view being promoted by writers such as Caitlin Flanagan that college sexual culture is hurting women because it is so degrading. (And let me admit right up front that I have mixed feelings about Caitlin Flanagan's views. I am glad that voices like hers are being heard but,
as I have argued elsewhere, wonder sometimes if Flanagan just isn't capable of dealing with maleness. I also suspect that she has a bit of a hang up about fellatio and just can't understand the enthusiasm that most women, in my experience anyway, have for the performing the act.)
Rosin's first move is interesting. She begins by admitting that the culture is crude and degrading. She goes out of her way to show us that women in college today are exposed to a barrage of porn and crude sexist humour from men. Then she goes on to says that this is a good thing. That women may not be outwardly enthusiastic about this culture but that they are willing to tolerate and enable it because it is in their interest to do so.
It's an interesting argument and regular readers will recognize it is being very close to views I regularly express, such as, for example,
this. But Rosin's argument does seem a little novel coming from a feminist perspective. I think, however, that it is typical of a major current in feminist thought today. Feminists have noticed that no one is even remotely interested in following them so they have resorted to the favourite tactic of ineffectual leaders everywhere: find the latest trend and try and put yourself at the head of it. Thus this conclusion:
To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the
existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is
women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school,
cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping
their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, 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.
I think if you read the thing for yourself, you will find that Rosin doesn't offer anything that even looks like a convincing argument that women are perpetuating the hook up culture. She argues instead that they are accepting of it in degrees running from "putting up with it because they can't get anything better" to "enabling it because it seems like a fun thing to do for a while". To make the case she wants to make, she'd have to advance some evidence that college boys are less enthusiastic about hook up culture than college girls are and she, wisely, doesn't even try that. (To put it another way, when Rosin says women are "cannily manipulating it [hookup culture] to make space for their success" she misses that women are the trophy and not the winner in that scenario.)
Rosin's real argument is that, whatever reservations we might have about it, girls are doing just fine under the current college culture so we should stop worrying about it. She offers two kinds of evidence for this proposition: Real evidence and anecdotal evidence. To take the second first, this article depends to a simply ridiculous amount on what used to be called "new journalism". The writer went somewhere and talked to people and managed to get an accurate picture of the culture. Well, no, Rosin went to a couple of elite universities pre-equipped with a whole bunch of assumptions and biases and managed to find anecdotes that match her assumptions and biases.
In that regard, the most interesting thing about her claims is the degree to which she has to admit that maybe girls aren't quite all on board with this. For example, she tells us about a girl she calls "Tali" who arrived at Yale and loved the hook up culture for a while but then:
She got tired of relationships that just faded away, “no end, no
beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and
her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my
friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as
the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered
destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also
more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say
anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chivalrous
age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-yogurt place,” she
said. That’s it. A $3 date.
Well, that's kind of sweet isn't it? Lots of girls want that. So do lots of boys. So what does Rosin do? Well, she gives a clinic in dishonest argument.
But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I
asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup
culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with
formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time,
prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to
“advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never.
Notice how her language telegraphs her intention. The soda fountain nostalgia "dissipated"? Only because you wanted it to Hanna. The words "formal dating and slightly more obvious rules" did the trick. It's not that the girls might not want that if they knew what it was. The problem is that Rosin has offered them the choice between the devil they know and the option of living in a strange land where the rules and expectations are completely foreign to them.
It's a pretty safe bet that you could go to any culture in the world and ask people who have become accustomed to its practices and who have some frustrations with them if they would like to completely change the rules and get a look of horror. This rhetorical strategy is a favourite of reactionaries every where.
In this article Rosin is really telling us what she wants to be the case, nothing more and nothing less. That's a kind of argument and it's a worthy argument. The problem is that she is lying about what she is doing. She is arguing her opinions with some supporting evidence but pretending to be simply reporting. (At the most ridiculous point in her argument, she shifts to fiction and starts using what happens on the TV show
Girls as evidence of how women deal with the challenge of the hook up culture.)
Read her article carefully, however, and you will see that there is plenty of evidence that lots of college girls are not "perpetuating the hook-up culture" the way she pretends. As a general rule, Rosin quotes individual subjects, anonymously, when she wants evidence that girls are down with hook up culture but the more objective evidence suggests something else altogether.
You could even say that what defines this era is an unusual amount of
sexual control and planning. Since 2005, Paula England, a sociologist at
New York University, has been collecting data from an online survey
about hookups. She is up to about 20,000 responses—the largest sample to
date. In her survey, college seniors report an average of 7.9 hookups
over four years, but a median of only five.
And if that sounds pretty restrained, wait until you read the parenthetical comment that follows that quote:
(“Hookups” do not necessarily involve sex; students are instructed to use whatever definition their friends use.)
Whoa, "hook ups" don't necessarily involve sex!? Are you getting the feeling that the whole "hook up" culture might be a little bit mythical?
Note also that this is a voluntary, on-line survey. That is to say, it is a survey
that is more likely to attract college students who exceed norms than those
who exemplify them. If anything, accurate numbers would be even lower.
Which is to say, the actual sexual practices of today's college girls
are probably exactly the same as they were when I
went to university in the early 1980s. In fact, while girls today are no doubt somewhat more promiscuous than they were when my mother went to college in the
mid 1950s, the actual sexual practice of the current generation is still close enough to that earlier era to suggest that there is some constant force at work here; something that you might call "human nature" if you weren't scared of seeming a little outré.
What isn't a myth, of course, is the outward trappings that go with this culture: girls may not behave like pornstars but they sure do dress like them. While girls may not be mastering the reverse cowgirl for some guy in his dorm room and they certainly aren't enthusiastically embracing anal sex or double penetration, they are painfully aware of these things and are responding to the pressure to outwardly act as if they are comfortable with it.
In a sense, we have reversed the game. In the 1950s everyone went along with a public game that girls saved it for marriage while the evidence suggests that most did not, in fact, do this. Now we have a culture where everyone goes along with an outward sexual culture that suggests that all girls are promiscuous while most are actually quite restrained.
I think you can argue that, whatever she thinks she is doing, Rosin actually provides evidence for four (overlapping) claims in this article:
- Girls want to be able to do some sexual experimentation without consequences.
- Girls like the feeling of power that comes from getting a lot of sexual attention and are willing to play up or down to boys' expectations to get this attention.
- Given the choice, most girls prefer not to be promiscuous and they, in fact, don't need to be promiscuous to get what they want.
- Girl's don't like a lot of raunchy, in your face, porn-sex culture but they are much more willing to tolerate it than their self-appointed defenders think.
I don't think any of those things are terribly surprising. Do you?
I mentioned above that Rosin offers two kinds of evidence. The other kind is evidence that girls are doing really well under the current system. I'll come back to that next Wednesday.
