This Just In: Hooking Up is a Culture Now!

Hey everybody, I'm thrilled that we've finally decided what to call my generation. Hanna Rosin of the Atlantic Monthly figured it all out for me in her newest article, and after reading it, I'm led to believe that I no longer belong to Generation Y, I'm not an Echo Boomer, not a Millenial or Generation Next-er. No, I am a member of what Rosin calls "the hookup culture."

Just what we needed after the romanticized "No Strings Attached" and
"Friends with Benefits" -- a vaguely authoritative article on how awesome
it is to have fun buddies during one's formational years! And let's assume,
since you're reading the Atlantic after all, that you've been to college.    

.... Really, though?

I tried to put aside my biases and read the article thoroughly, hopeful that it wasn't going to simultaneously accomplish what it's title indicated -- criticize our "oversexed" generation of Americans, and then claim that sex has a unique and defined tie to feminism/women's liberation that college women are acting out in some kind of (beneficial) body politic. But it did.

Where to start?
Well, Rosin claims from the beginning that sex and the "hookup culture" of today's age is not harmful to women at all (even younger, college women, which her article focuses on) but is actually an "engine of female progress -- driven by women themselves." I've taken this as her thesis statement, criticisms aside.

Again at that crucial beginning/hook section of her article, Rosin states that today's young women (and these are young women; again, she's largely talking about my generation, women under thirty, with a particular focus on women in college) are "proud veterans" of the hookup culture that she says, "over the past 15 years or so, has largely replaced dating on college campuses and beyond."
Now, I'm not exactly sure how Rosin determined exactly what a "proud veteran" of hookup culture looks like, especially with all the gratuitous mental images that this supposed hookup culture entails. Which raises, actually, my major criticism:
It's silly, and more than a little myopic, to assume that women are using their sex lives, even in retrospect, as motivational or formational.
It seems that it isn't Rosin's point of view that young women have found this supposedly a-la-carte sex to be somehow professionally or personally motivating through a thought-provoking experience -- rather, she appears to believe that the same young women not taking sex "seriously," hardly thinking about sex, having fewer boundaries around sex and detaching the emotional thought connection to sex, are proving in their thoughtlessness that they are empowered.

I can't right now, darling, I'm busy studying -- since I don't think about
sex all the time, I get to fill up all that extra space in my brain and maybe
accomplish things that, you know, a relationship would keep me from.

That's nonsense.
First of all, it's ridiculous to assume that sex is in the forefront of every young woman's professional and personal experiences with the world. Yes, it is a near-constant confrontation in most colleges, but  to say that "feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of hookup culture," as Rosin does, is perhaps attributing too much power to the role of sex in the young woman's life. And it is not to be seen as a kind of liberation that some women do not participate in the hookup culture -- women have had the ability to refuse sex for years. 
Furthermore, in spite of her claims that the hookup culture is liberating, Rosin also appears impressed by the fact that women can put their life goals before sex. Again, all respect to feminist role models, this is not a new phenomenon. It shouldn't blow someone's mind that women can have sex and still keep their brain on their career or other personal goals, any more than it should blow someone's ind that women can have a career and personal goals to begin with. There's a female secretary of state, for crying out loud. There's women in congress. And you can bet that all of those women are over forty, most of them have had sex, and yet ... they maintain their success. Shocking.

And I only became the highest-ranking female politician in American
history by remembering to separate sex from my personal goals!

What we should be most concerned with, I think, is Rosin's use of "sex sells." While it's probable that she was simply trying to investigate my generation's apparent obsession, I'd challenge anyone to find a generation (ever) that hasn't been sex-crazed. Our ability to get it doesn't mean that we're mature enough to understand it, to put the experience to use, or even to have it either of the ways that Rosin believes we do. According to her, my generation has the opportunity to feel nothing about sex (how exciting...?) or to feel empowered by it. Both options severely overestimate, again, the maturity with which sex is considered by the average college student, and underestimates women's character as not purposeful without consideration of their sex lives.

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