Few things are as reliable and consistent as generational judgements about sexuality.  Every generation judges the next for being too promiscuous, too interested in pleasure, not secure enough, not solid enough.  As sexuality has become an acceptable topic to cover explicitly in mainstream news and entertainment media, this pattern of judgement has become something of a minor industry.  First the panic gets a name, then come the experts, and usually, at the end of it, we get at least one or two people who act as a voice of reason, pointing out that the panic is often created by those who are flailing their arms, not those who are flailing the rest of their bodies around.


Arguably the first big panic of the 2000s was so called hookup culture.  It's unlikely that you missed it, but if you did, or if you're still not sure what it means, this New York Times article is a good example of what judgement and panic look like.  In this case it's a piece in the fashion section about how women are apparently playing the hookup game as well as men.

If you'd rather skip it, I'll summarize:  It's the end of intimacy, the end of monogamy, the end of marriage, the end of meaningful sex.  We don't know if it's the end of sexual pleasure...usually they don't talk about that part at all. 

Since it began I have found the fear mongering about hookup culture to be puzzling.  I've spent time training sex educators who work on college and university campuses and for the most part they tell me that what they see in their work and in health research doesn't connect with the titllation they read about in articles like this New York Times piece about how

But no one is going to write a story about sex on campus isn't that interesting, and the folks who really know what's happening are usually too busy working to want to call up the media and tell them they got it wrong.

 

So I was relieved when a voice of reason stepped up to consider the hookup culture claims.  University of Portland sociology professor Martin Monto was equally curious about these claims, and along with colleagues decided to have a look at what actual data we might have on the subject. 

To look at the claims being made about hookup culture he used data from the General Social Survey, which began in 1972 and has surveyed a nationally representative sample of U.S. households in three waves, allowing researchers to track answers to particular questions over a forty year period.  For this paper the authors compared data from 1988 and 2010.

He and his colleagues looked at responses from people aged 18 to 25 who had graduated from high school and had completed at least one year of college.  The questions they looked at included those that asked respondents about:

• number of sexual partners since turning 18
• number of sexual partners during the past year
• frequency of sex during the past year
• whether their sexual partner(s) were a spouse or regular sexual partner, a friend, an acquaintance, a casual date or pick-up, or someone not fitting any of these categories

They also wanted to consider attitudes toward what might be thought of as casual sex or hookups, so they compared responses to questions about individuals attitudes toward premarital sex, extramarital sex, teen sex, and sex between adults of the same sex.

What they found won't sell many newspapers, but it's still worth reporting.

There wasn't any significant difference in number of partners or frequency of sex among people who are in the supposed hookup culture.  In fact respondents in the older cohort were more likely to report having sex weekly or more often.

Those in the more recent group were more likely to describe one of their sexual partners as a "casual date/pickup or a friend" (with 44% of more recent respondents saying they had sex with a casual date vs. 34% of respondents in the older cohort).  The only significant difference in sexual attitudes was in terms of attitudes toward same sex couples.

This sort of quantitative research comes with many of its own problems, and alone we shouldn't think of it as a complete response or answer to all the claims of hookup culture gone wild.  But the divide between how fear mongering professionals and media outlets talk about "kids these days" and how they talk about themselves (you know, to those of us who listen) is stark, and it's nice to have some data to at least complicate the picture.

For me the most insidious lie in the hookup culture narrative  isn't about quantity of sex or sex partners or the kind of sex or anything behavioral at all.  It's the notion that sex doesn't mean anything.  Sometimes the hookup culture hucksters make this explicit and sometimes it's implied, but embedded in the narrative is the idea that hookup sex is sex without love or commitment and that therefore it isn't meaningful. 

This is a lie I can't tolerate.  I've never spoken with anyone who had any kind of sex with someone that carried absolutely no meaning.  They may start by calling it meaningless or casual, but once you ask a few questions, and give them a chance to tell a sexual story that doesn't have to fit inside societies narrow frame, some meaning always emerges.  I consider it the best part of my job to help people find that meaning, and it's always there.