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Love and lust in the bubble: Falling out of hooking up
Published: Thursday, September 20th, 2012
[Editors’ Note: This is the first in a series about love, sex, dating and everything in between on the Princeton campus. In this space every week our writers will reflect on their personal encounters with love—we hope you’ll ...
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spot on. thank you for this.
Wise. Courageous. Thanks.
Is there a character limit here? Let's find out.
You brave and intuitive girl. I'm a 40 year old GenXer who is ashamed that we have let young women start their adult lives with such naive trust in our advice. Everything you mentioned, we've learned it already. Yet we tell you to follow our path, because in the almost infamous words of Hanna Rosin in last month's The Atlantic, "To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture."
The sorry tale is long and complicated. In many respects, we women of Gen X simply aren’t sure of ourselves. We give you, the current college coeds, the same advice we were given, put yourself and your career first before you burden yourself with the commitments of marriage and children, because we want your endorsement. Imitation is some proof that we were right...right? In fact, if you pay close attention to us, you will find that we are obsessed with being right--in the Mommy Wars, individual marriages, parenting theory... This is not a position of confidence. Frankly, it is mother guilt. In one of the many and varied illusions of feminism, independent modern women are oddly susceptible to it. They made our career success possible, and if we subvert that success to anything else, then they think we have thanklessly tossed away hard won freedoms they gave to us. We owe them, you see. If this piece gets any circulation, you might find comments that you are not allowed to think this. That it is somehow disloyal or backward. That feminist mother guilt is the root of those arguments.
It is why we encourage your little star charts of "accomplishment." It is the fastest way to career success—or at least it was for us GenXers who left college and grad school for high paying jobs. With this economy you might not even get that, though you will still have our trouble adjusting to marriage. It is not a selfish institution and all the focus-on-the-self practice and habit formed in the hookup culture complicate marriage. And then there is motherhood. It is the antithesis of selfishness. Plus, push it off, and you might not get it. IVF and other fertility treatments might have lessened the urgency of our biological clocks, but it has many costs: financial, physical, generational.
That we haven't passed on these lessons to you is inexcusable. I'm writing, I hope, the 'I wish I knew then' piece that might have helped you. It should be at PJMedia by the end of the month. Until then, the voice of experience: opt out of the hookup culture.
Right on.
Well said. Excited and interested in the rest of this series.
Scarily accurate. Great job!
great piece. really well-written and a fantastic message
To drive home the message that men do not begin serious relationships by hooking up, perhaps an actual male person could volunteer to say that in these pages.
Thanks for having this important conversation.
Thanks for writing this.
As an actual male person, I will vouch for the fact that men do not begin serious relationships via hooking up. Also, you won't find your soulmate in a bar or a nightclub over several bottles of PBR. What you will find are a lot of self-centered perpetual adolescents keen to use women the same way they use alcohol--for an endorphin rush. Most men assume that if you're in such a setting, that's what you are looking for too.
The hook-up culture is fun for a little while, but its long-term effects are physically and psychologically toxic.