Hook Ups

Since the day I left Junior High it has seemed like things were changing too fast. I remember when kissing someone was a big deal. My first year of high school I heard from the younger sibling of a friend that three girls at our school had gotten caught having sex.

Back when I was there it was rare to even hear about someone going as far as to get fingered.

Now in college people talk about hooking up as if its something completely normal and even therapeutic. I used to see examples of it everyday. I still see guys that make out with girls, interchangeably in groups, and girls who make out with each other for a guys entertainment. I have to stop and ask, what happened to you women?

The women from a newspaper, Laura Sessions Stepp has written this book called Unhooked about the decline of love and its replacement by hookups in college and high school life. If I didn't see it for myself I wouldn't have believed it at first. In my high school people were so close knit that there wasn't much hooking up in the open, everyone knew everyone.

But when I got to college things changed severely and I could see the stuff that was going on all around me. One girl I knew personally got passed around like a doobie among hippies. Guys would get together and discuss her performance and even rate her on how well she did individual things.

Stories cropped up about different crazy acts she had taken part in, one of the most notorious was her allowing a guy to use the vibrate function on his phone for purposes other than it was intended for, needless to say the phone broke. But the point here is this, hook ups, for the most part, are degrading to women and they harm the guy on the other end of the thing too.

The problem really stems from Feminism, now I know I am going to get a lot of hate speech over this, but I think the second that women led themselves to believe that sexuality was the way for them to become more independent, they left themselves open to be used in a new way. Being outlandishly sexual doesn't empower you. All of the guys and girls I know that get the most crazy sex are the most unhappy people.

I read an article that Laura Stepp wrote on Valentines Day and it amazed me how much I thought the same way she did. She wrote about how many women didn't want anything to do with long term relationships because there wasn't any time for them. Stepp states in her article:

A national survey of 18-to-29-year-olds by the Pew Research Center reported that almost 60 percent were not in committed relationships and the majority of those were not interested in being committed. Young women even have phrases for couples, frequently spoken with a touch of derision: They're 'joined at the hip,' or 'married.'

But I can tell you right now that part of the problem lies in our parents. I had a friend who had a mother who had been divorced several times, and this friend told me that "I don't see the big deal with marriage, its just a short term commitment". Believe it or not the reluctance for people to seek divorce ruins the minds of the children involved.

What I can't do is offer much help. Guys I know think they are happy to be this way, to seek out these things and only these things. And occasionally making out with someone at a party isn't going to damage your mind forever, but going about looking for this as if its going to lead you to eventually meet someone you love is a dumb idea. If the other person only sees you as a hook-up that's all you'll ever be. Even if you marry that person, expect to get divorced, or have major problems. You weren't what they had in mind, just what was convenient.

A link to the original article can be found here: myspace