What is hookup culture? Hookup culture basically consists of having relations with someone you aren’t dating/in a relationship with. Many people correlate this type of relationship with college life. For the most part, they aren’t wrong to. College can be that “experimental phase,” “fun before settling down,” or “single years” for plenty of people, and that’s just fine. I don’t see why something like this needs a label and needs to be analyzed by middle-aged people with so much judgment. However, I do have my own problems with our so-called “hookup culture”.
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First of which being how male-oriented this subculture is. Everything from party themes to porn is made to appeal to boys. Everywhere you look women are sexualized in order to be more pleasing to men. Even bigger than that, men are stereotyped to be the ones going up to girls or asking girls out. It is like they have their pick of the crop and women are just there for selection purposes.
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Another thing that pisses me off is the informality of talking about hooking up. I was literally in a public restroom when I heard one girl say, “Yeah, Brian fucked me last night. I’d give it a 6 out of ten, though. He refused to go down on me,” to another girl while washing their hands. Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear about a juicy hook up as much as the next one, but the problem is we talk about it like it’s as simple as doing the laundry. What happened to the beauty keeping intimacy private and personal between two people?
(Image credit: https://therooster.com/blog/one-night-stand-selfies)
Going off of that, why the hell are body counts a thing? I mean, seriously. No one talks about the fact that body counts are referencing sexual partners (REAL human beings) as nothing but a body. Body counts are also discussed like no big deal; like they aren’t an extremely personal matter, which they are! Also, there isn’t a good answer to the question, “what’s your body count?” If you have 0 or 1, you’re inexperienced, prude, boring. If you have more than that, you’re easy, promiscuous, or a slut.
As young people, I feel we should embrace our hookup culture. We are in the age of acceptance and that’s awesome. What we shouldn’t do is make our hookup culture all about hooking up with people for the sake of telling the story or adding a number on a list. Hooking up is more than that and the culture should be too.