What the hook-up culture has done to women.

[HouseArrest]

I think it’s real but I think it’s contained within a certain subset of campus life. The vast majority of college students really are there to learn skills to do a job and move on with life.

It’s everywhere, and it has been since the '80s. Many of my friends who were big into the late night booty calls from boys were there to learn skills to do a job and move on with life… during the day. At night and on weekends, well, it was quite a different story.

Most state colleges have their orientation days filled with safe sex meetings, playing condom bingo and other such silly games meant to help students protect themselves physically. I know of several students in these past few years who turned down RA positions because of what they were required to teach the freshmen.

One school had a basket of condoms at the front desk, just like you’d normally see a basket of mints at a restaurant. If it were just a subset of students, I don’t think all that would be happening.

 

[Allegra]

It’s everywhere, and it has been since the '80s. Many of my friends who were big into the late night booty calls from boys were there to learn skills to do a job and move on with life… during the day. At night and on weekends, well, it was quite a different story.

Most state colleges have their orientation days filled with safe sex meetings, playing condom bingo and other such silly games meant to help students protect themselves physically. I know of several students in these past few years who turned down RA positions because of what they were required to teach the freshmen.

One school had a basket of condoms at the front desk, just like you’d normally see a basket of mints at a restaurant. If it were just a subset of students, I don’t think all that would be happening.

Gee. None of that happened at the orientations I was part of planning when I worked for a state university admissions office. And the only basket of condoms I was aware of anywhere on campus was in the student health office.

 

[Xantippe]

Gee. None of that happened at the orientations I was part of planning when I worked for a state university admissions office. And the only basket of condoms I was aware of anywhere on campus was in the student health office.

Yeah.

I went to a large private college in the early 90s (that was still the WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE OF AIDS era) and I believe there might have been a basket of condoms in student health, but nowhere else. There was a travelling novelty condom vendor that appeared occasionally. I also believe there was some sort of fruit and veggie demonstration one of my years living in the dorms, but only one year.

99.9% of the time there wasn’t anything like that going on.

 

[PLinz]

On the flip side:

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3634473/The-job-makes-happiest-Housewife-Survey-finds-stay-home-mothers-satisfied-profession.html

 

[HouseArrest]

Yeah.

I went to a large private college in the early 90s (that was still the WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE OF AIDS era) and I believe there might have been a basket of condoms in student health, but nowhere else. There was a travelling novelty condom vendor that appeared occasionally. I also believe there was some sort of fruit and veggie demonstration one of my years living in the dorms, but only one year.

99.9% of the time there wasn’t anything like that going on.

I think the behavior of college students in the past few decades was what motivated these actions by the colleges. They don’t just up and put a basket of condoms at the entrance of a dorm for no reason. It has finally evolved into this.

 

[Xantippe]

On the flip side:

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3634473/The-job-makes-happiest-Housewife-Survey-finds-stay-home-mothers-satisfied-profession.html

That’s not the US.

 

[Xantippe]

Also, a lot of religious colleges (even Catholic ones you think of as Sodom and Gomorrah) don’t do that stuff.

 

[HouseArrest]

Also, a lot of religious colleges (even Catholic ones you think of as Sodom and Gomorrah) don’t do that stuff.

Those things are a result of decades of the hook up scene. State and secular schools are handling it by providing baskets of condoms and having safe sex orientation events.

There are various reactions by the Catholic colleges I am familiar with. At some I have seen posters providing encouragement to lead a chaste life. Others have a chapter of the Anscombe Society on campus. Some secular schools have chapters as well. (It was actually started by a student at Princeton.)

loveandfidelity.org/#

The mission statement:

About LFN

Our Mission

The Love and Fidelity Network’s mission is to equip college students with the resources, support, and arguments they need to uphold the institution of marriage, the special role of the family, and sexual integrity within their university communities. We aim to build a network that will become the nucleus of an articulate and effective new generation of leaders who will advocate for marriage, family, love and fidelity on college campuses and in the public square.

Some Catholic colleges do not allow or severely restrict visitation in the dorms. The Cardinal Newman Society just posted several articles suggesting that all Catholic colleges review and make stricter their policies:

https://cardinalnewmansociety.org/?s=dorm+visitation&post_type%5B%5D=post&post_type%5B%5D=program&category_name=&tag=

This isn’t all for nothing. There is a huge problem with the hook up culture on many campuses. It isn’t just a few kids, and it isn’t just the ones who are not serious about their studies.

 

[Xantippe]

Those things are a result of decades of the hook up scene. State and secular schools are handling it by providing baskets of condoms and having safe sex orientation events.

There are various reactions by the Catholic colleges I am familiar with. At some I have seen posters providing encouragement to lead a chaste life. Others have a chapter of the Anscombe Society on campus. Some secular schools have chapters as well. (It was actually started by a student at Princeton.)

loveandfidelity.org/#

The mission statement:

About LFN

Our Mission

The Love and Fidelity Network’s mission is to equip college students with the resources, support, and arguments they need to uphold the institution of marriage, the special role of the family, and sexual integrity within their university communities. We aim to build a network that will become the nucleus of an articulate and effective new generation of leaders who will advocate for marriage, family, love and fidelity on college campuses and in the public square.

Some Catholic colleges do not allow or severely restrict visitation in the dorms. The Cardinal Newman Society just posted several articles suggesting that all Catholic colleges review and make stricter their policies:

https://cardinalnewmansociety.org/?s=dorm+visitation&post_type%5B%5D=post&post_type%5B%5D=program&category_name=&tag=

This isn’t all for nothing. There is a huge problem with the hook up culture on many campuses. It isn’t just a few kids, and it isn’t just the ones who are not serious about their studies.

Eh, bear in mind that even if it were sex 100% in actual dating relationships (so not hook-ups), colleges would still be concerned about “safe sex.” They certainly were during more HIV-conscious times.

Not all non-marital sex is hook-ups–let’s not misuse the terminology.

 

[HouseArrest]

Eh, bear in mind that even if it were sex 100% in actual dating relationships (so not hook-ups), colleges would still be concerned about “safe sex.” They certainly were during more HIV-conscious times.

Not all non-marital sex is hook-ups–let’s not misuse the terminology.

There is some difference in attention, from administration of colleges from the 90’s where 99.99% of the time there were no condoms being pushed at dorm entrances and condom distributing games being played at orientation, and now.

The many articles I have read are using the term “hook up culture”. There may be another set of students who are in dating relationships and having premarital sex, but that is not where the uprising of concern is. Sure, everyone wants the students to be physically healthy, but the articles about these new “relationships” also address the psychological effects of, putting it probably too simply, being used.

Are there that many couples in committed dating relationships that don’t have their birth control all figured out, and will need a last minute condom on the way into the dorm? Probably not enough to warrant a basket of them a the entrance.

All I am trying to point out is that it is clear from the amount of articles, reactions of college administrations, and formation of clubs that this is not a small problem contained within a small number of students.

Edited to add: If I remember correctly, your kids are small, and so are Allegra’s. The hook up culture started about the 80’s, and is finally becoming noticed as a huge problem. I certainly hope that by the time your kids are old enough to go on college visits, this kind of dorm living is over or at least tamed somewhat. I have horror story after horror story about the campus atmosphere. There are just too many to go into.

 

[Allegra]

There is some difference in attention, from administration of colleges from the 90’s where 99.99% of the time there were no condoms being pushed at dorm entrances and condom distributing games being played at orientation, and now.

The many articles I have read are using the term “hook up culture”. There may be another set of students who are in dating relationships and having premarital sex, but that is not where the uprising of concern is. Sure, everyone wants the students to be physically healthy, but the articles about these new “relationships” also address the psychological effects of, putting it probably too simply, being used.

Are there that many couples in committed dating relationships that don’t have their birth control all figured out, and will need a last minute condom on the way into the dorm? Probably not enough to warrant a basket of them a the entrance.

All I am trying to point out is that it is clear from the amount of articles, reactions of college administrations, and formation of clubs that this is not a small problem contained within a small number of students.

Edited to add: If I remember correctly, your kids are small, and so are Allegra’s. The hook up culture started about the 80’s, and is finally becoming noticed as a huge problem. I certainly hope that by the time your kids are old enough to go on college visits, this kind of dorm living is over or at least tamed somewhat. I have horror story after horror story about the campus atmosphere. There are just too many to go into.

After several years working for a university, I have come to the conclusion that dorms are a huge ripoff and a money-making system for the university. There is nothing “safer” about living in a dorm unless its a campus in a really unsafe urban area. It is massively expensive, very poor quality of life, a nutrition nightmare, and an environment completely not condusive to study or forming an appropriate social life. I intend to encourage my kids to attend one of the dozen or so local university options and live at home, or pick a school that allows students to live off campus in their own apartment.

 

[EasterJoy]

After several years working for a university, I have come to the conclusion that dorms are a huge ripoff and a money-making system for the university. There is nothing “safer” about living in a dorm unless its a campus in a really unsafe urban area. It is massively expensive, very poor quality of life, a nutrition nightmare, and an environment completely not conducive to study or forming an appropriate social life. I intend to encourage my kids to attend one of the dozen or so local university options and live at home, or pick a school that allows students to live off campus in their own apartment.

Dorms are needed because most college freshman are not ready for the jump to university academics, let alone buying and preparing their own food and accomplishing the other tasks that adults have to accomplish in daily life.

Most universities have a quiet dorm that is miles better in terms of a living situation for students who intend to use their college years to learn as much as possible from their coursework and get good grades to show for it.

When university food providers in our locale went from the all-you-can-eat model to a tick system where points are used to pay for food, the quality and the range of choices increased tremendously. There isn’t any reason a student cannot find healthful meal choices in a university with one of those good food services. The kind of food that college students typically prepare for themselves, meanwhile, easily spans the entire spectrum you are talking about. A lot of college students buy prepared food that is high in salt, high in sugar, high in calories, relatively high in cost per serving and low in nutritional value because they like junk food and do not have a clue how to grocery shop or cook their own meals.

I would not advise a typical first-year college student to start out in their first apartment and take care of their own food procurement or preparation unless they were already accustomed to doing that. It’s too much to take on in addition to the academic change, and that is true even if they were very good and hard-working high school students. College coursework is not just harder than high school work; it is also very different.

 

[EasterJoy]

“It is no coincidence that the top two prescribed drugs at our state university’s health center are anti-depressants and the birth-control pill. Our young women are showing up to a very different version of “college life” than that of the previous generation. One woman, while in her freshman year, went to her health center because she feared she had bronchitis. In perusing her “health history,” the physician said, “I see here that you are a virgin.” “Um, yes,” she responded, wondering what that fact might have to do with her persistent cough. “Would you like to be referred for counseling about that?” This student came to me to ask if I thought she should, in fact, consider her virginity—at the age of eighteen—a psychological issue. (I said no.)”

What the hook-up culture has done to women.

I am astonished that she doesn’t recognize what her mother would have had to say to her college-aged sister’s decision to a) take her 16 year old kid sister to a bar in the first place and then b) not watch her even as carefully when she got there as she would have a purse full of the day’s receipts from a business.

I think a great deal of the culture of casual promiscuity would evaporate if it were not for the concurrent culture that purposefully and habitually seeks out profound intoxication as a necessary element of social life. People get drunk or high and then do things they don’t remember or wish they could forget, but that is the socially-accepted means of acting at a “party.”

How much better college campuses would be if “party” and “get drunk, high or both” didn’t mean the same thing, if a sober life wasn’t incompatible with having a social life. There would be far fewer regrets if that one change could be made.

The other cultural norm that needs to go is the fashion that assumes that appropriate dress and behavior–not just for young adults, but even for children and senior citizens!-- must be sexually alluring by its very nature. People rating fashion trends talk as if tasteful dress that doesn’t suggest a desire to arouse sexual desire in all lookers is automatically “dowdy” or unattractive. This in turn implies that a young person who goes into a club and does not get solicitations for sex must either have made a serious fashion mistake or have exhibited poor social graces or else is irredeemably ugly.

If you don’t attract sexual advances from total strangers, you are made to feel insecure: ugly, geeky, no sense of style, or no charm. If you do, you are either an ice queen or a tease (because you stirred up passions you wouldn’t consent to indulge in) or you wind up making some choices that you live to regret, since everyone is being pushed to rush into intimacy–both physical and emotional, I might add–far greater than the foundation of their personal relationship will bear.

 

[RPRPsych]

What you aren’t grasping is that women are the gatekeepers to sex. When females guard their virtue, men don’t get any unless they get married or pay for it. Men were always easily corrupted, but held in check by women who realized that their sexuality is valuable and they weren’t giving it away for free. They kept their would be promiscuous sisters in check with good old fashioned shame.

While “slut shaming” still exists, it is much less effective thanks to the hookup culture which feminism enabled. It remains, however, a phenomenon of women attacking other women. A study was recently done that showed 2/3 of slut shaming on social media is done by women. So while I don’t blame you for being angry, I respectfully suggest it is misguided.

This is an extraordinarily reductionistic and un-Catholic view of sexuality and chastity. Your argument is the tired one used by the rape apologists in my country, as well as the “chastity for women, but not for men” school of Islam. Men are easily corrupted? It’s all on the women? Yawn.

Moving on.

 

[EasterJoy]

Same here. It was unthinkable to my doctor that I was in my late teens and still a virgin.

I was an atheist at the time but I did not see the value of sleeping around risking disease and pregnancies. Face it, so called protection isn’t foolproof and neither do birth control pills work 100% of the time. It was just not prudent for me to sleep around.

Young men get this same pressure–and yes, it isn’t just the religious guys who see the foolishness of a life of casual promiscuity! It is not as if all the guys want to have casual hook-ups or to give their hearts to women who only want them for sex while thinking they are morons. A man who wants a solid relationship and a marriage before having the sexual relations that will make him a father is treated like a pariah, too. He’s treated as if there is something wrong with him if he doesn’t want to have lots of casual sex, or if he’s just saying he doesn’t want that because he has “hang ups” or he’s got performance anxiety or is speaking out of sour grapes because he “can’t get any.”

 

[EasterJoy]

What you aren’t grasping is that women are the gatekeepers to sex. When females guard their virtue, men don’t get any unless they get married or pay for it. Men were always easily corrupted, but held in check by women who realized that their sexuality is valuable and they weren’t giving it away for free. They kept their would be promiscuous sisters in check with good old fashioned shame.

While “slut shaming” still exists, it is much less effective thanks to the hookup culture which feminism enabled. It remains, however, a phenomenon of women attacking other women. A study was recently done that showed 2/3 of slut shaming on social media is done by women. So while I don’t blame you for being angry, I respectfully suggest it is misguided.

I don’t get you. When women guard their virtue, they aren’t “getting any” either, hmm?

I’d venture that far more than 2/3 of all emotional feedback of every kind on social media is done by women. It’s not as if guys are getting on there and defending the women who are subjected to “catty” attacks by other women, right? From that, I wouldn’t conclude that de-valuing women who don’t take any seduction is just a female pasttime.

We live in an age when men can no longer be certain they will not be held to account for casual sex. It used to be the women got pregnant, the men didn’t have to worry about it unless they had an operational conscience. Now we have this thing called DNA testing. The men are learning that they may have a life-long investment thrust upon them from a one-night stand, too. They are also learning that they have zero to say about whether their child is allowed to go to term or not. They are learning that they can get cancer from the many strains of HPV not covered by vaccines, too, and all sorts of other negative health problems from STD exposure. That is starting to change the math.

 

[edwest2]

That’s not the US.

Women are different on the other side of the pond? I highly doubt the idea.

Ed

 

[edwest2]

Those things are a result of decades of the hook up scene. State and secular schools are handling it by providing baskets of condoms and having safe sex orientation events.

There are various reactions by the Catholic colleges I am familiar with. At some I have seen posters providing encouragement to lead a chaste life. Others have a chapter of the Anscombe Society on campus. Some secular schools have chapters as well. (It was actually started by a student at Princeton.)

loveandfidelity.org/#

The mission statement:

About LFN

Our Mission

The Love and Fidelity Network’s mission is to equip college students with the resources, support, and arguments they need to uphold the institution of marriage, the special role of the family, and sexual integrity within their university communities. We aim to build a network that will become the nucleus of an articulate and effective new generation of leaders who will advocate for marriage, family, love and fidelity on college campuses and in the public square.

Some Catholic colleges do not allow or severely restrict visitation in the dorms. The Cardinal Newman Society just posted several articles suggesting that all Catholic colleges review and make stricter their policies:

https://cardinalnewmansociety.org/?s=dorm+visitation&post_type%5B%5D=post&post_type%5B%5D=program&category_name=&tag=

This isn’t all for nothing. There is a huge problem with the hook up culture on many campuses. It isn’t just a few kids, and it isn’t just the ones who are not serious about their studies.

Thank you for posting this.

Ed

 

[Irishmom2]

On the flip side:

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3634473/The-job-makes-happiest-Housewife-Survey-finds-stay-home-mothers-satisfied-profession.html

Not sure what this has to do with the topic of this thread.

 

[BlueEyedLady]

Not sure what this has to do with the topic of this thread.

It really wouldn’t surprise me to find out that’s the case. Intuitively, it seems like most people would be happier working on their own schedule, caring for their own family who they love, and not having to deal with a psycho bosses and coworkers. But, there are also a lot of people who thrive when they work outside the home. It really doesn’t matter, because if you’re in the second category but staying at home, it really isn’t going to matter to you how ‘happy’ other people are in your same situation.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/08/7-key-findings-about-stay-at-home-moms/

This whole fact sheet was pretty interesting. #7 points out that SAHMs get more sleep and leisure than working moms do - both of those things correlate strongly with happiness.