Is Hooking Up Bad for You?

“I also think that faith can fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and the sense of reverence all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.”
-Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p.215

I am a libertarian and I do not believe in legislating morality. I am a Christian and I was always taught to respect and love all people, not to judge their behavior. I take seriously the words of Christ, “let he who be without sin cast the first stone.”

While no saint myself, I do possess a certain reverence towards sexual intimacy. It with that perspective that I attended a talk led by Frances Mantak, from Health Education, called “Sex and the MTV Culture: Is Hooking Up Bad for You?” This program was presented by the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center on Thursday, October 26 to an audience that filled the center’s lounge. During Mantak’s program, we discussed changes in dating behavior over time in this country and what technology, cell phones, text messaging, and AIM have done to encourage the “hook up.” The attendants, mostly women, eagerly talked on for the entire hour of time that was allotted. While Mantak did not come to preach, I sense that if she had, her ideology would have been largely in line with my own.

People often hook up because they are already depressed, dejected, and disheartened. Hooking up does not cure them of these ills. Yes, there are countless happy, healthy, hearty people, especially here at Brown, who have hooked up countless times contently. And if that works for them, that’s great. If they do not expose themselves to Sexually Transmitted Infections and emotional pain that can’t be treated, wonderful. If they do not grow attachments to the person, they hooked up with which are not returned, lovely. More power to them.

Yet, there are a substantial number of people who do get hurt by hook-ups, which they had intended to be one time, no-strings-attached encounter: one individual (most commonly the girl) lies to the other, and herself, by saying “it doesn’t mean anything.” And in the end, it does mean something to her; she develops strings which, along with her heart, get broken.

And our society says she is the one making the error; that she was wrong for connecting sexual intimacy with actual intimacy. Her friends tell her there are plenty of fish in the sea and encourage her to not attach herself emotionally to the next one she reels in.

This was the general message of Mantak’s talk and the discussion that followed. We watched a clip from MTV’s Real World, in which exactly this situation occurred. To my surprise, most of the crowd agreed that hooking up just ends up hurting people, especially women.

Every high school girl watches their friends fall precisely that trap with a guy: he didn’t consider kissing something special or valuable, and they did; he didn’t care that much for them, and they did. They wanted relationship, and he did not. Knowing all of this, many of them continued to hook up time and time again. What is it in our society that makes them go through this over and over again with different guys? What makes this okay for either party?