“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?
What makes people hook up without any feelings for the other person? Why do people continue to hook up with people for whom they have feelings when it is clear that these are not reciprocated, and that they are only hurting themselves? I don’t know. I don’t have the answers; I wish I did. And, as it turned out, neither did Mantak. She appeared to suggest the media with her MTV clip and society-at-large with her history of dating behavior, in the end I don’t think we ever came to a conclusion.
But what about when the feelings are shared? Then everything is all well and good, right? . . . two people are hooking up they decide they like each other, they date, they fall in love, story tale ending. Unfortunately, the attendees did not seem to have had that experience. We live in a new age of hook-ups and break-ups and going steady at fourteen in which several people at the talk were frustrated by the frequently in which they found themselves going out on a first date after their first time.
What I was happy to take away from the discussion was the fact that I was not alone, even on this campus, in my respect for sexual intimacy. Other girls had witnessed their friends fall for guys they were hooking up with, gotten jealous as he hit on other girls at a bar, and ended up getting hurt. Other girls had witnessed the confusion and disaster that comes from dating out of a hook up and had heard girls called “sluts” or “whores” for hooking up with a guy she was not dating.
We all saw the problems, but we did not all come to agree on any real solutions. I think we have made a lot of progress in our society in regards to sex and dating. We have made improvements in sexual education and in awareness of domestic and dating violence and unhealthy relationships. We have made sexual assault easier to report and less of a taboo subject to talk about. We have made progress towards removing gender bias from our condemnation of non-relationship sexual activity. And it has become okay to engage in non-relationship sexual activity, which is fine by me if as long as this is a healthy decision for both parties involved—although again, I think it often isn’t.
I would like to see more respect for sexual and intimate activities and more respect for relationships. What do people gain from these experiences that compensates for the devaluation of intimacy in actual in a relationships? I’d like to see people stop “hooking up” with someone they are interested in as a pre-cursor to actually dating, or hopping in bed with someone they have just begun to date.
All of us need to take dating and sexual / intimate activity more seriously. Would we really lose anything by taking the time to get to know someone before going up to bat with them? Would we really lose anything by rounding the bases just a little bit slower?
We would gain. We would come to better understand both ourselves and each other. Relationships would more often be founded on mutual respect and love. And we would restore value to miraculous, God given, life giving – something long overdue.
