The ladies are already doin' it for themselves

I’m exhausted of trend piece-inspired hand-wringing about the state of the collegiate hymen.

I have news for every publication, most recently The New York Times, that insists on cracking this whole “hookup culture” thing wide open: female sexual desire is not a trend.

Every piece focuses on women.
 
Is hookup culture hurting women? Are women driving hookup culture? What about their MRS degree? How do they have time to hook up with randos when they have cooking, cleaning and laundry to do?

I have yet to read an article about hookup culture that includes similar worries about men, an oversight that implies hurtful assumptions about both genders.

The denial of female sexual desire, or the shock in discovering it, is an attitude leftover from Victorian days when women had to schedule a doctor’s appointment in order to orgasm. 

By focusing solely on hookup culture’s impact on women, these trend pieces reinforce the idea that women wanting sex — especially no-strings-attached sex — is an aberration that must be explained by something other than sexual desire.

These pieces assume sexual desire is only caused by pressure from men, by career goals, by drugs and alcohol. These assumptions are harmful because they reinforce in young women the idea that their only role in sex is to be pleasing rather than to be pleased.

This is the conditioning that leads to the scarier scenes of the Times piece, wherein women perform sexual acts just to get it over with, or because they felt like they had to.

The failure to examine the men’s side is also troubling.

When feminists say the patriarchy hurts men too, this is the kind of attitude we are talking about: that men are sex-crazed animals, that men’s emotions are weak, stunted or even non-existent.

Hookup culture pieces tend to assume that all men would actually prefer sex without emotions. This denies male emotional depth and sympathy, furthering the cult of masculinity that insists (straight) boys don’t cry. 

Stereotyping male libido as uncontrollable and indiscriminate allows defense attorneys to put a rape victim’s wardrobe on trial. The argument “Look at what she was wearing! Of course I couldn’t help myself,” exists because it works.

Because enough of us believe that men are physically unable to control where they stick their penises.

The idea that “women only sex like this” and “men only sex like that” is actively harming us. It destroys female sexual confidence, male emotional solvency and perpetuates rape culture.  And it sells papers.

Until we can get it through our thick skulls that women can want sex and men can want relationships, we’ll be affronted with the same drivel next year, and the year after, until we all die, probably from the shock that college students are having sex.

Or maybe the “Me Me Me Generation” will prove too incompetent to keep the world from exploding.

I read about it in a trend piece.

­— casefarr@indiana.edu