Sex On Campus: College Hook-up Culture On Young Women

[Semper Catholic]

Clutch those pearls Grandma. I heard the young ladies at Vassar are now listening to some "Elvis" fellow and staying up past curfew. The horror.

[Era Might]

Life's complicated for the bourgeoisie. Reminds me of something Kenneth Rexroth said in an essay about Simone Weil, the tortured woman philosopher who identified as a Christian but chose not to be baptized, explaining her decision in a letter to a priest-friend of hers. The situation of these women in the New York Times article who don't want to commit to a man is similar, I think:

 

Religion has been called the gap between the technology and the environment. When her intellectual and psychological environment blew up in her face, Simone Weil discovered that she had no technology whatever, and the gap was absolute. She never permitted herself access to anyone who could help her. If I were planning to enter the Catholic Church the last person I would ever approach would be the kind of priest who could make head or tail of her Letter to a Priest.

 

Fr. Perrin and M. Thibon may have been wise men in their generation, but they both fell into the trap of her dialectic of agony. They took her seriously — in the wrong way. They lacked the vulgar but holy frivolity of common sense of the unsophisticated parish priest who would have told her, “Come, come, my child, what you need is to get baptized, obey the Ten Commandments, go to Mass on Sundays, make your Easter duties, forget about religion, put some meat on your bones, and get a husband.” Simone Weil knew the type, and she avoided them as a criminal avoids the police, and probably secretly disdained them as much.

 

Only such advice could have saved her. Only the realization of the truth — so hard to come by for the religious adventurer — that no one is “called” to be any holier than he absolutely has to be, could have given her real illumination. To anything like this she was defiantly impervious. She went to John of the Cross when she should have gone to plain Fr. Dupont, or Fr. Monahan, or Fr. Aliotto. Even Huysmans, with all his posturing, had sense enough to make St. Severin, that humble slum church, his home parish. Simone Weil assaulted the Garden of Gethsemane, and as is so often the case, was broken on the gate.

 

http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm

[CrossCuT]

These two look like real comments:

I figured it was clear which comments were not that serious, but thank you for pointing out which ones were.  :smile3: 

 

I certainly intended my comment to be "real". I teach in higher ed, so I read the entire article. (It isn't actually that long.) I knew about the hook-up culture, but it's not the kind of thing you'd pick up on as a teacher. I had simply heard about it in articles and books on "students today". I didn't realize it was quite so bad as the NYT article revealed. And before I read that article, I really hadn't thought about "who perpetuates it". In a sense, it's obvious that everyone who participates in it perpetuates it. But I think that women's participation in it is largely driven by the desire for emotional and relational intimacy, regardless of what those women say. As a woman who was not always as modest as I am now, and who has friends who have traveled the same road as I have, I know that a lot of women "experiment" with hooking up and talk a lot of smack about how liberated they are and how they just want a good lay and how they have other "ambitious" priorities and bla bla bla. But the truth is, most women go home from a hook-up hoping the guy will call them again. For the most part (I'm not saying it's everyone), women use sex to "hook" men. Which is stupid, because that is not what hooks a good man. They just think that, since that's what men obviously want, and since they aren't emotionally or otherwise available, it's the only "hook" they've got to offer.

 

That being said, I think that the Patheos article was spot on. The more we suffer from a lack of intimacy and attachment, the more we seek those things out in harmful (and unproductive) ways. Not everyone who does stupid things is aware of their true motivations for doing so. That takes self-awareness, which I can say without a doubt not many of my students have. So if you ask them about those stupid behaviors, they'll rationalize why they do it. And they'll rationalize in a way that flatters their egos—because obviously that's what's hurting from all their history of insufficient intimacy and attachment and real, healthy love. They'll say they do it because they're ambitious and don't care about having a relationship with a man. When the truth is, if they really didn't care about having a relationship with a man, they'd forego sex altogether and spend their nights studying. Twenty years from now they'll look back on their behavior and recognize their real reasons for doing it.

 

I think everything you said is exactly how I feel on the issue. I always find it funny when women claim these things are liberating. Ive heard this term used with birth control as well and its all just bleh. 

[EmilyAnn]

The article was right in a way that it can be difficult to establish meaningful relationships at university - I don't know about the US but here people don't go to university near their hometowns, so chances are if you meet someone they're from halfway across the country and people don't want to invest in a relationship that has a time limit. University is only 3 years here. The majority of people I knew who were in serious relationships had been with their partner before they came to uni. Many of my female friends found that the problem wasn't that they weren't interested in serious relationships, but they struggled to find men who were. They were faced with the expectation that they should provide sex before a man would be seriously interested in them, which obviously fails. 

 

From my experiences at college and seeing how my friends behaved, the ones who had casual sex were those who were emotionally vulnerable and insecure. They didn't see themselves as worthy of a real, loving relationship. They saw that they got attention from men purely for sex and believed that was all they were worthy of, and they were ultimately very unhappy with the choices they made. And ultimately, these are women who just want to feel wanted, but confuse being desired purely for sex (in which circumstance it's not you they want, but just anyone) and being genuinely loved and cared for. What the article really misses is that the cost-benefit analysis and all that other stuff comes after the fact, not before. It's a way of rationalising one's behaviour so that they don't have to face how unhappy their choices are making them. 

[Socrates]

Clutch those pearls Grandma. I heard the young ladies at Vassar are now listening to some "Elvis" fellow and staying up past curfew. The horror.

 

You're a pretty lame troll.

 

Look to "God the Father" for an example of trolling done right.

[Socrates]

Life's complicated for the bourgeoisie. Reminds me of something Kenneth Rexroth said in an essay about Simone Weil, the tortured woman philosopher who identified as a Christian but chose not to be baptized, explaining her decision in a letter to a priest-friend of hers. The situation of these women in the New York Times article who don't want to commit to a man is similar, I think:

 

You like to use the word "bourgeoisie" a lot.

 

It's so quaintly old-school Leftist.  Charming.

[Era Might]

You like to use the word "bourgeoisie" a lot.

 

It's so quaintly old-school Leftist.  Charming.

 

Do you have a better alternative? "Middle class" is more American, but too technical...doesn't have the necessary cultural overtones.

[Socrates]

Do you have a better alternative? "Middle class" is more American, but too technical...doesn't have the necessary cultural overtones.

 

I actually find the term more quaintly amusing than offensive, but never mind me, I'm weird like that.

[4588686]

You like to use the word "bourgeoisie" a lot.

 

It's so quaintly old-school Leftist.  Charming.

 

 

1- Era Might isn't a leftist.

 

2-Leftists aren't the only ones who use that terms.  In fact I've read it in works by intelligent conservatives (These tend to not be books written by Mark Levin).

 

3-It's not offensive, nor was it intended to be.

[Gabriela]

Many of my female friends found that the problem wasn't that they weren't interested in serious relationships, but they struggled to find men who were. They were faced with the expectation that they should provide sex before a man would be seriously interested in them, which obviously fails. 

 

From my experiences at college and seeing how my friends behaved, the ones who had casual sex were those who were emotionally vulnerable and insecure. They didn't see themselves as worthy of a real, loving relationship. They saw that they got attention from men purely for sex and believed that was all they were worthy of, and they were ultimately very unhappy with the choices they made. And ultimately, these are women who just want to feel wanted, but confuse being desired purely for sex (in which circumstance it's not you they want, but just anyone) and being genuinely loved and cared for. What the article really misses is that the cost-benefit analysis and all that other stuff comes after the fact, not before. It's a way of rationalising one's behaviour so that they don't have to face how unhappy their choices are making them. 

 

That is my experience exactly.