Girls Who Swing
I’m a 21-year-old member of the hookup generation.
I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships. Like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships.
I don’t exactly advocate picking up guys at frat parties and screwing atop the keg as the path to marital bliss. It’s just that hookup culture is not the radical extreme so frequently characterized in the media.
There is sloppy stranger sex among people my age, but sometimes hooking up is regular sex with a casual acquaintance. Sometimes it’s innocent making out or casually dating or cuddling.
Often it involves just one person at a time. In a sense it’s all very old-fashioned. There’s just a lot more unattached sex involved.
Like most 20-somethings, I’ve had online porn and unregulated chat rooms at my fingertips since I hit puberty. But I also grew up during the Girl/Grrrl Power explosion, which taught me to demand respect from boys. It taught me that I didn’t need to cake myself in makeup or teeter in high heels.
From the very start, my love life has embodied that seeming paradox. I lost my virginity at 16 with my first love and best friend. It was all champagne and roses.
It was also porno sex. I enthusiastically guided us into nearly every position I’d long marveled at online. At one point, midcoital, I actually pinched my chin and asked aloud, “What positions are left?”
Afterwards, he said the sex wasn’t what he’d imagined. He probably thought it would be the missionary position and ceremonial crying.
I didn’t do much hooking up in college; I went to a single-sex school. But after I closed the gates to that cosseted women’s school and all of its unsexy talk about misogyny and the patriarchy I opened those other metaphorical gates of mine.
I opened my legs. That’s not to say I had a host of one-night stands. I’ve never had a one-night stand, only several-nights stands. I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they suited me.
Perhaps our generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple pleasure back into sex.
Perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard.
The idea that a woman has to test a man by withholding sex, as many abstinence advocates argue, relies on a paradigm of inequality in which women are forced to rely on such desperate power plays.
It isn’t that feminism has taught women to have sex like men, as the argument commonly goes, but that withholding sex isn’t women’s sole superpower. Coitus isn’t women’s kryptonite.
Know what you want from a hook-up and be open to finding chemistry with someone you haven’t made your target. If you hit it off with some hottie on the dance floor let the magic happen.
It’s probably wise to keep in mind that a drunken night of hooking up with a rando from the Harvey Mudd party won’t lead to any sort of romance.
If you’re on a relationship quest this may not be the best method. But if booty call is the name of your game, go forth and multiply (your orgasms).
Hook-ups are bound to have slip-ups or awkward moments, so lighten up the situation and have a little laugh. Hook-ups should be footloose and fancy-free!! If there’s less pressure, you’ll be focused on enjoying yourself rather than performing perfectly.