Monday, January 27, 2014

What Do You Mean The Hookup Culture Is A Social Construct?!

If you've ever attended college, you're familiar with the term "hookup culture." If the college you attended was Colgate, the idea has crept its way into approximately 47%* of your classes and personal conversations. If you're anything like me, your first time hearing the term was great because you finally had a word for the phenomenon you had been witnessing in your environment...and then after years and years of critique after critique you were fatigued of the conversation.

That was until I read this.

Truthfully this isn't the first article like this that I've read, but for sake of argument let's just say it was. I'm not entirely surprised since we know that this entire idea is pretty exclusive to a certain group, but isn't this painfully hilarious? We gave this behavior a name and suddenly it's dominates college life even though the numbers clearly indicate something completely different. I remember reading the Campus Climate survey and seeing the number of sexual partners Colgate students admitted they had during their time here and it was by NO means indicative of the emotionless orgy that we often talk about...but we still use the term hookup culture to describe Saturdays at The Jug! How can we call ourselves academics if we're clearly not using the quantitative data to support our opinions? Sure, Colgate students are having sex and sometimes with different partners during any given semester, but is Colgate an extended version of Spring Breakers? Definitely not.

The fact that so many people are feeling left out of something that hardly exists is especially hilarious to me. We throw around this term so often and discuss the implications so frequently that we've actually made members of our community feel like they're missing out on something that is hardly real! We're actually sitting in our 9:55's thinking everyone but us got some last night when the numbers seem to suggest that everyone was probably just drunk at Slices.

In short, there's no need to feel bad if you're not having wild sex with strangers every night because your peers probably aren't either. 

I really hope I'm not the only one laughing at this.

Love You Like XO,
Renyelle

P.S.: I am in no way advocating or discouraging anyone's personal sexual choices. As long as everyone is consenting, I could not care less about what you choose to do or not do with your own genitals.

*NOTE: percentage based on no math at all

3 comments:

  1. Great post Renyelle! The "hook up" culture definitely has strong racial, class, gender, sexual preference, able bodied, etc. dimensions that do not represent all students, and I also think it is also important to look at our own climate survey, as you reference in your post, rather than other schools (such as the Risman study at UIC), where only 1/3 of the students live on campus. UIC is a large, urban, public institution, which significantly differs from Colgate. In addition to your research with the climate survey, I recommend Donna Freitas' work on the issue. She even came to campus not too long ago!

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