Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  While it might have surprised onlookers, undergraduates in the 2000s were in fact having less sex than their predecessors in the 1980s and ’90s—if you accepted their definition of sex as vaginal intercourse. (Those of us who grew up during the Clinton years learned from our president that activities other than intercourse do not constitute “sexual relations,” however intimate they may be.) Nationally representative studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control have found that in fact there has been a significant decrease in rates of teen sex over the past twenty years. In 1991, their annual Youth Risk Behavior survey found that half of boys and 37.2 percent of girls age fifteen to seventeen reported having had sex in the past three months. By 2010, the number of boys fell to under 33 percent and girls dropped to 17 percent. The professors who turned to their own campuses found similar patterns.

  Paula England, a sociologist at New York University, has carried out the most exhaustive research to date on hookup culture. Over the past ten years, England has interviewed individual students, run focus groups, and conducted an online survey on more than thirteen thousand heterosexual undergraduates at four-year institutions across the United States. England found that on many campuses, the unusually chaste and unusually profligate tend to skew the average number of hookups between matriculating and the time of graduation. However, the median for graduating seniors is between four and seven—hardly a shocking figure, especially when you take into account that only 40 percent of these hookups involve intercourse. Nor were encounters always “random.”

  The researchers restricted their sample to students who explicitly said that they were not in relationships. Only 50 percent of this group said their last hookup was with someone with whom they had never hooked up before, and 20 percent said it was with someone with whom they had hooked up “ten or more times”—a “repeat” or “serial hookup,” aka a “friend with benefits” or a “fuckbuddy.” Less than 15 percent of all college hookups took place between strangers.

  In sum: Young people today may sleep with more partners over a lifetime than their parents did, because we marry later. But the perception that students are becoming more and more promiscuous is unfounded.

  * * *

  The most significant change in students’ sex lives in the Age of the Hookup does not have to do with how much of what kind of sex they are having. What has changed is what sociologists call the “sexual script”—the roles that people feel are available for them to play, and what they think they mean.

  Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist who conducted a study of hookup culture at both a secular and a Catholic university on the East Coast, argues that the “dating script” has been replaced. Indeed, it has been reversed. Rather than go out on formal dates, the students she surveyed “hang out” or “party” in large mixed-sex settings. Bogle’s informants explain that if two students are interested in each other, they put out “the vibe.” If it is reciprocated, they hook up—at the party venue, back at one of the partner’s dorm rooms, or somewhere in between. If emotional attachment develops from a series of hookups, partners must “have the conversation” or “DTR” (define the relationship) before things “get weird.”

  Whereas from the 1920s until at least the 1960s, there was an assumption that a series of dates would lead to sexual intimacy and emotional commitment, students today tend to put sexual activity first. If you want a hookup to lead to “something,” you are not supposed to admit it. The defining feature of the hookup is thus an emotional attitude. Lisa Wade and Caroline Heldman of Occidental College have described it as “more than simply casual.” After hookups, “students reported a compulsory carelessness.”

  Donna Freitas, a professor who surveyed several thousand students about hookup culture, agrees. “Hookup culture teaches young people that to become sexually intimate means to become emotionally empty, that in gearing themselves up for sex, they must at the same time drain themselves of feeling.”

  This reversal of scripts has inspired two major reactions.

  Some writers have described hookup culture as a misguided rejection of marriage and monogamy. Susan Patton represents this strain of thinking at its most regressive. Better known as the “Princeton Mom,” Patton became an overnight Internet celebrity in the spring of 2013 when she published an open letter in The Daily Princetonian. Her goal was to counsel the daughters she never had. Her advice was that female undergraduates at elite institutions should spend most of their time husband-hunting.

  “You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you,” Patton admonished her imaginary girls. She proceeded to appear on TV show after TV show and, one year later, published a book called Marry Smart.

  Predictably, Marry Smart argues that hooking up is no way to conduct a husband search. Patton admits that it is impossible to compete with “the woman who is easier to make than a peanut butter sandwich” or has “been around more times than a laundry drum.” The good news is that “worthy” men do not want to marry such women either. Hookup culture is, therefore, a game you had best sit out.

  Other writers have argued the opposite. They say that hookup culture is a victory for feminism and precisely what female undergraduates should be doing if they aspire to earn more than an MRS degree.

  The Atlantic contributor Hanna Rosin claimed in her book The End of Men that hookup culture was in fact one of the most important reasons for the gains in educational and professional attainment that women have experienced relative to their male peers during the last decade. In the chapter “Hearts of Steel,” Rosin praises hookup culture for letting ambitious young women get sex out of the way, without committing time to relationships that might compromise their career prospects.

  A much-discussed New York Times article that also appeared in 2013 showed young women at the University of Pennsylvania rationalizing their love lives in explicitly economic and corporate language. The source whom the reporter Kate Taylor quotes in the lead says that she sleeps with a friend she is not dating when she has free time, because “cost-benefit” analyses of the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up make this make sense. “I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship.”

  Yet this practical stance leaves many problems unaddressed.

  It remains unclear how the kind of liberated woman Rosin and Taylor portray is supposed to segue from steely hearted hookups to emotionally meaningful relationships—which almost all of them say they do want, eventually. Can courtship function like a game of musical beds, in which someone turns off the music on your thirtieth birthday, and you have to marry whomever you are lying next to? Does intimacy itself not require any practice? Even if you do not belong to the vast majority (over 80 percent) of millennials who say that they want to get married, hooking up as Rosin describes it—disciplining yourself to resist any tug of emotion so that you can focus on professional advancement—comes at a cost.

  Although they draw opposite conclusions about how young women should interact with hookup culture, Patton and Rosin do share one point of view. Both seem to discount the possibility that pleasure itself might be worthwhile, or that hooking up could provide a way to explore your sexuality if you did it right.

  Patton has appeared on national television disputing that date rape happens and insisting that all sex education should be left to parents or clergy (consulting Google as needed). She is too obviously trolling to take very seriously. The Rosin and New York Times camp are far more reasonable. Yet they, too, seem to be telling female readers that they cannot really enjoy their own capacities for sex and affection. Not if it means wasting precious time.

  Why look for a man to support you when you can sell yourself to The Man? The women in their stories often say that they are acting “like men.” They look more like perpetual-motion machines programmed to do endless work.

  * * *

  When the College Men and Coeds of the Roaring Twenties graduated and became the ones writing
and editing advice columns, they popularized the attitudes that they had learned at school. College had taught these writers to treat dating as a form of recreation, where you used your personality and sex appeal to get the attention and amusement that you wanted from your peers. They had been lucky enough to date during the fat years, when wealthier parents thought nothing of buying their children cars or paying their fraternity dues, and when it was easy to come by part-time jobs to cover incidental expenses that might raise the eyebrows of a mom or dad—to keep themselves in new clothes and flowers, dance cards and movie tickets, chocolate malts and hooch.

  “Not even poker played by a man of bad judgment, inept at the game, is more disastrous to an undergraduate’s monthly allowance than is the game which the fusser is trying to play,” Dean Clark of the University of Illinois joked in 1921. Ten years later, even young people who were able to attend four-year colleges could not afford extravagances. And so a shift of emphasis took place. The law governing college dating was still the law that the stag line and cut-in culture had exemplified: the law of competition. But rather than competing through the kinds of conspicuous consumption that daters had indulged in during the 1920s, the College Men and Coeds of the Great Depression competed in the currency of dates themselves.

  The advice literature of the 1930s is full of tips on how to use dates to increase your popularity, and vice versa. The prestige that you gained by being a popular date offered some consolation for not being able to run up a big tab at the football joint or to update your flapper fashions every other week. Many daters had to content themselves with dating longer, as the bad economy prevented couples from settling down.

  Throughout the 1930s, newspapers and women’s magazines ran dirge after dirge about the dearth of “marriageable men.” Few young men were earning the kind of income that was considered necessary to found a household. Between 1928 and 1932, the number of women marrying between eighteen and thirty-five decreased by nearly 20 percent from the previous five-year period. Students were behaving a lot like today’s millennials. Dating prolifically was the one way to keep up their stock, so competition for dates intensified, even as any given date became less likely to lead to a permanent arrangement.

  Looking out over the quad, professors started taking notice of their behaviors. In 1937, one scholar lifted a bit of ’20s slang and elaborated it into an academic theory. Campus courtship, Willard Waller argued, was controlled by the “rating and dating complex.”

  * * *

  Waller, who held a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, may have been predisposed to take a dim view of dating. When he arrived to teach at Penn State University in the early 1930s, he was recently divorced and sorely disappointed by his students’ lack of intellectual enthusiasm. When he turned his eye on what did interest them, he was troubled by what he saw.

  Waller recognized that the largely middle-class white students he taught had good reasons for putting off marriage. They had come to college because they aspired to “mobility of class.” For them, it would be disastrous to actually fall in love: Marrying almost always entailed dropping out. To make good on their investment, they had to wait until they had graduated and landed jobs. It made sense. But Waller believed that the new process of dating without any intention to commit had perverted the functions of courtship.

  “Dancing, petting, necking, the automobile, the amusement park, and a whole range of institutions and practices permit or facilitate thrill-seeking behavior,” Waller wrote. “Energy is dissipated in thrills which is supposed to do the work of the world.”

  In addition to diverting resources from the important tasks of forming new couples and families to frivolous entertainment, dating encouraged the development of “exploitative relationships.” Specifically, the confusion that arose from rapidly changing courtship protocols allowed young people to take advantage of one another. “According to the old morality a kiss means something, a declaration of love means something, a number of Sunday evening dates in succession means something,” Waller wrote. “Under the new morality such things may mean nothing at all … So it comes about that one of the persons may exploit the other for thrills.”

  Unlike the earlier generation of progressive sociologists, who had fixated on the dangers that dating posed to women, Waller believed dating caused moral harm all around. “When a woman exploits, it is usually for the sake of presents and expensive amusements—the common pattern of ‘gold-digging.’ The male exploiter usually seeks thrills from the body of the woman. The fact that thrills cost money, usually the man’s money, often operates to introduce strong elements of suspicion and antagonism into the relationship.”

  In a sense, Waller was expressing the “prostitution anxiety” that had plagued dating ever since the Charity Girls. The Coed did not actually exchange sexual favors for money. But sometimes she did accept a date from a man she did not truly admire. Not only might she enjoy the cocktail or movie ticket he was offering, she used dates to purchase social prestige—which she could cash in for more dates. Men, meanwhile, took as many physical “thrills” as they could get. Like the stock market, the rating-and-dating complex was a confidence game, which men and women played by different rules.

  “Young men are desirable dates according to their rating on the scale of campus values,” Waller observed. “In order to have a Class A rating they must belong to one of the better fraternities, be prominent in activities, have a copious supply of spending money, be well-dressed, ‘smooth’ in manners and appearance, have a ‘good line,’ dance well, and have access to an automobile … The factors which appear to be important for girls are good clothes, a smooth line, ability to dance well and popularity as a date.”

  You had to rate to date, and could rate only by dating. Yet to keep your stock high, you had to seem scarce. In order to be desirable, the main thing a girl had to maintain was a reputation for desirability.

  “Here as nowhere else, nothing succeeds like success.”

  * * *

  Margaret Mead agreed that the kinds of dating that took place on college campuses were not well suited to creating happy marriages and families. Mead had spent much of the 1920s and ’30s in the South Pacific and had opportunities to observe the courtship and mating practices of radically different cultures. Her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa became a bestseller and made her one of the most famous anthropologists in the world. So in 1946, when Stanford invited her to give a series of lectures on American Courtship Rituals, she brought an unusual perspective. Like Willard Waller, Mead saw dating as “primarily a competitive game.” However, she did not believe that this made dating a dysfunctional form of courtship. Instead, she said dating had nothing to do with courtship. Americans had no courtship rituals at all.

  “The boy who longs for a date is not longing for a girl,” Mead wrote in a chapter of Male and Female that she adapted from these lectures. “He is longing to be in a situation, mainly public, where he will be seen by others to have a girl, and the right kind of girl, who dresses well and pays attention.” Mead argued that dating taught young people to treat one another as status symbols. A boy wanted the girl he wanted at any given moment because he believed she would improve his image and thus increase his worth. “He takes her out as he takes out his new car, but more impersonally, because the car is his for good, but the girl is his only for the evening.”

  She may have been the first to anticipate the breakup cliché: It’s not about you. Petting, Mead said, was not even about sex. Young people learned to “mimic sexual readiness” in order to compete with one another. Your skin and limbs and hair and laugh served you as so many chips in a game. The prize was not love but popularity. The most important lesson from dating in college was to learn to consume and to present yourself correctly: to groom and dress the right way and propose the right activities; to make the right jokes at the right moments. The exercise had less to do with courtship than with job training.

  Colleges themselves were shifting their pri
orities in this direction. In the early twentieth century, American universities were changing. Under the influence of figures like John Dewey, who advocated “learning by doing,” administrators started allowing and even encouraging students to develop their own organizations. In addition to fraternities, campuses saw the proliferation of activities from student newspapers and theater companies to intercollegiate sports teams. Along with rating and dating, these clubs prepared students to succeed in the corporations they often resembled.

  In 1915, the Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby wrote that “it is mere pedagogery to suppose that all effort not directed toward intellectual development is wasted.” Yale, Seidel said, was “graduating ‘good mixers’ by the hundred.”

  * * *

  Like rating and dating and fraternity culture, contemporary hooking up sorts students. The Princeton Mom took a frankly elitist approach to dating in Marry Smart, telling young women that nowhere but at Princeton would they find “men worthy of them.” All the social scientific data on hooking up suggests that that practice, too, is overwhelmingly white, straight, and upper middle class. It is not nearly as universal as the articles in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times suggest. Lisa Wade’s research has shown that African American students, perhaps wary of a long history of stereotypes that accuse African Americans of being hypersexual and then punish them for it, are far less likely to participate than their white peers. Students who commute to college, or work to support themselves, do not have the time or disposable income to join the party scene. Queer students have their own reasons for avoiding fraternities, and although gay men have a reputation for being more promiscuous than their straight peers, sociologists and school counselors and psychologists have suggested that they do not earn it. In fact, they are generally better at defining and demanding what they want from relationships, which often includes abstaining from sex.