Seize: yeah, old old nasty trend, right? Of course, even though the women in question are supposedly “victims”, they’re somehow still simultaneously perceived as scum. Which probably says it all.

Now that I think about things I’ve read by a number of feminist thinkers lately, I think characterizing the sex debates as even “kind of” over was incorrect

Not so much over as… irrelevant, from what little I can tell. They’re still going on, it’s just most people don’t care about them anymore. In fact, it looks like feminism is fading as an ideological movement with anything resembling leaders, in favour of something more individualist. (Plus, the anti-sex feminists have abandoned the whole “ganging together with baseball bats to attack lesbian BDSM clubs and their patrons” thing, which is at least a small victory.)

The one thing that bothers me about the “hookup culture” is that it shapes the view that “western women are all whores.” Living in Asia, the one thing that bugs me above all else is how guys will assume I am just a hooker because I’m white, and hey, white girls “hook up” and give away sex all the time! (And yes, I’ve been asked how much I charge. I mean “hooker” in a pretty literal “prostitute” sense.) If I try to just meet guys to hang out, it is assumed I will have sex with them. I told a guy I wasn’t interested in relationships or sex and an hour later he asked if I wanted to go to a hotel. It’s terribly confusing, because from what I’ve observed, foreign women are far more sexually conservative than the locals, but PERCEPTION is what matters in this case, not reality. And western women are all Paris Hiltons–who herself may not be as promiscuous as she’s been painted–who dress in scraps of cloth and have sex with whomever asks.

I’m just lucky that in this culture it is unusual to bother women in public (it happens, but like … once a week on average). Can’t say the same for some of the men from other parts of Asia and Africa who live here and treat me like I’m wearing an invisible sign advertising blowjobs.

I don’t know if the hookup culture is as prevalent as articles and Oprah would indicate, but the rest of the world perceives that it is true, and it is harmful to those of us living in the rest of the world. :/

Is it just me or is the word “slut” so 1990?

I’m thinking “hook-up” is so 1990, because I certainly remember hanging around the dorm about then, and a bit earlier, complaining that guys didn’t want to go on dates, they just wanted to hook up. Mind you, “hook up” had a slightly different connotation than the panicked media gives it today; it could mean anything from casual sex to just running into each other intentionally at the library.

It is indeed a misconception that every single woman is out sleeping around. However there are indeed a LOT of women who are and that is what people based their perceptions on.

Don’t be so sure. There are a lot of people who are “basing their perceptions” on lies and suppositions. Because what’s a great thing to call a girl you don’t like to tarnish her reputation? A slut. It doesn’t have to be the truth. Hell, I was informed I was “promiscuous” by a supposedly intelligent adult during my first year in law school (she had been running around telling people that two of my classmates and I had clearly been sexually abused as children, because we were “externalizing our pain” by being “promiscuous”). This was news to me! I hadn’t fucked a damn soul all year; turns out she’d constructed my “promiscuity” out of whole cloth, based solely upon a remark I once made about a classmate’s ass as he leaned over a pool table, which entailed what use I might like to put said ass to.

I can only imagine what a joy she was in high school, when that kind of thing is much more damaging.

None of the guys I know call the girls they “hook up” with sluts. They have half a brain to realize that that makes them “sluts” too. They’re just two people who want to hook up.

What annoys me about these articles is that they never talk about “why” there’s a hook up culture more so on college campuses as oppose to high schools, workplaces, gyms etc. I think if they asked the “why” then they’d realize it’s not about sluts or feminists, but it’s about a unique phase of one’s life….which not be much different than their life after college. Geez.

But since I did, number one. Tom Wolfe. Naturally if I want information on what girls my daughters’s age are doing in their personal life, the first person I’m gonna think of to ask is a guy my father’s age, who is a professional novel writer, that is, a guy who’s spent his entire career manufacturing fiction.

Second, “By the end of senior year, the average college student has had 6.9 hookups…” No no NO NO. No college student, average or exceptional, has ever had 6.9 hookups. The number of hookups any individual college student obviously has got must be an integer. The fact that she presents a fractional number means that she’s not talking about a median or a mode; in other words someone asked n students how many times they’ve “hooked up,” and divided the sum by n.

Which tells you that either a.) it’s an epidemic, every last boy and girl on campus has “hooked up” five or six or seven or eight times, or b.) ten percent of the students are wildly promiscuous party animals while the other ninety percent live the lives of monastery-dwellers, or c.) something somewhere between a.) and b.), or d.), the most likely, that teenagers invariably fabricate vivid lies when being interrogated concerning their personal lives, so in terms of facts we have learned nothing at all.

I didn’t make it to page two.

…….

and seeing the world through another’s eyes
is like busting a window in a house of lies
and in the end you make up your own mind

and there’s wide open spaces
and little cornered off places
and check ‘em out
check ‘em out
take your time

how far is too far?
how much is enough?
you gotta test this stuff

i mean how you gonna know
what you need
what you like
till you been around the block
a few times on that bike

i mean how you gonna know
who you are
what you feel
till you feel a few things
that just don’t feel real
…….