Hookup culture: The end of civilization, or the biggest NBD ever? If you’ve read a single article about dating apps lately, you are well primed to believe it’s the former.
According to a recent barrage of news stories, apps like Tinder have turned dating into a dehumanizing form of online shopping, catalyzing some sort of sexual Armageddon and the death of courtship itself. Dark times, apparently. Why are there so many sexual assaults on campus? Look no further than hookup culture. Can’t get a boyfriend? You can blame hookup culture for that, too. Oh, and if you use Tinder, you’re probably going to pick up an STD. Casual sex has become too easy, the consensus seems to be, preventing young people from making meaningful connections and turning us into sex-crazed, diseased sociopaths speeding toward a broken, lonely future. But like . . . says who?
Take the viral piece by Nancy Jo Sales, “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse,” in the current issue of Vanity Fair. The entire article functions as a doomsday warning against dating apps, which Sales claims offer only romantically impoverished and ultimately damaging interactions. Sales goes so far as to compare dating apps to “a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship.”
Reading the piece, I felt like I had traveled back in time. From start to finish, Sales drills home an outdated Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus view of the sexes. Essentially, men are fuck machines with no feelings, and women are victims who are used for casual sex when all they really want is to settle down with a nice guy. All I could think was: “Really? You want to resuscitate this stereotype?”
To make her case, Sales tells a one-sided, myopic story through interviews she conducted with a selection of highly promiscuous and unsavory 20-something men. One guy has slept with five different women from Tinder—his “Tinderellas”—over the previous eight days, another with “30 to 40 women in the last year.” They can’t remember some of the girls’ names, and they brag about how little money and effort these “dates” cost them. But is this sampling of guys really representative of the majority of young people on Tinder? And is there any actual evidence to say that having a lot of sex through apps is, in fact, “bad”?
For a second opinion, I called up Dr. Zhana Vrangalova, the renowned sex researcher who recently gave the TEDx talk “Is Casual Sex Bad for You?” “Guys like that do exist,” Vrangalova told me. “There’s a trait known as sociosexual orientation, which measures how oriented a person is toward casual sex. So if you have a very unrestricted sociosexuality—meaning you want a lot of casual sex and novelty—then Tinder is perfect for you. Highly unrestricted men do tend to be more manipulative, aggressive, and psychopathic—aka, they’re more often jerks. But that represents a modest minority of the people on Tinder. There are all sorts of people on Tinder, just like there are all sorts of people everywhere.”
Sales, however, doesn’t quote a single guy who’s looking to form a relationship, nor a single woman who’s looking to hook up. There’s no voice for people who have found a boyfriend or girlfriend through the app, of which there are obviously thousands. (The majority of my friends found their partners on Tinder. Jeez, there are Tinder marriages! “From the first swipe right, I knew it was right,” was literally a line from my friend’s vows.) I personally have slept with multiple guys from Tinder who are kind and respectful. But the 20-something women in Sales’s article have no such luck; they all have bad sex and feel manipulated, creating the impression that women are forced into a hookup culture they are not comfortable with and have no control over.
Of course, at the heart of her case is a familiar and unfortunate premise: the idea that, by having sex, men are getting something, whereas women are giving up something. It’s outdated, it’s offensive, and it’s psychologically destructive for women, because it has the power to mislead girls into thinking that having one not-ideal sexual experience means that they have lost a part of themselves. Hello? Pitying and victimizing women doesn’t help them; it just dismisses the importance of female sexual agency.
“In our society, if a guy wants to have sex with a lot of women, he is generally viewed as unethical and a jerk,” Vrangalova said. “If you’re a female who wants sex with a lot of guys, not only are you a slut, but you also have ‘issues.’ You couldn’t possibly just want sex for fun, like guys do, so the desire must be coming from low self-esteem, depression, or because you’re ‘ugly’ and can’t get a boyfriend or whatever. And both of these judgments are problematic.”
There is also a long-held puritanical assumption that having sex with a lot of people is damaging for both sexes, but there’s little data to back this up. According to Vrangalova, there’s nothing wrong with casual sex; it just depends on who you are and how you do it. “Casual sex has many potential benefits—for instance, sexual pleasure; an increased sense of self-confidence, desirability, and freedom; and satisfaction of our biological need for adventure,” Vrangalova said. “Study after study finds that people have more positive reactions after hookups than negative ones. Other studies show that casual sex has little or no impact on longer-term psychological well-being, meaning things like self-esteem, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.”
And is it true that a lot of casual sex interferes with one’s ability to form real, loving relationships? “Sex and love are two separate needs, and humans have both of them,” Vrangalova said. “Just because you have sex with a lot of people doesn’t mean that you don’t need love and relationships—people will want that no matter what. However, people may decide to postpone love and relationships in order to have more sex, because we live in a culture that doesn’t leave room for open relationships for the most part. But there is no research suggesting that having a lot of casual sex will somehow impede your ability to have relationships or form intimacy in the future.”
Meanwhile, I’m beginning to feel like one of those crazy conspiracy theorist people, because everywhere I look, I see not-so-subtle messages that I should get married, domesticate, and breed—before it’s too late! In one particularly creepy article in The Washington Post last week, Jon Birger argued that hookup culture is not Tinder’s fault but rather the result of an imbalanced dating pool. In 2012, the article says, 34 percent more women than men graduated from American colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education expects this gap to reach 47 percent by 2023. This is creating a scarcity of “marriageable” educated men, giving men an advantage that then sways the dating game toward casual sex.
Okay, that makes sense. But then Birger goes on to advise women “not to put off getting serious about dating because the math will only get worse over time. Call it the musical chairs problem: Nearly everybody finds a chair in the first round. By the last round, however, there’s a 50 percent chance of not getting one.” He then non-ironically suggests that women move west of the Mississippi River, where there’s a more balanced gender ratio, and literally says, “Go West, Young Woman.” Like we’re a herd of cattle marching desperately in any direction of a man who will fill our uterus.
To me, it seems increasingly clear that what dating apps and our so-called hookup culture have actually ignited is a strong case of moral panic—the sort of reactionary hysteria that greeted the invention of the birth control pill and, more recently, the legalization of gay marriage. If you revisit some of the panicky conservative responses to the sexual revolution in the ’60s, they read strikingly similarly to today’s cautionary tales about hookup culture. In fact, a main argument in support of the Pill was that technology does not determine behavior, and studies have since validated this assertion: Unmarried women were having sex before the Pill; it was just less out in the open. Likewise, people were—shock, horror—having casual sex well before the dawn of Tinder; dating apps have only made it more visible. One recent study even suggests that millennials actually have fewer sexual partners than their parents did.
Even when unfounded, moral panic seems damaging because it reinforces double standards between men and women and distracts us from actual problems. We live in a debt-ridden society in which students graduate from college with $100,000 worth of loans that cripple them for life, but it’s Tinder that’s destroying the youth! Right. Sort of like how gay people caused Hurricane Katrina. Or, it’s not our woefully lacking sex education that’s responsible for a rise in STIs—no, it’s technology. (“Swipe Right for STDs” might be my favorite sensationalist headline of the summer.) And most troubling of all: Hookup culture is now to blame in the high-profile sexual assault case of an elite prep school student, who was recently acquitted of the felony charges he faced. Why tackle campus assault when you can point a finger at Tinder?
As with many taboos, casual sex is mildly tolerated as long as it’s properly tinged with shame and swept under the rug; only when it’s acknowledged in the light of day does it become threatening. But thankfully, Vrangalova thinks this, too, may be changing. “As things like casual sex, as well as BDSM, open relationships, et cetera, become more visible, you’re inevitably going to get people who disagree, who will find doomsday scenarios in liberal social change,” she told me. “Basically, our society is experiencing growing pains when it comes to sex outside of long-term, romantic relationships. But in some ways I think that’s healthy for society because it ignites these necessary conversations.” It’s about time.
By K. Sciortino
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.