Episode 35 - Hooking Up

Transcript

David: 0:00

Before we get into today's episode, we want to give a quick content warning. This episode briefly discusses sexual violence. Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:16

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:19

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:21

who are also professors,

David: 0:23

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:26

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, I can't stop watching this reality dating show called F Boy Island.

David: 0:43

I honestly don't know why you watch these, period. That's where I'm at.

Ellie: 0:48

I mean I'm so fascinated by cultural depictions of love and sex, especially as they relate to these hidden social scripts that we all sort of like recognize as in the air. So for instance, the figure of the F boy, I think is so interesting. I think the F boy is a picture of low key toxic masculinity, right? The kind of guy that straight women warn each other about, but are simultaneously tempted by. And so the show trades on precisely this dynamic of attraction and repulsion, and it also plays on the binary between so-called nice guys and F boys.

David: 1:21

Well for the record, I'm a nice guy, although

Ellie: 1:23

gosh.

David: 1:24

people who say that are usually F boys in disguise.

Ellie: 1:27

Be suspicious of anyone who calls themselves a nice guy.

David: 1:30

I am a master of suspicion, including of myself, but there's a way in which the figure of the F boy is just a new iteration of other figures of, as you say, low key masculinity, or as I would call them a high key masculinity.

Ellie: 1:44

Well, lowkey toxic masculinity.

David: 1:46

Okay. Fair enough. But you also have like the stud or the man's man, which is typically just straight guys being proud of their heterosexuality and their own assessment of their own sexual prowess. You know, it's not actually objectively corroborated by other people.

Ellie: 2:03

Yeah. And that sexual prowess in their minds is determined by the number of partners they have and pretty much nothing else.

David: 2:09

Well, yeah, by definition, almost, the F boy is that guy who like hooks up with a ton of women and at the same time breaks their heart because he doesn't want anything serious, man.

Ellie: 2:21

Yeah. I, you know, I think too that even though F boys get a bad rap, they're still very much rewarded in our society because they fall into that trope of the man's man that you described, David. So for instance, I think this is really different from what, starting with Freud, theorists have called the Madonna-whore complex for women, the idea that women in our society are sort of expected either to be the pure, virgin, motherly Madonna figure, Madonna, the mother of Christ, not the pop singer.

David: 2:55

Oh, no, no.

Ellie: 2:56

On this herself.

David: 2:57

It, Madonna is actually the blurring of the distinction of the Madonna-whore distinction.

Ellie: 3:02

She definitely has both, right. Like a virgin, a little overly self-conscious there, but yeah. And then on the other hand, you have the quote whore, right? The sex object who's filled with lascivious lust, tendencies to sleep with any and every man and, the women are categorized as one or the other, or sometimes as you say, as both, and really don't have a wider spectrum of options to choose from in their sexual lives.

David: 3:28

Yeah. And it seems to me that when we talk about a show like F Boy Island that reflects our modern preoccupation with sex and sexuality, it seems like that distinction has shifted a little bit because we no longer really expect women to be Madonnas necessarily. But we do expect women to have some hookups, but definitely not too many, you know, whatever that means. It's a very vague, blurry, arbitrary line. So we allow or say that women should be sexually liberated, but there is a point at which that liberation does turn into what, what was the term that you just used, like la- let's let's shift-

Ellie: 4:04

Lascivious.

David: 4:05

Lascivious lust, I think.

Ellie: 4:07

Do we say lascivious or lascivious? Maybe I'm like, literally just pronouncing- I pronouncing in the Italian way, right? Lasciviouso!

David: 4:14

Well, you're asking somebody who is ESL so I just believe you, but kudos on the alliteration, definitely.

Ellie: 4:21

It's lascivious.

David: 4:22

Lascivious lust of sexual liberation. But there's also a weird norm in a heterosexual hookup in particular, where women are forbidden from looking clingy or needy or, desperate, but they're also expected to be secretly expecting a relationship when they hook up or hoping that an F boy will somehow turn into a nice guy by the magic of their love.

Ellie: 4:47

Oh my God yes and no spoilers, but let me just say that F Boy Island very much trades on that myth that you can turn an F boy into a nice guy. I mentioned it though, cause I know you're not actually going to watch it-

David: 5:00

Thank you.

Ellie: 5:01

But it's that I- I think that a show like F Boy Island is possible only in the context of hookup culture.

David: 5:08

Mm.

Ellie: 5:09

This culture is actually surprisingly new, right? I think a lot of times people are like this sort of culture has always existed, right? Because we've long thought that men have these essential lascivious tendencies and women are pure, except when they're whores, but actually the practice of hooking up and the phenomenon of hookup culture, in being pretty new, raise a lot of philosophical questions that relate to feminist theory, ethics, and queer theory.

David: 5:37

Today's episode is about hooking up.

Ellie: 5:40

What does it mean to hookup and what attitudes towards sex does hookup culture propagate?

David: 5:47

What are the ethics of hooking up? Does hooking up imply treating another person as a commodity or it can hookups provide blueprints for ethical, casual sex?

Ellie: 5:57

And can the heteronormative underpinnings of hookup culture be disrupted with insights from queer theory? What does it mean to hook up? Well, the philosopher, because indeed philosophers have written about hooking up, the philosopher James Rocha defines a hookup as a sexual encounter between two people who are not in a committed relationship. One of the things about hooking up is that its definition is really ambiguous. So what do we mean by a sexual encounter? Some people will define hooking up as a make-out session, others will define it as full-on sexual intercourse, still others might define it differently, especially in queer contexts.

David: 6:43

Yeah. This ambiguity has taken me for a loop multiple times because I've heard a lot of people, and I have to say especially younger people, use the term hooking up to talk about kissing somebody else or like spending time with somebody else, whereas I've always thought of hooking up as definitely involving either oral or sexual intercourse. So it seems like it's also a broader category of connection that may be the way in which I use the term.

Ellie: 7:13

Yeah. I don't think one can expect its meaning to be obvious across the board at all. In fact, the sociologist Danielle Currier says that the ambiguity of the term is highly useful for many young people because it allows them to keep the details of their sexual lives private. So for instance, you know, the 13 year old can flex and say they hooked up when it was just like a sweet peck. Same with, you know, the 19 year old college frat bro. But then for many girls, Currier says it allows them to protect their status as good girls by keeping the details ambiguous.

David: 7:47

Because I guess part of a hookup culture is that you don't really say a lot about what happened in the hookup. It's just taken to be self-evident that you hooked up and that's it, right? Like a hookup is a hookup and not a lot of details are divulged.

Ellie: 8:01

Yeah, maybe to your closest friends, but sort of in the broader cultural atmosphere of acquaintances and stuff, you wouldn't know details. You know, hooking up is sort of a new iteration of some previous phenomenon such as necking or petting back in the day. So Americans only started to use the term hooking up to refer to sexual activity in the 1980s. And then the term went mainstream in the nineties and early two thousands. But throughout most of the 20th century, the term hook up meant simply either a meetup or a network, which my mom's still uses it to mean today.

David: 8:35

I'm telling you young people and the-

Ellie: 8:37

Hook up later.

David: 8:39

it's just like confusing us left and right.

Ellie: 8:41

right. But it was also actually used as a synonym for getting married throughout much of the 20th century, similar to getting hitched.

David: 8:48

Getting hitched. Uh, yeah, like I, I think I've heard the term like getting hooked, but I haven't-

Ellie: 8:53

Oh yeah.

David: 8:54

up, you know, like the woman throws like a fish hook with bait and then the man bites.

Ellie: 9:01

Oh God. Well, I actually found this one really funny quote from a Brown University student in 1997, who was quoted in a Cleveland newspaper. And they said in a normal Brown relationship, you meet, get drunk, hook up, and then either avoid eye contact the next day, or find yourself in a relationship.

David: 9:22

Well, and it's interesting that here you're pointing to a college student because hookup culture really takes root in college campuses, right? It's swept the nation in recent decades. And by now I take it that it's even bled into pre college life among high school students, who are suddenly feeling this pressure to enter into hookup culture, right, to hookup with their friends and to brag about it and to be part of this larger social dynamic. And it's also, I would say, bled, not just into pre college life, but into post college life, where people in their mid to late twenties, early thirties, maybe even until like late thirties, find themselves experiencing this pressure, especially if they're young professionals living in urban settings, right? Like going on dates on apps, meeting people, hooking up at bars and so on and so forth. Think about Sex and the City, you know, it's kind of like, like Samantha from Sex and the City who just embodies that.

Ellie: 10:21

So many hookups.

David: 10:21

Uh, yeah, that's what she represents, right? Samantha represents hookup culture in an urban setting. And the sociologists Lisa Wade and Joseph Padgett wrote an article recently about the history of hookup culture in the United States. And they trace its origins to the rise of fraternities in American universities, especially in the mid 1800s. And also the rise of the women's liberation movement in the early 20th century. So around the twenties, thirties, and forties, and they make this argument that when men went off to college in the 19th century, many of them were like rich boys, you know, like daddy's boy who had a lot of money. They came from well-to-do families and they had basically a ton of privilege. And so they started treating college not so much as an intellectual refuge, really, for the cultivation of the mind, but more as a playground, right. They expected it to be fun, for there to be partying, and for there to be entertainment and alcohol and a lot of male bonding, which is where the fraternity kicks in.

Ellie: 11:26

It's like Animal House for the 19th century.

David: 11:29

And actually in a different piece, Lisa Wade talks about that movie Animal House as emblematic of modern day conceptions of college life and hooking up in college.

Ellie: 11:40

Hmm. Okay. Take us back to the 19th century though, for now.

David: 11:42

Yeah. So back to the 19th century, according to Lisa Wade and Joseph Padgett, in the 1800s, most of these early versions of the modern frat boy were having sex typically with women over whom they had a ton of power. So this included enslaved women, as well as sex workers who would get paid for rendering service to the frat house, to the fraternity. But fast forward a few decades, when you have the entry of women into the workforce in the 1920s and thirties, and suddenly you have a lot of women going to college campuses who in many ways are the social equals of the frat boys, right. They have their own income. They can provide for themselves to some extent. Plus, I should add that a lot of colleges started admitting women for the first time in the 20th century, right. So it's only when you have sort of economic and social equality between men and women that these frat boys start treating sex as a kind of game where you get social points if you get to conquer a woman who in theory can say no to you, rather than just exercising direct power over her. And so Wade and Padgett make the claim that this is the origin of hookup culture. It's a combination of the emergence of fraternity houses in American college campuses and the idea that men go on the hunt for women. So think of men being on the prowl, basically.

Ellie: 13:11

This is so interesting. And I think also hookup culture as we know it is an even more recent phenomenon that has to do with the rejection among women of what's known as purity culture, which is this idea that women have to limit our sexual activity, or even have none at all, in order to be wife material.

David: 13:30

Wifey.

Ellie: 13:31

Yeah, and women have been encouraged to pursue their sexual desires more openly in recent decades, especially with greater access to birth control. So in a sense, what hookup culture does is extend a traditionally masculine form of sexual activity to women. And I want to note here that when I say masculine, I'm not talking about some sort of imagined, innate urge that men have to have sex with as many women as possible according to the dictates of nature, right, in some pseudo biological, pseudo evolutionary picture.

David: 14:07

Yeah, I guess I definitely don't have that.

Ellie: 14:11

We will leave aside questions of sexual drive and evolutionary biology, which are extremely thorny. But when I say masculine here, I mean that historically men have been encouraged to sort of have sex with as many women as possible, especially in the 20th century and that is coded.

David: 14:29

Mm.

Ellie: 14:30

Or associated with masculinity in our culture. And so I'm not making any claims about gender essentialism here. And I also want to note too, while we're on this topic that, that most of the studies that we're gonna be discussing in this episode were done on populations of largely cisgender and heterosexual people. So the vast majority of studies on hookup culture are done from within this demographic of heterosexual, cisgender folks. And I think that actually says something kind of interesting about the very nature of hookup culture and to what extent it is defined by heteronormativity, which we'll discuss more later in the episode, but I also want to note that it's just like a total shortcoming of a lot of these studies of hookup culture. And a lot of folks that write about this will openly acknowledge that as well.

David: 15:12

Yeah. And most of them also focus primarily on college campuses, right. So they don't often talk about the pre college or the post-college life necessarily, which again, it makes perfect sense because when we think of hookup culture, we think about campus.

Ellie: 15:25

And you know on the point about gender, the sociologist of masculinity Michael Kimmel calls hooking up guys' sex. He says that guys run the scene. And I think that simultaneously folks on college campuses will, on some level, recognize the truth of that statement. And on another level probably really want to resist it right by being like but people of all genders can participate in hookup culture and see the fantasy is there for all of us. And I think that Kimmel is right on this point in as much as hooking up as a practice trades on traditionally masculinist values.

David: 15:58

Definitely about the masculinism of the culture, more so than about the sex or gender of the people who participate in it, and when we think about hookup culture, it's important to note that there's a strong sense of pressure to participate in this culture, in the areas where it's popular, again, such as college campuses, but the weird thing is even as there is a lot of pressure to join in, way fewer students are actually hooking up than a lot of people think. In the book Guyland, which I love as a title, Guyland, one word, Kimmel, who you just mentioned, Ellie, discusses a study showing that a group of college men estimated that 80% of their peers had had sex in the previous weekend, when in fact only 80% of their peers had ever had sex in their entire lives. And so-

Ellie: 16:52

Oh, my God.

David: 16:53

there is this perception that college students have that all their friends are constantly hooking up that doesn't match reality, but this perception really creates a pressure cooker kind of an environment where these young people, you know, men, women, people who don't fit the binary, feel like they need to enter into what Lisa Wade calls the erotic marketplace, right. They want to be desired. They want to be wanted. And they get the sense that the only way to do that is by joining this game, that as you say, is run by guys.

Ellie: 17:27

Absolutely. I think this idea that like everybody's having sex but me is so damaging. And the pressure to hook up is especially hard for those who feel excluded from it whether because of cultural or religious differences or because they feel like they have low levels of social capital in this erotic marketplace. In her book, American Hookup, Lisa Wade, obviously also someone we've been talking about who's written a lot about this, discusses how low income students hookup less than affluent peers. That goes

David: 17:55

for wow. Yeah.

Ellie: 17:56

races. Yeah. But also, even though that goes for low income students of all races, that disproportionally affects students of color because they are more likely to be low income than their white peers. And then she also says that religious students often feel very excluded by hookup culture, but hookup culture can additionally play into damaging racial stereotypes that encourage students to hook up less. There's one quote that Wade gives from a black male student, who says that he abstains from hooking up, because if he were to aggressively pursue women the way that the white guys do on campus, he'd risk being seen as a hyper-sexual predator, right? And women students of color also risked being stereotyped for their sexual activity more than white women.

David: 18:37

Yeah. And I would venture to say that the vast majority of the students, you know, whether they are members of historically marginalized groups or even members of those communities that get a lot of privilege within hookup culture are fundamentally dissatisfied with hookup culture itself. They are pretty unhappy with it. So they seem torn psychologically about the relationship to it. Because on the one hand, you know, they're college kids, they want to do what they think other people are doing. They're drawn to it. They're curious about it. Maybe they're sexually frustrated as well, so they want to participate, but at the same time, many of them report having fears about what will happen to them if they give themselves over to hookup culture entirely.

Ellie: 19:20

Yeah. And you know, I think that this widespread dissatisfaction with hookup culture is because hooking up is a shallow and commodified form of sexual activity and its norms violate basic respect, in my opinion, but we'll get to that momentarily. And we'll also come back later to the gender asymmetries in hooking up. I want to mention one other point about the pressure to participate in hookup culture that totally shocked me. Wade states that the average graduating senior from college reports hooking up just eight times in four years. So that's once a semester on average, and half of these hookups are with someone that the students have already hooked up with.

David: 19:57

Oh, okay. So it's not a one-time hookup. It's like they hook up with somebody a few times and all of those count as a hookup..

Ellie: 20:05

Yes.

David: 20:06

Yeah. So again, people are doing it a lot less than other people think they are. And so it seems like we're all just basically collectively deluded about how common it is for college students to hookup. Because I honestly would say that it's happening all the time before I saw those statistics.

Ellie: 20:22

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. So yes, it is happening a lot less than we think, but let's talk about the practice anyway. In typical fashion for a sociologist, Wade describes hooking up as a kind of ritual with highly prescribed practices.

David: 20:37

Oh, yeah. I want to know the details of these practices. Now I'm guessing that one element is that it happens in very specific places like college campuses, bars, things like that, that are kind of closed off from the rest of the world. Is that correct?

Ellie: 20:52

Oh, yeah, that good old liminal space of college, to use a term from anthropology.

David: 20:58

And also a ton of alcohol consumption, which I think is essential to the culture of hooking up.

Ellie: 21:04

Yeah, one needs the ritual drug to get the bacchanalian revelry started.

David: 21:09

Wow.

Ellie: 21:11

In fact, the first stage of Wade's analysis of the hookup ritual is the pregame. You initiate yourself into quote drunk world by having a few drinks with your friends. Then you go to the party, the club, the frat house, and you start dancing. If you're a straight woman, you probably have a secret code with your friends to let them know if you want to get away from someone.

David: 21:30

Don't I know it, as the gay friend to a lot of straight women in college, both in undergrad and grad school, I am very well acquainted with the unspoken norms of, Hey, get this guy off my back immediately versus, Hey, can you get lost a little bit in order for me to let this stranger grind upon me a little more?

Ellie: 21:53

I've probably given you the secret code at some dance club in Atlanta, back in the day.

David: 21:57

Yeah, I think you gave me a few of those.

Ellie: 22:01

But, you know, if you're into it, then yes, of course you do want your friends to leave you alone. And then as Wade puts it, you might start kissing the person and then it goes on from there.

David: 22:11

I love the elliptical nature of the claim. And then it goes from there dot, dot, dot. Now, one of the biggest sources of shame for me in thinking about hookup culture is that when I was an undergrad, I spent a lot of time in frat houses. You know, very people know this about me, except the people who were there at the time. But.

Ellie: 22:30

Except for all of us now.

David: 22:32

Yes, except for our massive and growing Overthink audience. But I mean, you would call me a frat rat if, if you wanted to. But of course, some of the aspects of the ritual that Wade describes are changing nowadays with things like dating apps. So think about your Tinder, your Grindr, Scruff, things like that, where you avoid the preliminary steps and jump directly into the hookup.

Ellie: 22:57

Yeah. Yeah I think they're also putting pressure on what James Rocha calls the near stranger phenomenon, which is that our scripts for hookups usually imply that people know each other a little, but not too well. The people on dating apps are strangers, right? Unless I guess you're using them on a college campus.

David: 23:14

Yeah, but even so, I mean, technically anybody can be there, so you don't have a social connection to them. And I have to say that one thing I like about dating apps, for instance, is that they allow people a baseline or a framework for expressing their interest in somebody else. So rather than going to a party or a bar, and just like waiting to see who shows up or who approaches you, you know, who like dances up behind you? Might very well be a lot of creeps.

Ellie: 23:41

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

David: 23:43

In an app, you have some level of control, you know, swiping or messaging on a napkin signal that you're open to talking or not open to talking. So there is a little bit more of a filtering process that might give people a sense of control. Although, of course, that can be very problematic if you start blocking or filtering out people from like certain communities or certain races and things like that. And a lot of sociological research indicates that that's how it's used sometimes.

Ellie: 24:09

That's a great point. And at the same time, though, I think there can still be a ton of unspoken norms when you're actually with the person and Rocha writes about how dangerous this can be, because say if one person's definition of a hookup is sex and the other's is making out without clothes on, it's easy for an otherwise consensual encounter to become a sexual assault. Although speaking of consent, I actually think there's a huge contradiction on college campuses between their technical sexual consent policy, which often says it has to be sober, and the presence of alcohol in so many sexual encounters.

David: 24:42

Yeah. And so many hookups settings in particular. So-

Ellie: 24:45

Yeah.

David: 24:45

No and I think this tension that you're pointing to between universities' tacit invitation to come to campus and party, which to 18 year olds means hooking up, and their policy around sexual consent, you know, that's a topic maybe for a whole other episode that we can, punt to the future, but I'm dying actually to go back a little bit to that student from Brown University who says that the culture of hooking up on campus is that you don't look at people the next day, because I mean, it seems like there are these norms that regulate how we relate to those with whom we hook up after the fact. And Lisa Wade makes this argument explicitly. She says, a key element of hooking up is establishing the relative meaningless of whatever happened the night before in the days and weeks and months that follow. The essential thing is to show that the other person basically means nothing to you, right? That's why you don't make eye contact.

Ellie: 25:42

Yup. Yup.

David: 25:43

That you don't recognize them. You don't know who they are. You don't acknowledge them. You don't say hello to them, because to do so would be interpreted as a major violation of the norms of hooking up.

Ellie: 25:56

Yeah, because otherwise they'll catch feels and think you're like their boyfriend or something.

David: 26:02

But I do love this image of college campuses as a gigantic Seurat painting in which nobody is looking in the direction of anybody else. Everybody's just like actively avoiding eye contact, um, eyes locked in completely opposite directions at all times.

Ellie: 26:18

That literally sounds like my college dining hall on a Sunday morning.

David: 26:23

A lot of this has to do, I think, with the fact that hookup culture is linked to an attitude of radical casualness, where everything must be like so casual as to reach the level of a neurosis. You actively disavow any recognition of, or commitment to, the person with whom you're hooking up after the fact.

Ellie: 26:45

Absolutely. Like even a commitment to saying hello, right? Wade discusses this as a kind of demotion that happens after a hookup

and quick true story here: 26:53

when I was in college, I had a friendly acquaintance that I hooked up with one time. And we were in the same philosophy class together, and our professor, this amazing Austrian guy with a super thick accent that I will not try to reproduce, was railing against the quote senseless coupling of college hookup culture, from the perspective of like a critique of capitalism and just sitting in the audience of being like, oh my God, I senselessly coupled with a student who's two rows down.

David: 27:23

I know the professor is talking about senseless coupling and you and this other person are just like nervously avoiding eye contact with each other in the classroom.

Ellie: 27:30

Like the painting.

David: 27:32

But I really do love this concept of the senseless coupling, because that does strike me to be what's happening in hooking up, that something that involves so many sensations is ultimately taken to be senseless in the end.

Ellie: 27:47

Yeah. We take hookups to be divorced from feeling.

David: 27:49

Yeah. And part of hooking up means conveying to the person that you hooked up with the day after that what happened the day before was not a big deal, right? So you might do that by literally just not texting and letting conversation die, or by texting them something hyper banal like that was fun, have a good life or, you know, like, oh my gosh, I was so tipsy last night. Great. Or something like that, but something that minimizes what happened and that in many cases does amplify the role that alcohol plays. And in fact, Wade argues that in hookup culture, sober sex is taken to be off a totally different order from a hookup. It's not even in the same category.

Ellie: 28:33

Yeah. And there's this whole narrative, not only of the meaninglessness, right, but also of the feelinglessness, because you're not meant to catch feelings or at least you want to hide any feelings that you might have because you don't want to come off as desperate. You don't want to come off as attached. And I think this is very gendered. Indeed, there's a good amount of sociological research suggesting that men are more interested in divorcing sex from feelings and from attachment than women are. But some of this just so ridiculous, like the idea that you don't have any feelings. I have feelings about the sidewalk. I have feelings about the shoes I'm wearing, right? There are no human experiences that are devoid of feelings. This insistence on having no feelings about a hookup just defies the basic logic.

David: 29:17

Of human sociality. Yes. I cannot tell you how many times when I was in undergrad, I met guys who would judge women with whom they hooked up precisely on what they interpreted to be as these women's clinginess after the hookup. And the funny thing is that when they describe what that clinginess actually entailed, sometimes it just sounded like basic human decency on the women's part. Like, Hey, I hope you have a good weekend, or how have you been? But then the response from the man was like, oh my God, she's so obsessed with me. She's caught feelings. So there's definitely a way in which hookup culture changes how agents interpret things that otherwise wouldn't really have that much significance.

Ellie: 30:08

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. One thing that strikes me is that a lot of times people are talking about feelings when what they actually mean is commitment. So casual sex is sex without commitment. And it's important, I think, that people be able to engage in casual recreational sex if they wish. This is part of what the feminist and LGBTQ movements brought us. This sense that, oh, it's not just a single gender that can have recreational sex without repercussions. It's people of all genders. And so sex doesn't have to be tied to a kind of long-term commitment. But I actually think that this confusion of commitment with feelings is really indicative of our cultural ideas about sex and romance. Hookup culture is kind of the other side of the coin, right, of our culture's obsession with romantic love. It's precisely the disavowal of romance. And what does it say about our culture that so many people think that basic respect, decency, and warm feelings toward a sexual partner are intelligible only as desires for a romantic relationship them.

David: 31:07

Yeah, no joke. And in the heterosexual context of mainstream hookup culture, I think this comes back all the way to the Madonna-whore complex that you brought up at the beginning, where women are either hook-up buddies or wife material. So that hooking up is a way of like finding the women who are not marriable.

Ellie: 31:27

Yep. And for whom you have zero feelings.

David: 31:30

Yeah. And with whom you never make eye contact at any point in time. But it seems to me that in addition to denying feelings, hookup culture is also about rejecting labels. And maybe this is actually kind of cool, this ambiguity around hookup culture, because it creates a lot of, I would say opportunities for sexual exploration outside of the reach of socially recognized labels, concepts, and categories, and that liberation can be particularly freeing for queer students. So if you are to have a hookup, you don't really have to explain with whom or what happened. It was just a hookup. That's what it is. And this ambiguity, again, it can be liberatory, but it also can be a recipe for disaster, especially when two sexual agents meet in a hookup with fundamentally different and perhaps irreconcilable expectations about what a hookup means and how far it's meant to go. So there is this tension between the two. The most common critiques of hookup culture are typically voiced by conservatives, either in defense of traditional monogamy or defenders of purity culture who adopt a conservative view about sexual morality, arguing that sex without romantic attachment or without commitment is fundamentally immoral. Here, we want to take a different approach than those two conservative lines. How can we be critical of hookup culture without falling into a defense of traditional monogamy, which we've done a whole episode about, or without being a conservative moralizing about sex?

Ellie: 33:36

So the book by James Rocha that we've been discussing, The Ethics of Hooking Up, suggests that ethically engaging in hookups might actually be impossible. So I want to talk about this idea. According to Rocha, hooking up fundamentally disrespects the other person. And what he means by that is respecting another person has to do with taking them as a subjective agent with their own rights and abilities to reflect on their own good. So if you're an agent, you get to act in ways that have your best interest at heart. When you're being recognized as an agent, somebody has recognized you as having that right. And the problem with hookup culture is that it encourages us to treat people as means rather than as ends, to put it in language of Immanuel Kant. We are fundamentally unable to recognize other people as agents when we are engaged in hooking up with them, because we are treating them as commodities on the market. Is somebody an eight, a nine or a 10? Are my friends going to think it's cool that I hooked up with this person? Can I brag about it at the dining hall the next morning? Even if we're not talking about sharing it with others, if we're just talking about sexual pleasure, the social scripts of hooking up have to do with a single-minded pursuit of your own sexual pleasure. Also pretty tied to toxic masculinity, because there's tons of research on how heterosexual hookups are usually way more pleasurable for men than for women. But the bottom line is, if we're pursuing our own pleasure and we're treating another person as a commodity, as it means to get that pleasure, then we are not respecting them. What do you think about this, David?

David: 35:16

I don't know. I disagree because it doesn't really cohere with my personal experience of hooking up. And it really depends on the people in question and the kind of dynamic that they develop in the course of hooking up. So I want to recognize that Rocha makes the claim that there might be a difference between talking about the ethical permissability of casual sex in the abstract and the ethical permissibility of casual sex given the concrete reality of hookup culture. So he does draw this distinction where he says, look, I might agree with you that there's no problem with casual sex in the abstract, but let's talk about it concretely, when you're talking about these houses with the rituals and the drinking and the partying and the pressure.

Ellie: 36:03

Yeah, the problem is not casual sex. The problem is hookup culture.

David: 36:07

Yes. And so I am open to his point that perhaps there is a real problem of instrumentalizing the other person based on the way in which hookups happen under hookup culture. But again, I want to leave open room for the possibility that this might depend on the persons involved in the hookup. And the reason that I say this is because recently a group of sociologists from the University of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana conducted a study about the relationship between the beliefs that people have about hooking up and the ways in which those beliefs influence other beliefs, especially those concerning rape. We know that a lot of college students are highly susceptible to believing myths about rape. And the sociologists found that those students who say that hooking up is about getting social status, about increasing your body count. They are the ones that are highly susceptible to believing myths about rape and sexual violence, but people who, for whatever reason, their background, their experiences, their political commitments, view hookup culture as an act of intimacy that includes some kind of feeling, some kind of attachment, who are conscious about the ethics of sex, are way less likely to believe myths about rape and sexual violence. So I think that within the structure that exists of hookup culture, which is highly problematic, there is an opening for possibly ethically permissible hookups, but it depends on the individual.

Ellie: 37:46

I want to just note though, that what you just said, David, said that people who believe that hookup culture can involve intimacy is probably not quite right. It's more that people who believe hooking up can involve or lead to intimacy, right.

David: 38:00

Yes, that's right. That's right.

Ellie: 38:02

Yeah, because I think this is a case where, given what we've discussed about hookup culture already, the practice is inextricably interwoven with rituals that I think, you know, really do undermine people's agency and undermine people's ability to respect others. But that doesn't mean that necessarily individual hookups are always going to map onto that. This is a place that where I would maybe want to say that what those folks are engaging in is casual sex, but not hooking up.

David: 38:30

But what's the difference between those two?

Ellie: 38:33

Hooking up is a casual sexual encounter that you, in principle, divorce from feelings and/or commitments, whereas casual sex is not. And I know here, you know, I'm kind of adding to the Rocha definition, that's narrower than he would define it. He just defines it as a sexual encounter between two people who are not in a committed relationship. I actually see hooking up as self-consciously adopting the mentality that you won't be in a committed relationship, even though, as we know, a substantial minority of hookups do actually lead to a relationship. So you know, I think my narrow definition of it is not the one that most people are going to use. It's actually not the one that I've always used either in my experiences of hooking up in the past. But I think I would like to see a future where we move towards much more anarchic, respectful, and ambiguous ways of engaging in casual sex that don't have the kind of contradictions endemic to the idea of hooking up.

David: 39:36

Yeah. But let me ask a follow-up question, because you said two different things and I want to clarify. So on your definition of a hookup, a hookup is casual sex that doesn't include a committed relationship, but-

Ellie: 39:50

That's Rocha's.

David: 39:51

Okay. And so on your definition, it also must include the divorce from feeling, a conscious attempt to not subjective attachment. Is that correct?

Ellie: 40:00

Yes, even though in practice, a lot of people don't actually engage in hookups that way, or they like try to hook up with that mentality.

David: 40:08

So then it follows that by definition, on your view, there cannot be an ethical hookup because it always involves the detachment from feeling. Okay so you don't believe hooking up can ever be ethical.

Ellie: 40:20

No, not given the specific, narrow definition that I've offered. I think hooking up is intelligible only if we treat people as means rather than as ends. If we treat them as commodities. And I also think it's only intelligible from within the context of a culture where we vaunt this romantic ideal of loving another person, usually within a monogamous context, where there is what Lauren Berlant calls the love plot, where it's like first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby and the baby carriage on the one hand. And then we relegate other forms of interaction to this sort of commodified, impoverished hook up culture. I would like to see a much broader spectrum of feelings, relations, and sexual encounters that does not have that kind of binary at work. And yeah. So, so in that sense, I would actually say both romantic love and hooking up in our current culture are fundamentally unethical, but I want to just be careful there because that doesn't mean that I haven't engaged in those things. And that doesn't mean that I think we need to morally condemn everyone who does.

David: 41:27

Well, what do you mean if it's not ethically permissible, then some element of condemnation should follow, right? Even if it's an institutional critique.

Ellie: 41:35

Oh yeah. I'm down. I'm down with the institutional critique for sure.

David: 41:39

Yeah, but- but if you consciously participate in that structure, presumably you should get a little bit of moral blame. Yeah.

Ellie: 41:46

I think a lot of people aren't consciously participating in that structure though. Cause we're, we're given so few options, right? Like college students are not really given much on many campuses at least, other than either the romantic love option or the hookup.

David: 42:01

Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you, but I do think we are operating here with two different definitions, because I abide by Rocha's definition, which is that hookup culture is casual sex without a commitment to a relationship. The question of feeling for me, it's not essential. So there can be hookups that are problematic, where people divorce themselves, where there is sexual violence, where there is a lack of respect, but there can be ethical hookups, where you treat the other person as an end in themselves rather than as a means to an end. So I think we just need to be careful that our definitions don't get in the way of the phenomena itself.

Ellie: 42:38

Yeah, because I think on that definition, I'm very open to that too. Casual sexual encounters between people who are not in a committed relationship, that seems perfectly ethically permissible to me, depending on the context. One other just quick thing to parse is the fact that I think, you know, in some of what we've been saying, I've been conflating commitment or the possibility of commitment with both feelings and with treating the other person as an end in themselves. And I want to note that when we really get into the weeds of it, those are quite distinct things. But I do think the through line there is treating the other person as a commodity. Because if you treat another person as a commodity, you're foreclosing the possibility of commitment. You're not treating them as an end in themselves. You're treating them as a means. And you are foreclosing the possibility of feelings, even a basic feeling of goodwill towards the person.

David: 43:28

The most basic human sentiment on Kant's moral universe, just the goodwill towards your fellow human beings.

Ellie: 43:36

Yeah, you don't need to love another person to engage in ethical, casual sex with them, but you do need to have some goodwill towards them, I would say. Controversial hot take.

David: 43:44

Uh, no, and I, and I kind of want to latch onto the possibility of an ethical hookup in, you know, part of it is me being super self-defensive for selfish reasons where it's like, no, I have had ethical hookups, uh, but that's not an

Ellie: 43:58

important point. Yeah no, I mean, I, I would like to hold on to that for my own, in my own case as well. For what it's worth.

David: 44:04

But I also want to hold on to that possibility because I think it's important for people to be able to imagine the possibility of an ethical encounter with another person that fits into a social script for which we have a term, but that doesn't follow the dominant narrative of, you know, instrumentalizing the other person that kind of takes away the negative side and retains the core. So I want to be open to the possibility of reclaiming the act of hooking up and redirecting it towards precisely what you call an anarchic affirming sexual ethics, Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other fellow listeners through our Facebook page and Facebook group or on Twitter and Instagram at @overthink_pod. underscore.

Ellie: 45:08

I think the other major critique of hookup culture besides the conservative one, which you identified two prongs of, David, is the critique from feminists. And the idea that as we said earlier, hooking up is a traditionally masculine form of engaging in casual sex that has now been extended to folks of other genders. So in this vein, Rocha points to the fact that one of the reasons that hookup culture for him is impermissible is precisely because it tends to leave women dissatisfied in heterosexual contexts. So he writes about a double standard in men's and women's reports of hooking up. Studies indicate, he writes, that women have higher hopes that hookups will lead to relationships than men do. And there's a really telling study where men and women were asked about their quote, terrible experiences in hookups, which almost half of participants said they've had. When women were asked about what their terrible experiences of hookups were, they were talking about things that amounted to sexual assault: being pressured into changing their mind about hooking up, pressured into going further than they were willing to go, sometimes their lack of consent being completely disregarded. When men described their terrible experiences of hooking up, they tended to describe hookups with women who were seeking relationships. So the bottom line here is that the dangers of hookup culture are super different. Statistically speaking for women and men, women risk sexual assault and men risk being caught in situations where women are looking- seeking relationships.

David: 46:45

Yeah. I told you the myth of the clingy hookup woman, uh, you know, like when the worst thing that you could imagine in a hookup is that somebody caught feelings for you, it really says something about the toxicity of your attitude towards sex and intersubjective connections. The fact that you experienced human emotion as subversive.

Ellie: 47:06

Yeah. And the fact that that's your version of a terrible hookup, whereas for a woman, a terrible hookup is sexual assault. And of course this isn't to deny the fact that there are men and people of other genders beyond the binary, right, who experience sexual assault, um, we're just talking about sort of broad statistical strokes here. Rocha also concludes, related to this, that men have better odds for meeting their goals in hookup culture, because the majority of men who engage in hooking up don't want a relationship and they tend to get that goal met. Like, if you don't want a relationship, the buck stops there.

David: 47:40

You can't force it.

Ellie: 47:41

The other person can't force you to be in a relationship with them. But the minority of men who wish to end up in a relationship actually also have positive odds for meeting their goals, because it tends to be much more common for women to want a relationship out of a hookup than men do. So men's sexual and emotional goals are much more likely to be met in hookups, whether they want a relationship or not, than women's are. What do you think about this? David? I found this really scary.

David: 48:08

Well, it's scary because it means that men have a lot more social capital that they can cash in in terms of getting what they want in hookup culture.

Ellie: 48:18

Oh, my gosh. How surprising?

David: 48:20

But it also extends all the way to the sexual act and the sexual gratification that comes with hooking up. So for example, we know a lot about the orgasm gap in college sex, especially casual sex, where men will orgasm, but typically women won't. Going back now to Lisa Wade's research, for example, she mentions that most of the young men and women that she interviewed showed the following pattern: women said that they thought it was rude to expect an orgasm from a man while hooking up. So they wouldn't really ask for it. They wouldn't talk about it. If it didn't happen, they wouldn't complain. The men not only reported that they had no interest in making women orgasm, like they just said that. They're like when I hook up, the orgasm of the woman is not my concern.

Ellie: 49:17

I think this really troubling study, David, also points to a different double bind that women find themselves in which is the double bind of being considered a slut or a Madonna, right? Because of course, young people, as a general category, are pressured in many ways to engage in hookup culture, but women are pressured to engage in hookup culture while also being pressured to maintain some sort of purity. And even for folks that are super left wing, not religious, et cetera, there is often this kind of sense that, oh, well, I don't want to come off as a slut.

David: 49:57

Yeah. And one interesting thing to add here is the work of the feminist theorist Lisa Rudd, who recently published an article entitled "Beyond the Closet" in which she argues that interestingly, even though hookup culture on college campuses is highly heteronormative, highly sexist, because it treats women again, as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves, there is this opening internal to this heteronormative practice for the exploration of queer identities, in particular for queer women, because a lot of the hookups on college campuses, especially the more exploratory ones, the ones that push the boundaries a little bit more, typically are threesomes involving one male and two women, because the assumption is that women are much more sexually fluid, much more sexually flexible, and they should provide this fantasy for the man. And so she makes the argument that even in this very regimented space, there's an opening for the exploration of queer identity for women because women in these hookups suddenly start experimenting with partners, with practices, with acts, that maybe they wouldn't have thought about before. So a lot of queer women will report experiences that made them think about their sexual identity emerging, for example, from these threesomes.

Ellie: 51:19

When we're talking about this kind of space of experiments of recreational casual sex, there is a kernel there of liberatory potential, you know, resisting heteronormativity and toxic masculinity and allowing people to try on different pleasures, Foucault's kind of bodies and pleasures mentality. Because of that absence of teleology or an end goal, what I described earlier as the love plot coming from Lauren Berlant, in its resolute denial of a potential future, hooking up arguably does resist that heteronormative nuclear family logic of first comes love, first comes marriage.

David: 51:54

Yeah. And here we might plug in the work of the queer theorist Lee Edelman, who wrote a book that was very influential for my psychosexual slash intellectual development when I was an undergrad entitled No Future in which he gives a pretty damning critique of what he calls reproductive futurism, which is a cultural fantasy that teaches us that if you just do things that support the status quo and that reproduce the existing social order, then everything will be good in the end. Everything will work out for the best. And reproductive futurism is typically associated with the figure of the child, because the child represents both innocence before corruption, by sex and modern life, et cetera, and futurity, right. The future of the family, the future of the nation. And so according to Lee Edelman, most of our social structures are organized around this reproductive futurism, the idea that you have to reproduce the status quo into its future. And that applies to sexuality because it is through the sexual act, through reproductive heterosex that the social order is literally reproduced, that you produce new citizens, new family members and so on and so forth. And that means that all forms of sex tend to be subjected to this logic of the future, where you can only have sex that is socially respected and recognized if it happens within the framework of marriage and the family and citizenship, really.

Ellie: 53:31

And this connects with Edelman's idea of the anti-social hypothesis, which is an idea that originates in the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that actually sex divides people rather than bringing them together. When we're involved in sex, we are, to put it in, uh, terms that Slavoj Zizek discusses in the copy he wrote for an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog in I think the nineties, um, that sex is a kind of mutual masturbation, no matter what.

David: 54:02

Yeah. Yeah, no, you're exactly right, because Edelman is very critical of the romantic conception of sex, according to which sex is an activity in which two become one, because there is this unity of souls and then two become three, because the child enters the picture. And he says on a fundamental level, sex is negative, negative not in the sense that it's bad, but in the sense that it's critical and that it moves us away from unity, because sex, as you say, is mutual masturbation in the sense that even when you are committed to sexual ethics and have good views about what good sex is supposed to be, you're still projecting onto the other person your idea of what their sexual desire is, right. You're basically treating the other person in an instrumental way, even if you don't want to. And that's inevitable. That's just part of sexuality. Sex is narcissistic. This is where Lee Edelman draws a lot from psychoanalytic theories of sex. And the point here about bringing Lee Edelman into dialogue with hookup culture, is that his point is that sex because it has this negative function in the sense that it criticizes unity, both the unity of the two and also the unity of the one because in sex, a lot of your ego boundaries are destroyed, at least momentarily. It performs a very important critical function, which is that it de-mythologizes the notion of reproductive futurism. In that sense, sex, all sex, performs at critical or negative function, but queer sex in particular performs an extra critical function because more so than heterosex, queer sex really challenges the notion of the future because of course, two people of the same sex cannot have a child without social or technological assistance, which is why queer sex is typically associated with death. It reminds me of that piece by Leo Bersani, which is entitled, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" which is about the association of queerness with death itself, especially in the wake of the AIDS crisis.

Ellie: 56:12

This idea that hookup culture moves us away from reproductive futurism is super compelling. And I do think, you know, this is kind of just like a general point to make about sexual ethics as somebody who works on this, the most innovative, ethical insights I think in our culture today are coming from queer communities and queer practices of sex and that's not to idealize or homogenize them. But it is to say that I buy the thesis of heterosexual pessimism, basically the idea that a lot of our problems, uh, in thinking about sex and romance come down to heterosexual situations. But I think what happens a lot in queer communities is an explicit negotiation of different norms around sex that often, although certainly not always, go hand in hand with respecting individuals as individuals and making explicit what would otherwise go unspoken because there is no sort of first base, second base, third base teleology in queer sex. And so in the same way that queer sexual practices often tend to involve more explicit communication about what sexual partners are interested in, what they like, what gives them the most pleasure, we can also say that queer approaches to hookup culture may open the door to resisting some of the really rigid social scripts that we touched on earlier, and that Wade identifies. But precisely the promise of liberatory sexual practices, I think are going to come from making implicit social scripts explicit and resisting those social scripts through the invention, the creation, of new norms that are perhaps more respectful and more interesting.

David: 57:50

Yeah. And one of the ways in which I interpret queer theory and its value for reinvisioning sex and sexuality in our culture comes from what I take to be the fundamental honesty that I think is there in queer theory about the act of sex and everything that surrounds that. And that includes an honesty about the dangers of sex, about sexual taboos, because by the time you have worked through a lot of queer issues related to your identity, you are not as susceptible to social taboos, right? You can talk about things a little bit more openly, a little bit more freely, including things that might be socially frowned upon. And the anti-social hypothesis is anti-social precisely because it foregrounds those aspects of sex that work against social collective fantasies about what sex must be like in order for it to have a place in the public, or in the private. And so thinking about hooking up as possibly resisting that logic of reproductive futurism, that according to the Edelman is so destructive and so dangerous, is one way in which I can have my cake and eat it too, which is to critique hookup culture and its traditional garb and at the same time, hold on to this possibility of more disruptive ways of having sex.

Ellie: 59:10

Now that's a reality show I would want to watch.

David: 59:13

And for once, I would watch that too. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 59:26

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 59:33

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon.

Ellie: 59:43

Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us.