<p>those days were quite scary, I worked in a residential addiction treatment program where many of our patients were dying and we had no idea why. kind of influenced my decision to marry…</p>
<p>[Hookup</a> culture: for the white and wealthy. - Slate Magazine](<a href=“Hookup culture: for the white and wealthy.”>Hookup culture: for the white and wealthy.)</p>
<p>poetgrl: I am sorry for your loss and I hear you. Do you know this book? <a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Plays-Well-Others-Allan-Gurganus/dp/0375702032[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Plays-Well-Others-Allan-Gurganus/dp/0375702032</a> Absolutely heartbreaking.</p>
<p>Whether or not I believe in the hook-up culture, I definitely believe young people are not, as a whole, safe enough. I am older than you. I saw it from a little different perspective. I lost friends, too, and very quickly. In academia, the arts, etc - we lost a generation, at least, of amazing work. We all lost so much. I started talking to my sons about safe sex when they were five. I probably traumatized them, but didn’t think it was possible to start drilling it into their heads too early.</p>
<p>The few times I have brought up safe sex practices on one of these teen/college student/sex threads - I’ve been told it really isn’t an issue any longer. I don’t believe that. Some say, no one dies anymore so we can all relax a little. I am not relaxing.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>allyphoe: Thanks!</p>
<p>this is probably true, allyphoe.</p>
<p>Since my daughters are wildly beautiful (really this is objective), they do get to choose. I wish the world were more merit based, but it’s not. Beautiful women do still get to choose first.</p>
<p>Ahl, I drive my daughters crazy with the safer sex talk, and the “have you been tested” once a year, lecture, but I really don’t care. It’s probably PTSD. This is what my oldest has told me anyway, “Mom, just because you have PTSD about HIV, doesn’t mean you need to worry so much.” :rolleyes:</p>
<p>In my experience any strong, self assured woman, who is clear what she is looking for, “gets to choose” regardless of whether she has conventional beauty. Conventional beauty definitely doesn’t hurt, but I don’t think it is the most important quality in getting to choose. </p>
<p>That is a completely different thread, but I would sure participate :)</p>
<p>Yep, this pretty much sums it up.</p>
<p>Hook-ups or one night stands are not good for anyone. My reason may be way off ( please feel free, with justification, to steer me right) however I feel the following ( this goes for a male or female ): our society apparently still embraces and condones the institution of marriage ( I know… Obvious). Marriage is suppose to be monogamous with unconditional trust. How can an individual ( male or female) be so promiscuous ( that’s what hook-ups are) and then when one is " READY " to settle down be able to stay with one person over the next 3-5 decades when there will be ups & downs? Having a lifestyle that does not place sex in a special light and then all of a sudden … With a ring, ceremony and a piece of paper placed sex in a special place seems almost impossible. Now I am not suggesting abstinence prior to marriage, however, since we treat sex in marriage special , then shouldn’t it be treated that way all your life ( having intimate relations with only very special individuals)? Or let’s just make sex not special ( much like hook-ups) and let’s not frown on anyone who wants to have sex with other partners while married ! To me the double standard is how sex itself is being treated.</p>
<p>Oddly, alh, I really don’t think that your post #146 is for a different thread. I think it sums it up, all of it.</p>
<p>liberty, that’s way off base IMO. For one, there is more to relationships than sex. Sex does not define a relationship- whether it is special or not or whatever. Two, people can change. While they might want sex with no strings attached at 20, by 30 they might be ready to be with one person for the rest of their lives. </p>
<p>My parents have been fairly open about the fact that they had plenty of hook ups in high school and after (they sometimes use it in a warning context- my dad had a kid right out of high school and got into a really bad marriage because of it). This was before AIDs was well known and my mom grew up in the free love era- fully immersed in it. They’ve been together over 20 years and have gone through much more than most couples and yet have never been anything than 100% committed to one another. The one night stands were just that whereas relationships are relationships. </p>
<p>I personally don’t see sex as anything special or sacred or whatever. I see it as a very basic biological process. I would rather have sex within a relationship for a variety of reasons and think stranger sex would be unfulfilling, but I don’t think sex or your views on it are what defines a relationship.</p>
<p>Hook-ups when you’re single are one thing. When you make the decision to be in a relationship with someone, then it’s no longer just your emotions and health that you need to worry about. If you’re both cool with having sex with other people, so be it! It works in other cultures. Not something I would personally pick but I don’t care what others do.</p>
<p>alh, I like your post 146 (I say as a strong, confident women who isn’t traditionally beautiful :p)</p>
<p>
I think sex is a bigger part of relationships than you suggest, although certainly it’s not everything. I will say that sex outside of the relationship sure destroys a lot of marriages (and other relationships), so it’s pretty powerful. I don’t know if having had a lot of sex partners before marriage makes it harder to have a strong marriage or not–but I wouldn’t assume that it makes no difference. It’s another question that anecdotes really won’t answer, either.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yup, which is why I said </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Of course anecdotes don’t work on a societal level. One can disagree based on personal experience though when someone makes a sweeping generalization like </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Once again, one night stands are nothing new. They are not causing the downfall of relationships. Dating is still very much alive and well. Etc, etc</p>
<p>I personally don’t see sex as anything special or sacred or whatever. I see it as a very basic biological process. I would rather have sex within a relationship for a variety of reasons and think stranger sex would be unfulfilling, but I don’t think sex or your views on it are what defines a relationship.</p>
<p>How we think about sex compares to our relationship with food.
We have a primal drive to nourish our bodies, just as we have a drive to copulate.
When we are sexually mature, that drive is as strong and as healthy as the need for nourishment & for shelter. Its one of the things we were put here on earth to do.</p>
<p>That doesnt mean that a corn dog & ice cream cone at the beach isn’t as fullfilling in its way as a five course expertly prepared meal. Or a quickie on a fallen log on the side of a hill above your campsite. 
But sex can also be an enormously spiritual and even out of body experience which I have shared with my partner.
<a href=“http://www.psychologies.co.uk/love/the-joy-of-spiritual-sex.html[/url]”>http://www.psychologies.co.uk/love/the-joy-of-spiritual-sex.html</a>
However, that is as intense as it sounds and for me requires to be very grounded within myself & in the relationship in order to have my heart and mind open to the experience.
Not something that occurs generally with a more casual and short lived relationship.</p>
<p>It’s not the number of sexual partners prior to marriage I was referring to. Rather, the number of mere casual sexual encounters with multiple individuals.
I hope I am wrong and that one can have multiple superficial sexual experiences ( hook-ups) and then settle into a long term everlasting relationship and never ever stray. I know other issues can go into straying and being unfaithful, but I also have to think that if one only had previous sexual encounters with individuals they seriously cared about ( having chemistry if you will) then straying in marriage may be less likely. If I’m wrong so be it but as one poster said …infidelity ends marriages! It’s not like going to Dairy Queen and having a vanilla ( chocolate ) malt when you told your spouse your trying to loose weight.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>IMO, infidelity is an issue of one’s character…or lack thereof. </p>
<p>This has much closer relation to matters such as not honoring promises/contracts to others rather than how many casual sexual encounters one had while not in a committed monogamous relationship.</p>
<p>An interesting debate. As someone with oodles of statistical training, I suspect that I probably would be pretty skeptical not just of the conclusions of the article but of most of the papers cited above. </p>
<p>Posted by Iglooo
</p>
<p>Iglooo, the frequency of men and women having casual sex better be equal if they are talking about averages (unless we are also including LGBT hookups or imaginary ones). Medians might be different if there were very few men (or women) having all of the sex as happens in some species of birds and bats.</p>
<p>As people have said, one night stands have been around forever. As a male who was somewhat shy (no longer), I can say that not all one night stands were initiated by males, even in the dark ages when I was in college and grad school. </p>
<p>A few things struck me about the article. </p>
<p>First, if we as a society are asking women to be full participants in the job market and are investing resources in them as if they are going to be, then we ought to be pleased that women are trying to act in accord with these expectations. It is still largely a sexist world out there and women are the ones in two career marriages who are generally the ones who are expected to compromise and actually make compromises. These young women are saying that they don’t want to buy into those sexist expectations. </p>
<p>Second, there was a strong implication in the article that some (many?) of the women at Penn involved in hook-ups did so because males set the terms. Thus, at least that for that subset of women, it sounds like they’d prefer sex with intimacy and in the context of relationships but feel that they can’t get that at Penn and that the rules of the game have been set by men and the frat culture. If that is true, I feel sad for them and the situation is troubling. Note that this is different than the young career woman discussed above, whose decision I respect [though she may not understand all of the consequences as some posters have noted].</p>
<p>Third, the saddest part of the article is that some of these young women have habituated to date rape. We didn’t have the label for it back in the dark ages, but I had a girlfriend back in the dark ages who was date raped. Somehow assumed that because she’d had sex with him, she should therefore enter into and stay in a (relatively exploitative) relationship with the jerk who had raped her. I think that both date rape and habituation are damaging to the women. </p>
<p>Fourth, as people have noted, alcohol is a part of the problem in points two and three. A friend who was a university president was very concerned during his tenure about drinking and reported the change – not long ago, guys drank to get drunk but girls just drank to be in the party (and drank much less) but over the past 10 years, girls are also drinking to get drunk. Given lesser alcohol tolerance and some males’ willingness to have sex with relative comatose females, heavy drinking serious makes them vulnerable to bad judgment, either inducing them to engage in hookups they’d eschew if they were sober or enabling them to be date raped.</p>
<p>Finally, romani, this may be obvious to you, but maybe not. I think the evolutionary explanation is pretty reasonable for the “preciousness” of women’s sexuality. Because men have an incentive to have many offspring and women have a 9 month gestation period and can have a much more limited number of kids, having women choose only the right times and right partners made and makes evolutionary sense (see point 1). Social norms would not have to protect men from unwanted sex but should have protected women. Technology upends this – with birth control, the risk is a lot lower, although the direction of the effect would be the same. So, in principle, protecting female sexuality is at least a lot less important. But, people’s embedded evolutionary logic hasn’t caught up with modern technology. Same thing with burqas. One can know for certain that the who the mother of the child is, but in days gone by, one could be certain who the father was. Thus, social norms developed to make it hard for women to have affairs. The males in cultures with burqas are trying to preserve paternity. Seems an extreme way to do it. But, guess what, we now have DNA tests and can determine paternity. But, embedded evolutionary logic hasn’t caught up with technology.</p>
<p>[Kate</a> Taylor Pimps Penn’s Hookup Culture * Hooking Up Smart](<a href=“http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2013/07/17/hookinguprealities/kate-taylor-2/]Kate”>http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2013/07/17/hookinguprealities/kate-taylor-2/)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>(apologies if this has already been posted)</p>
<p>shaw, I disagree with your last point to an extent. Yes, I absolutely agree that there is some evolutionary basis for why some cultures treat women’s sexuality as more “precious”. However, there are several cultures where women mate with several men so that no one is quite sure of paternity and thus men have an incentive to protect all children as they might be theirs. (This is also common in our non-human primate cousins.) Furthermore, there are many, MANY cultures where paternity is not determined by DNA but by societal norms. For example, even in the Bible we see that Onan was supposed to produce a child with his deceased brother’s wife. That child would not be his, it would belong to his brother, even though it was his DNA. This is common in pre-modern cultures- even common in some parts of the world today. </p>
<p>So yes, I agree that evolution could absolutely have something to do with part of it. However, I think culture plays a much stronger role than what is embedded in us through evolution. </p>
<p>People interested in this topic might enjoy this series: [Global</a> Problems of Population Growth with Robert Wyman - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE60A08636F41C128]Global”>Global Problems of Population Growth with Robert Wyman - YouTube)
I just made it through it and I was absolutely enthralled. The first 3 or so videos talk about this very topic.</p>
<p>I do agree that it’s very sad if women feel they need to engage in hook-ups because that’s all they can get. However, there are plenty of women who want hook-ups because they just don’t want the commitment. I hope both types of people never feel forced into the other type of situation.</p>
<p>In 1777, Lord Mansfield announced that it was settled English law that neither the husband nor the wife could raise a question as to the paternity of a child born during their marriage. So, it seems that good old Anglo-Saxon law was aware of the issue of infidelity of the woman.</p>
<p>Someone more versed in the Bible can set this straight, but one of the 10 Commandments was to not commit adultery. This is one of the commandments that seems to apply to men and women.</p>
<p>So, it appears that it is nothing new that females have been sexually active outside of marriage even when married, i.e., in a relationship.</p>
<p>
See, for example, Potiphar’s wife.</p>