Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Oh, no, it’s Charles M. Blow, wringing his hands about The Kids Today and Their Hooking Up:

The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.

(For those over 30 years old: hooking up is a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of future emotional commitment. Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.)

According to a report released this spring by Child Trends, a Washington research group, there are now more high school seniors saying that they never date than seniors who say that they date frequently. Apparently, it’s all about the hookup.

“Hookup culture” seems to be the latest bugaboo among those who worry about the degradation of the young people — let’s face it, specifically of young women and girls. Because sex is harmful for girls, dontchaknow.

What’s most amusing about Blow’s handwringing is the fact that he contradicts himself within a few paragraphs. See, in the hip, under-30 lingo, “hooking up is a casual sexual encounter” and yet, a few paragraphs later:

I should point out that just because more young people seem to be hooking up instead of dating doesn’t mean that they’re having more sex (they’ve been having less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) or having sex with strangers (they’re more likely to hook up with a friend, according to a 2006 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Research).

So Mr. Blow, on the payroll of the New York Times, is just making shit up to fit the latest (or, in typical Times fashion, just-about-over) buzzword. Well, not that surprising for the paper that employs Maureen Dowd, William Kristol and David Brooks (and, for that matter, Caitlin Flanagan herself).

But having defined “hooking up” as “casual sexual encounter, he then backs off that definition and admits that Kids Today aren’t actually having quite as much sex, or that they’re fucking strangers. So. What’s the problem, Charles?

To help me understand this phenomenon, I called Kathleen Bogle, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia who has studied hooking up among college students and is the author of the 2008 book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus.”

It turns out that everything is the opposite of what I remember. Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date.

I asked her to explain the pros and cons of this strange culture. According to her, the pros are that hooking up emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating, and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date. As she put it, “It used to be that if you couldn’t get a date, you were a loser.” Now, she said, you just hang out with your friends and hope that something happens.

Funny, that seemed to be the model when I was a young ‘un, too. I remember sitting around the pizza shop in the Eastbrook Mall while I was in college 20-odd years ago while my girlfriends complained that nobody wanted to date and everyone wanted to just “hook up.” Though “hook up” was much more of a casual, hanging-out sort of thing rather than anything specifically sexual. I suspect, frankly, that “hooking up” means pretty much the same thing to those who are doing it as it did 20-odd years ago. The only new thing is that the Caitlin Flanagans and Kathleen Bogles and Charles M. Blows of the world have seized upon the term as the latest sign of the Moral Decay of Today’s Youth.

Which once again makes me very grateful that I came of age in a time that seems charmed in retrospect. Very few adults had their noses in our crotches back then, handwringing over the state of our souls. They were more worried about getting us to use condoms, what with AIDS coming down the pike at us.

But seriously — his problem is that “dating” — a term he doesn’t define, by the way, other than the one-pair thing — is in decline? How does he imagine that relationships form among young people who see each other daily in school or at the dorm? It’s not enough to get to know each other while hanging out with friends? To be a “real” and, presumably, Blow-approved relationship, it must be formed via separating yourselves from the group and going on Blow-approved dates with dinner and corsages? Does he think that there’s no effort put into forming relationships via hooking up/hanging out, other than just “hoping” something will happen?
Oh, and here it comes: the “Hooking up is bad for girls” bit!

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased likelihood of sexual assaults because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol.

So much left unsaid here. First, who’s saying that girls want relationships and guys don’t? Bogle? Blow? What’s the evidence of that, anecdotal or otherwise? Second, who’s looking for a spouse in high school and college, which appears to be the age group that Bogle has studied?

If you wind up doing more traditional “dating” when you’re older, i.e., out of college and in the workforce, it’s most likely because you have fewer opportunities to hook up than you did when you had a looser schedule and saw your friends all the time. Plus, when you’re working, you usually have more money for stuff like dates than you did when you were in school.

And while I agree that sexual assaults are bad (though apparently not everyone agrees), why does Blow think that dating is the cure? Has he never heard of a guy who’s had a few on a date deciding that the girl’s going to put out whether she wants to or not because he paid for dinner? At least if you’re in a group of friends, you have some protection.

But I think that Bogle herself gets at the real problem when it comes to girls and hooking up, and why it’s so easy for her to draw the conclusion that girls want something else and are therefore harmed by hooking up:

That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.

It used to be that “you were trained your whole life to date,” said Ms. Bogle. “Now we’ve lost that ability — the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them.”

Dingdingding! Social conditioning is the problem! So stop training girls their whole damn lives to date and then getting the vapors about moral laxity when they don’t.

ETA: I should have remarked that what Bogle and Blow mean by “dating,” though it’s not terribly well-defined here, seems to be some kind of 1950s-era malt-shop thing.  That, of course, bore no resemblance to the kind of dating that young people did in earlier eras, nor was it the sole means of forming relationships in the 1950s.  My mother, for example, was in college in the late ’50s, and she was in many ways the quintessential middle-class post-war white girl.  While there were more formalized dates on which she was allowed by the nuns who ran her college to go on (and calling it a “date” allowed you to get out of the dorm for the night with a boy by yourself), a lot of her socializing with young men occurred in, hey, groups of friends.  When she left college, she also socialized with young men in groups of friends or cousins/brothers.   She eventually met my father in a bar, and he was older and didn’t want to hang around with her cousins, so she did more “dating” with him, and then had 30-odd years of increasing social isolation in a marriage to a drunk.  Whee!

There’s also the little issue that “dating” the way Bogle romanticizes it isn’t even the way it’s done in many cultures around the world and within the US.  So once again, we have a conservative (LaSalle College, FYI, is a Christian Brothers school) looking back to a past that never existed except part-time for a few well-to-do Americans, and decrying its loss at at a time when it just doesn’t work anymore.   Hell, why not get all nostalgic for Michaeleen Flynn’s jaunting cart and the observance of the proprieties?