Speechifying: So-called hook up culture and the anti-feminists who love it

Earlier this week, I was in Virgina speaking at Emory & Henry College at the school’s winter forum – it was a day-long group of discussions on gender and sexuality. This talk was different than others I’ve done – generally I speak about Feministing and my writing. But the organizers at E&H wanted me to speak about the so-called hook up culture on college campuses, and they wanted me to have a “discussion” (a debate) with this woman, Elizabeth Marquardt. (I actually felt very odd about debating Marquardt because she was so damn nice and friendly – I don’t know that I’m cut out for this kind of thing. More on this in an upcoming post…)
In any case, I had a lot of fun with the talk, because a lot of it related back to the work I did for The Purity Myth. So on the chance that anyone gives a shit, I thought I’d repost my speech here…dirty jokes not included.

I have to admit that when I found out I would be speaking on “hook up culture” today, I was somewhat at a loss.
Because the truth is, I actually don’t believe that hook culture exists.
Do I think young people in college have sex and hook up? Of course.
But I don’t think that this means that there’s some nefarious culture of wanton sexuality rampant across college campuses – at least, not any more than there ever was – and I don’t think that the fact that young people have sex or are otherwise physically intimate with each other is necessarily a cause for concern.
What I do think is cause for worry is the way that conservative and anti-women organizations, writers, and media makers are using this myth of a hook up culture to promote regressive values surrounding gender and to roll back women’s rights.
So just to get some context – let’s talk a little bit about what “hook up” culture actually is as its imagined by the media and conservative organizations.
In 2007 alone, nearly 1,000 news and magazine articles referred to the “girls gone wild” or “raunch culture” phenomenon.
The topics of these articles ranged from general finger wagging about girls’ supposed promiscuity and spring break, to op-eds about college women’s slutty Halloween costumes.
I found headlines like “Spring Break, Broken Girls,” “Dying to Date” and “Girls Gone Bad.”
One article for Newsweek even wondered whether America was raising a generation of “prostitots.” (That would be slutty toddlers.)
Another piece from The Washington Post – and this one is actually my favorite – said that young women hooking up was tantamount to “a mental health crisis on American campuses.”
There should be two things that are immediately evident to you – even from just these small sampling of articles. 1) The concerns about young people hooking up and having sex aren’t about young people at all – they’re about young women.
And 2) The attitude is definitely that young women having sex is a bad, bad thing. There’s a whole lot of shaming and scare tactics going on.
And it’s not just limited to the media. Also in 2007, when all of these articles were coming out, five books were released, all arguing that pre-marital sex and hook up culture are terrible for young women.
One book, Unprotected, by Miriam Grossman, told readers that sexually active young women are more likely to be depressed and more likely to commit suicide.
In another book called Prude, the author writes that pre-marital sex “often condemns young women to a life of poverty and deprivation.” (So just to keep this straight, women who are hooking up are supposed to be depressed, suicidal, AND looking forward to a life of poverty.)
And these books are just the latest in a long line of publications and reports – almost all put out by conservative organizations (and I’ll explain why that’s important in a minute) saying that hooking up is the most dire issue facing young American women today.
A short publication – a little booklet meant for college women – put out by the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, for example, says that the more sexual partners women have, the more depressed they are and that young women who have sex are just going to end up sad, lonely dropouts with HPV.
(I’m paraphrasing obviously, but this is in fact what was written in the publication.)
The booklet hinges so much on scare tactics that it goes as far as to wish STDs on fictional characters.
“It’s easy to forget, but the characters on Grey’s Anatomy and Sex in the City are not real. In real life, Meredith and Carrie would have warts or herpes. They’d likely be on Prozac or Zoloft.”
Just as an aside, I think it’s really telling that a lot of anti-hook up books rely on anecdotes from TV or the movies – characters that are totally fictional – because they often can’t find real life examples for their scare tactics.
And if the content of these publications wasn’t obvious enough, their visuals really say it all. The covers of these books and publications – and if you can ever look them up online, I highly suggest that you do – frequently show young women, head in their hands, dresses ripped, and slumped over, or naked in the fetal position – just generally looking in trouble.
The message seems to be that the only kind of sex young women can have is dangerous, drunk sex that leaves them disheveled and traumatized.
But the thing is, despite what these books and articles are saying – sexually active young women are in fact not diseased, depressed drop outs. They are doing just fine.
The truth is, 95% of Americans have premarital sex, and this has been true for decades. Even for women who were born in the 1940s, nine out of ten had sex before marriage. (And even back then there was moral panic about young women having sex – so this is really nothing new.)
Teenagers are using contraception more often than in past years, and more effectively. Unless they’ve taken abstinence only education classes, of course, in which case they don’t use contraception and have increased rates of oral and anal sex. And that’s according to the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Women are also attending college at the highest rates in history, and we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students.
In addition, a national survey of five hundred thousand high school seniors from 1975 to 2005 showed that 70 percent of young women today report being happy with themselves, and that 77 percent are happy with their lives. The same study showed that 70 percent of young women think it’s important to make a contribution to society, and that 90 percent hope to have a job that enables them to help others.
So these stats – showing happy and socially engaged young women paint quite a different picture than conservative organizations and the media do – of oversexed, apathetic, young women going wild.
So what’s the disconnect? If young women are doing so well, whether they’re having sex or not – why spend so much energy arguing that hooking up is ruining them?
The simple answer is that well-educated and socially engaged women don’t make for sexy headlines and they certainly don’t sell books.
But there’s also something more insidious going on here. Almost all of the books and reports written about hook-up culture are done by writers and researchers with ties to conservative or anti-feminist organizations – some are even outright funded by them.
Miriam Grossman, who wrote Unprotected, for example, is a senior fellow with the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute – the same organization that put out that anti-hooking up pamphlet and which also spends a good amount of money trying to shut down college performances of the award winning play The Vagina Monologues. (They think it’s pornographic to say the word vagina, apparently.)
The statistic that sexually active young women are more likely to be depressed and suicidal actually comes from a study done by The Heritage Foundation – a conservative think tank that’s a strong proponent of abstinence only education, and that is against issues like same sex marriage and CEDAW (which is a major international women’s rights treaty in the UN.)
And also I believe the study Elizabeth did on hooking up was funded by the Independent Women’s Forum, an organization which argues that pay inequity doesn’t exist and actually fights against Violence Against Women Act – legislation which allocates billions of dollars to domestic violence shelters and rape centers.
So I think it’s really important to think about where these statistics are coming from when we talk about so-called hook up culture and to remember that this kind of manufactured panic is really just one part of a larger conservative strategy.
Because talking about women’s sexuality in this way is an incredibly effective tool that’s being used to reinforce traditional gender norms and to regress women’s rights.
And if you’re at skeptical about this, besides looking at who is doing the writing and the funding, you should also pay close attention to what they’re actually saying, and specifically what solutions they’re suggesting to the “problem” of young women hooking up.
Laura Sessions Stepp, who wrote Unhooked, writes that young women don’t belong in bars, “that’s a guy thing,” and that they should consider baking cookies to impress men. (Not that there’s anything wrong with baking cookies, I’m a big fan myself, but I think you see where this is going…)
Miriam Grosmman advocates that young women not wait long to get married and get pregnant – in fact both authors seem to assume that the main goal of women in college isn’t academics or finding themselves, or even having fun – but instead, finding a husband.
Again, nothing wrong with getting married and having babies, but when you assume that should be the main goal of young women in college – something is amiss.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that none of these books talk about gay or lesbian youth – the only young people who exist in this narrative are straight, and generally white.
And this isn’t just about talking points or press releases on how college women shouldn’t be having sex. The work that they’re doing around “hooking up” is doing actual tangible damage to women.
For example, when the FDA was considering making the HPV vaccine available in the United States – the vaccine that prevents cervical cancer – the single biggest public concern cited wasn’t health related or about the vaccine’s newness. It was about the worry that girls would become promiscuous if they were vaccinated.
Charlotte Allen, of the Independent Women’s Forum, wrote that the HPV vaccine gives girls the message that “it’s just fine for them to have all the sex they want, ‘cuz now they’ll be vaccinated!” Bridget Maher, of the Family Research Council, said that giving girls the vaccine is harmful because “they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”
Dozens of other conservative pundits and organizations repeated the sentiment.
Now, I rarely quote Bill Maher, but he was right on when he joked, “It’s like saying if you give a kid a tetanus shot, she’ll want to jab rusty nails in her feet.”
Similarly, emergency contraception – also known as the morning after pill or Plan B – was held up in the FDA for years for over-the-counter status (meaning, you would be able to get it without a prescription) because of fears that young women would go all slutty.
It later came to light that an FDA medical official wrote in an internal memo that over-the-counter status for emergency contraception could cause “extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”
Let’s be clear, this was an FDA official holding up a safe contraceptive that because of the fear of teen sex cults.
So really, all of this writing and talking about hooking up is about a lot more than just wanting young people to have less sex, or to date more. This is about a return to traditional gender roles – a world where women go to college not to get an education, but to find a husband; a world where women don’t really like sex but just do it to have babies. A world where women have no reproductive choices.
Now, all of this is not to say that I don’t think there’s a problem with how oversexualized the media is, or how women and women’s sexuality are portrayed in pop culture – I do think that there’s a problem.
I also think we need to have a serious conversation about sexual assault, rape and alcohol on college campuses – these are issues of sexuality that are immediately dangerous to both young men and women.
I even think that there’s a lot more we could discuss about hooking up. But let’s have that conversation with nuance and realism, and let’s certainly have it without an agenda.
And fact is, focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers, titillate the imagination and line the pockets of conservative organizations make it that much easier to ignore actual problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix.
For a young woman living in poverty, spring break isn’t even an option, let alone a concern. For a young woman who has no health insurance, the “moral” debate over STDs won’t do anything for her the next time she needs to see a doctor. And for a young single mother, hearing about herself as an unfortunate statistic isn’t going to make her life any better or easier.
If the same people who are working themselves into a panic over women’s sexuality spent half as much time advocating on behalf of issues that young women really need help with, we might actually be getting somewhere. But instead, we’re stuck talking about what a shame it is that young women are having sex, when the truth is, it isn’t a shame at all.