The hookup ”” that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students ”” is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating.
It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.
Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren’t necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.
“The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening,” Bogle says. “In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating.”
God is Love.
Love is Sex.
Sex is god.
We have come full circle where we (as a society) “worship” sex itself. The clamour for blessing same sex unions and for no fault divorce (and the resulting serial polygamy) and, now, for sex without intimacy are simply symptoms of the worship of sex.
Where does this worship of Sex come from? I believe it comes from the use of sex to sell everything from air travel to toothpaste and deodorant. Personally, I believe this is an effort of a spirit (not The Holy Spirit) to trap and enslave our culture.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
I am so glad I’m too old, and married, and I’m so sorry for my unmarried daughter. The old rules are gone, and the new ones are lousy.
The new rules are the old rules, repackaged. Every society in the past that has fallen and failed has done so shortly after a marked departure from societal mores of decency. Look at Rome: a fall into decadence by the emperors on down through the aristocracy.
IMO, this is just one more symptom of the fall of the Western Civilization.
And they wonder why there is a the sad correlation in sexual violence on the dating scene going up exponentially. If sex is expected, then sex will be demanded as a right, and will be attained by hook or by crook.
But, the good news is, there are still good single people out there. Like the story of Isaac and Rebekah, we may just have to look farther a field to find them.
We know about the boys. Nothing new there. But what part of the contemporary young woman’s soul has been surgically removed for this to go on? And whom or what removed it?
That’s “who are what”
Albany+,
The answer is Hugh Hefner, NOW, Roe v Wade, and the so-called sexual revolution.
My husband and I have a few single or divorced female acquaintances who have fallen for this “hooking up” concept, and have sex with casual relationships. These poor ladies have also wondered out loud why none of their sexual partners is interested in marriage. The phrase “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” comes to mind…
It’s very sad. I agree with Katherine (#2). My adolescent daughter, who has witnessed the misery of these sad ladies, vows she will stay a virgin until marriage. I pray she keeps that resolution.
Albany+,
The media has removed female ideals of chastity. The media bombards young women with images of woman having worry-free, guilt-free, problem-free, consequence-free sex. In TV and movies, all sex is good; there is no reason for a woman NOT to have sex. In TV and movies, married couples never have sex (when was the last time you saw a love scene on the big screen between a husband and a wife?)
Women have been bombarded with these images for over a decade. Outside of a rather anemic church, there is no cultural institution telling these women of the benefits of chastity.
I think Christianity has shied away from honest discussion about sex for too long. It is time for the Christians to join this discussion once again. It is time, in fact, for Christians to own this discussion, to expound, once again, that sex is really much better than our culture thinks it is.
From the article: [i]”The dilemma for this generation is how to learn about intimacy, she says: “How am I going to have a series of relationships that are going to be healthy for me and others, and going to prepare me” for settling down with one person?”[/i]
Wow. The answer to this unfortunately is, you aren’t. Human beings healthy and sane enough to form a cohesive society are not made that way, and no amount of attempting to ‘re-frame’ them will make it happen. So off goes western civilization merrily to hell in a handbasket. I’m not sure it’s historically honest to analyze these regrettable developments as a trend, however. It seems to me after more than 5 decades of observation that they are also episodes that coincide with war and economic booms, and in between those, some members of society sit around rubbing their heads and wondering why their lives aren’t turning out the way they expected based on what they were promised by ‘someone’. The promises made through high school sexuality classes and rampant media portrayals of sexually ‘fulfilled’ people are premised on a dangerously wrong understanding of how to be a decent human being in society, but they do set up the sort of expectation expressed in the quote above. The result is just a lot of young people wandering lonely in a moral wilderness, where they bump into each other and ricochet off. Only when they recognize that the gift of intimacy is a reflection of God’s way of relating to us will the erroneous premise be corrected. It’s for this reason that the witness of such contemporary figures as Dawn Eden is powerful and is helping lead the mis-led out of darkness. (St. Augustine of course had precisely the same realization eventually, in about 300-400 AD, IIRC.)
Alas, in a relativist society where there are no absolutes, or no universal, objective moral standards anymore, there is nothing to stop or reverse the cultural slide into ever greater degradation and debauchery. And the misery and social havoc that comes from it.
This is one more sign that American culture is in moral free fall, and it seems things are even worse in Europe. One of the ironies inherent in the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the Boomer generation is that the acceptance of promiscuity has led to what I often call the Trivialization of Sex, treating it merely as a form of having fun, cheapening it as an aid to selling products, etc. The supposed “liberation” from “prudish,” “Victorian,” “Puritan” or just “old-fashioned” ways has turned out to be a case of false advertising, for it’s only lead to fostering lots of empty, meaningless sexual activity. The end result: people have more and more sex outside of marriage, but it means less and less.
Perhaps that’s one reason why Pope John Paul the Great’s refreshingly positive “Theology of the Body” has caught on like wildfire among many young people, and not just among Catholic young people either.
The NPR story reports that several national surveys show that the number of college students claiming to be virgins remains about 28%. That suggests that the impression (conventional wisdom) that every one is hooking up these days is a considerable exaggeration, but it’s still sadly all too common. The most tragic part is how little difference there seems to be between Christian and non-Christian young people, as polls by evangelical pllster George Barna and others have shown.
Bottom line: We Christians have a lot to repent of, but we also have a great opportunity here to act as salt in a rotting and decaying society. For we stand not only for a highly countercultural standard of sexual purity and morality, but also for the MEANINGFULNESS of sex, as God intended it to be. And for sacramental Christians (Lutherans, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox), we can go a step farther and even use of the language of the sacramental nature of sex. Which is the very opposite of our society’s clear trend toward the trivialization of that most intimate and meaningful part of life.
David Handy+
#8. It’s not just the fact that the milk is being given away for free that amazes me – it the fact that these women do not seem to realize that they, like everyone, are not as valuable in this department as they get older.
I’m guessing that a lot of these women – Dr. Laura is one of them – will become conservatives in their old age when they realize their folly. Perhaps our culture needs their example to learn from, since we don’t learn from history.
As Christians we could do a lot better by explaining to the world where sexual morality in the Bible makes modern sense instead of simply saying that it’s the word of God and should be obeyed. The Bible is a much greater document when shown how it reflects the wisdom of the ages.
I scanned the article and the only statistics I could find were 28% remain virgins! When I was just out of college and working my tail off just to make ends meet I was reading articles about YUPIES. Cover of Time magazine etc. I was frustrated that I wasn’t a YUPIE (YUPIES were Young Upwardly Mobile). YUPIES were just 2% of the population but got 99% of the press. Having three married late twenties and early thirty children and two single mid twenty and early thirty children hooking up is not part of thier life style!!
There is no surprise here. No extensive analysis or search for nuance is necessary here. The chickens are coming home to roost ( and the rooster is happier than ever.) I hope that we see the cultural connection to the pandering to homosexuality that is now so ubiquitous and the absence of sexual self restraint among heterosexuals. Feminism has freed women to become men, so that they have forgotten how o be women. And the reverse is true, which in part explains the popularity of homosexuality.
There is no cure for this disease save the eruption of some
physical disaster – a different disease perhaps – that so scares people that they change their behavior. That is, when there are no consequences attendant on the failure of self discipline and there are rewards for self indulgence, what else can the outcome be? Where there is no moral law, promiscuity can only be controlled by pain.
There will another kind of pain later on – and too late. Their kids will say, “What did you do when y ou were young?” And they will realize that they cannot say, “I smoked a lot of dope, tried lesbianism when I was in college, and slept with every man who asked.” They will lie and know they are lying. Will they train their children differently? Or will they do the Baby Boomer thing, namely, allow their kids even more latitude than they took themselves because teaching self-restraint is too difficult and too unpleasant?
L