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Flight From Love
By Kate Burch
There are a number of conditions of contemporary life in America that
disturb me. One that I find almost unutterably sad is the
“hookup” culture on our college campuses. Even at many
religiously-affiliated colleges, participation—usually
alcohol-fueled—in numerous and casual sexual encounters with strangers
or mere acquaintances has become normative behavior. Those who do
not engage in hooking up are often viewed as odd or even
disordered. There have been tales of students being referred for
psychological counseling because they retained their virginity beyond
the age of eighteen. Hooking up cannot be considered to be a
variant or refinement of courtship behavior, because the people who are
“partners” in a hookup very often avoid any further casual contact or
even behave with frank hostility toward one another. Their
coupling is not an expression of love or even of caring. There is
no interest in the other person beyond the linking of genitals; there
is no willingness to be involved—to be vulnerable—to be known.
To probably most people like me who were fairly well formed before the
sexual revolution of the sixties, hooking up is shockingly immoral and
self-defeating, particularly for young women. Indeed, it is young
women who appear to be most wounded by this behavior. Studies
show that most young women who have engaged in uninvolved sex admit to
regretting it. Regrets are less commonly admitted among the young
men. It’s possible, I suppose, that the biological imperative to
fertilize might partly explain the difference. Consider, also,
that self-reports of regrets may be skewed by the desire to answer in
conformity with what is socially expected and acceptable in one’s peer
group. We do know that the numbers of female adolescents and
young women today suffering from eating disorders, addictions, anxiety,
and depression are at all-time highs, and that the level of suicidal
behavior among female adolescents has tripled over the past fifteen
years. The two most-prescribed medications in college health
services currently are oral contraceptives and antidepressants.
So, why does the public supinely accept what must, to any honest
observer, appear to be a truly disastrous and damaging situation?
Relatively little is written about the hookup culture. The
outrage and the frantic drive to identify and punish wrongdoers is
focused instead on an invention: the “rape culture” on
campus. Bureau of Justice statistics show less risk of sexual
assault for students on college campuses than for non-students, and
that the risk of sexual assault on campus has actually declined over
the past two decades. There is, actually, no “rape culture”
on our campuses and the college campus is one of the safer environments
that a young woman may inhabit. Of course, it is far more
likely that a politician’s career will be advanced by identifying
victims and perpetrators and then prescribing and imposing new rules
and regulations to address the contrived problem, than if he or she
honestly spoke about the existence of a spiritual and moral
crisis.
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