Age 24: I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships.... I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spending time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a committed relationship became clearer — and it wasn’t amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn’t trigger self-protectiveness…Perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard.She's right on schedule. In three more years she'll be declaring that there are no good men left, followed seven years later by loud and unconvincing declarations of how much she loves being single at 40. The punchline? The woman who wanted us to hear her roar that she had fully proved her ability to have one-night stands belatedly confesses that she almost never climaxed in any of the casual encounters she was so enthusiastically championing. " I didn’t mention that I’d faked it during nearly all of my dalliances." Now, how much can she possibly have learned about what turns her on if she didn't even manage to learn enough to get off?
Age 26: As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar – and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups…We can now acknowledge regret over a one-night stand, without being considered, or seeing ourselves as, forever ruined women; if there’s been a recent change in my generation’s relationship to casual sex, I suspect it’s that we’re relaxing our defensive posturing.
Age 27: I wanted company, warmth and no danger of attachment.... Except that in reality there was. I actually liked him, quite a bit, as a human being…At some point I realized that, despite my insistence otherwise, I actually wanted those sorts of intimacies, only with an actual commitment.
Age 28: I’ve tired of hookup culture’s dictatorial reign over modern courtship. It doesn’t feel so free when it doesn’t feel like an intentional choice….I’ve often had no one but myself to blame — especially when going after boys literally wearing warning signs in the form of tattoos reading things like, “I am what I am” or “forgive me.” Sometimes, tearing off your clothes is just a pathetic attempt at taking control of the uncontrollable: love. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t always getting what I wanted from hookups.
Susan is absolutely correct to conclude that this seller of casual sex was a fraud. Now, I would not go so far as to conclude that no woman genuinely enjoys casual sex or one-night stands, as there are without question true sluts at heart whose cravings for physical activity are very similar to those of highly-sexed men. But it is simply not true to claim that all, most, or even a significant minority of women are wired that way, or it would not be so common for women involved in hookups, one-night stands, or friends with benefits situations to destroy the casual relationship by attempting to turn it into a committed one.
The primary lesson here for women is that they need to apply the same skeptical lens to female advice that Game-savvy men habitually do and realize that the media figures do not define the norm. Their task, however, is even more difficult, as they need to not only watch what the other women do instead of what they say, but also attempt to distinguish between what those women feel and what they say they feel. That's a task that would be well beyond the vast majority of men, but perhaps would be possible given the more developed sense of female intuition.
