The Atlantic has published yet another triumphalist Hanna Rosin article, this time about how promiscuity is essential to and drives feminist progress. Rosin argues that not only does the hookup culture contribute to women’s power, but it is women themselves who are perpetuating it:
Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-school party—are for the first time in history more successful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.
I’ve argued something similar on many occasions. Feminism is, more than anything else, about women harnessing sexuality for power. This is hidden to some extent, because another feminist goal is the collectivization of female sexuality; that is, women’s sexual power is to be expressed in aggregate rather than individually (doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the idea).
If Rosin’s analysis of the college hookup culture is any indication, Americans have reached the apogee of feminist expression amongst young women:
…I found barely anyone who even noticed the vulgarity anymore, until I came across a new student. She had arrived two weeks earlier, from Argentina. She and I stood by the bar at one point and watched a woman put her hand on a guy’s inner thigh, shortly before they disappeared together. In another corner of the room, a beautiful Asian woman in her second year at school was entertaining the six guys around her with her best imitation of an Asian prostitute—“Oooo, you so big. Me love you long time”—winning the Tucker Max showdown before any of the guys had even tried to make a move on her. (She eventually chose the shortest guy in the group to go home with, because, she later told me, he seemed like he’d be the best in bed.)
“Here in America, the girls, they give up their mouth, their ass, their tits,” the Argentinean said to me, punctuating each with the appropriate hand motion, “before they even know the guy. It’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘You wanna hook up?’ ‘Sure.’ They are so aggressive! Do they have hearts of steel or something? In my country, a girl like this would be desperate. Or a prostitute.”
So there we have it. America has unseated the Scandinavian countries for the title of Easiest Lay. We are, in the world’s estimation, a nation of prostitutes. And not even prostitutes with hearts of gold.
A dubious distinction indeed. Nowhere in the article does Rosin mention who is paying for these girls’ training in the art of mercenary sexuality, but she describes how it gives women a sort of power rush, like cocaine:
At Yale I heard stories like the ones I had read in many journalistic accounts of the hookup culture. One sorority girl, a junior with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, whom I’ll call Tali, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hookup culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. “It was empowering, to have that kind of control,” she recalls. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it! I had these options to hook up if I wanted them, and no one would judge me for it.”
Rosin’s article may be demoralizing to these girls’ parents and potential husbands alike, but the kind of behavior and attitude that she is describing exist not in a vacuum, but rather a hothouse.
These are women at their absolute sexual peak. They are at their most fertile and most attractive, and they are too immature and naive to realize that it will wilt with surprising rapidity.
The girls display the “I’ll put it off until tomorrow” attitude quite clearly:
For an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman, hookups were a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development or schoolwork. Hookups functioned as a “delay tactic,” Armstrong writes, because the immediate priority, for the privileged women at least, was setting themselves up for a career. “If I want to maintain the lifestyle that I’ve grown up with,” one woman told Armstrong, “I have to work. I just don’t see myself being someone who marries young and lives off of some boy’s money.” Or from another woman: “I want to get secure in a city and in a job … I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good.”
This attitude is a recipe for disappointment and disaster. The girl has total sexual freedom in school, plenty of male attention from young men with raging hormones, and the world is her oyster, so of course she wants to put off the drudgery of children, marriage and commitment. Usually, until something like “by 30.”
The problem is that it doesn’t get any easier. if you’ve got a career started in your late 20s, it’s easy to put it off a few more years — “by 30″ becomes “by 35.” And being accustomed to hookups doesn’t tend to predispose a woman to long-term commitment. It isn’t that easy to reverse course, and most men have already found their long-term love interest by that time. The ones who haven’t are generally just looking to hook up themselves.
I talked to my mother about the article, as she reads The Atlantic, and she was pretty disappointed with the piece. Not because of prudishness, but because she sees it as promoting a lifestyle that leads to problems down the line. She oversees a lot of women at work in a very libertine city, and quite a few of them come from just this milieu. According to her, these women come late to a realization that they really do want a normal family, and by that time they are utterly unprepared for it. Their skills revolve around being sexy career women, and when they lose the “sexy” part they’re left with nothing but a career — usually not a particularly impressive one. The emotional fallout is difficult for everyone around them, and managing them is no easy chore.
I suppose the question is whether we are really doing these young women a favor by giving them what they want. It’s starting to look as though men may actually not be getting the short end of the stick here, because these aren’t the women of the 70s and 80s who got married and had kids before they decided to go feral. No, their eventual emotional implosion will be effectively contained.
Although Rosin and other feminists tend to see this as a self-sustaining step forward – a sort of feminist version of limitless, unconstrained progress – it’s a heavily subsidized trend. Without their wealthy parents, student loans, grants and all the rest of the effort that goes into creating this hothouse that grows women into grotesquely exaggerated versions of their natural selves, it would all come tumbling apart, and one of these days it will. Unfortunately, when we’re called upon to clean up the mess, there are going to be a lot of damaged women out there.
