Hooking Up is Different … How?
Posted By jss on June 13, 2009
Ever since I first heard that “hooking up” meant having casual sexual activity with someone — which had to be about in the late ’90s — I have been predictably annoyed by the media freak-outs on the subject. Here we are in 2009, and hooking up is still a horrifying trend, even according to National Public Radio.
Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships
At least NPR finds the roots of “hooking up” back in the 1970s … we boomers want credit for everything. Though I could make a convincing case that contemporary hook up culture has its roots in the Stone Age rather than the Stoners Age … or anytime in between.
So I dashed off a quick, personal rant, and it’s published over in the Sex and Relationships section at AlterNet.
Hey Kids, Have Lots of Sex — It’s What Your Parents Did at Your Age
I did not write the headline, nor would I have. It’s catchy though, huh?
The essay is part ’70s reminiscence, part rant against the media-created stereotypes, part just joshing around. The incident toward the end of the story actually occurred at an all women’s college in Northampton, Mass, and I could probably find that coatroom again. I don’t want to, though.
The photo is from one of the all-time great alien hookup movies, Earth Girls are Easy, from 1989. I haven’t thought about the ’80s much lately … I have a half-baked hypothesis that people who became teen-agers in the ’80s feel really shortchanged, sexwise, because of AIDS and and the backlash against the ’60s and ’70s … AND, then, the backlash was sort of secretly over in the ’90s, and the hook-up was invented. If you were born in the ’60s … well, yes, in some ways, that was not optimal for your healthy sexual development, what with Ed Meese in charge of sex education and all. But you should have gotten over that by now …
"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
Hey Jeff,
Whew! Thanks for this.
We’re the same age. We must’ve lived down the hall from each other in college.
May I just add, “yep.”
hiho
We didn’t have halls, we had “entryways” … but you’re right, wherever we were, it was one big hallway.
-jeff