The New York Times has devoted many a headline to How Women Act Now. Most recently, the paper dispatched reporter Kate Taylor to interview sixty or so female students at the University of Pennsylvania about their sex and/or relationship lives (rarely did the two seem to overlap). The students, almost all of whom spoke anonymously, talk about how there’s very little dating and lots of hooking up, and plenty of dissatisfaction with both. Some of the women are ruthless in their determination not to let a relationship slow down their rising GPAs and resume-building. The star of the story is A., a hyper-competitive workaholic who enjoys casual sex and describes dating with terms like “cost-benefit issues and trading up and trading down.”
Other interviewees, disillusioned by the lack of genuine emotion in the hookup scene, simply give up on finding love (or even someone beyond “a guy that we don’t actually really like his personality, but we think is…hot and good in bed”). Some are sexually disempowered to the point of nihilism; Taylor described one student’s typical sexual encounter as follows: “usually by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.”
As with any feature story that tries to capture an entire social subset, the article has sparked plenty of criticism. (Public Editor Margaret Sullivan even weighed in with commentary and a Q&A with the reporter, which cleared up none of the ambiguity in the piece.) It’s true that the methodology — interviewing a not-huge group of women (and no men) on a single Ivy League campus — as well as the agenda — using extensive quotes from A. to push the conclusion that ultra-driven women who put career advancement before anything else is the new norm — create an incomplete picture. There’s also a lack of contextual data: Are these women beating out their male competitors for the grades and plum job offers they keep referring to? Has the hookup culture these students describe led to an increase in incidents of sexual assault on campus?
But the glaring flaw in the piece is that it tries to force the experiences of these women into a single narrative — specifically, that there is something very different about the way women have sex in college now. For starters, Taylor states as a given that:
“It is by now pretty well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by ‘hooking up’ — an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to oral sex to intercourse — without the emotional entanglement of a relationship.”
Except for the fact that “traditional dating” is a term that has been rendered essentially meaningless in the last decade. Plenty of people date, but whether or not they do it “traditionally” — in a world of online profiles, Facebook status updates and texting — is up for interpretation. Traditional dating involved a chaperone and a dowry.
As for hookup culture, it’s controversial, and whether it’s a sign of “progress” is highly debatable, but new it is not.
Taylor did uncover one interesting differentiation among the women interviewed: The wealthier (and presumably white) women tend to freely participate in the hookup scene, while women from different socioeconomic backgrounds abstain. Unfortunately, beyond a cursory mention, there’s no analysis beyond the general conclusion that some women have casual sex and some don’t.
Even the students who describe oral sex as a means of “wrapping things up” aren’t examples of a new paradigm. They may be a sign of failure for female sexual empowerment (and for the Times, which didn’t explore the subject). But women’s performing sexual acts that they don’t really want to perform in order to achieve a goal is just a reminder of how little things have changed.
Type-A women set on achieving stellar resumes and actively forgoing any romantic attachment do exist — as they did ten years ago (and twenty). Sure, there may be more of them now, but whether or not they’ve become the norm is not demonstrated anywhere in this piece. Nor is there any evidence presented that women are having more casual sex than they have in the past.
As such, the Times doesn’t present much of a case that things have really changed. The same fundamental rules apply: Both men and women want many things in life. Some want to focus on personal goals and achievement, others on having a relationship. And everyone wants sex, which is basically how it’s been since the dawn of time. What is changing — the navigation of relationships and career, the emphasis on dual incomes and financial self-sufficiency, the evolution of marriage and family structures — is harder to capture, and deserves a deeper dive.
The only seemingly-new aspect that Taylor uncovers is how disconnected some of these women are about the purpose of having a relationship. Throughout the interviews, one view expressed by the Penn ladies was that they had two choices: either be single, or be almost married. The students say things like, “Am I allowed to find the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with when I’m 19?…I don’t really know. It feels like I’m not.”
Since when is having a boyfriend or two not in this spectrum? Not every relationship is intended to last forever, or even more than a few months. The point of dating when you’re young is to have love and connection, yes, but also to figure out how to be with another person in an adult way. As Elizabeth Spiers put it, “learning how to develop a meaningful, sustainable relationship and keep it healthy takes some extended practice.” Dating in college isn’t necessarily about getting married; no one (except Susan Patton) is saying it should be.
Relationship skills aren’t formally taught in school, which is a shame, since they’re the one set of skills every human being on the planet needs in order to have a satisfying life. If there’s one major consequence of the hookup culture, it’s that it’s robbing young people of the chance to learn these lessons on their own.