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Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too
Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2013-07-13 18:13
Article here. Excerpt:
'Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.
...
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.
Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men, and that women were reluctant participants, more interested in romance than in casual sexual encounters. But there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too.
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Typical of elite universities today, Penn is filled with driven young women, many of whom aspire to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers or corporate executives like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg or Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer. ...
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These women said they saw building their résumés, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job at Penn.'
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Comments
Really, about time
What a relief for the guys. It used to be the first week at college, a freshman girl'd be on a guy to date-propose-marry ASAP. Glad to see they're finally bailing off that nonsense.
20-something is way too young to marry-- at least these days, IMO.
First a disclosure: this
First a disclosure: this article is 7 pages. I didn't read the whole thing
I agree with the author that females probably participate in hook up culture as much as men do. Not sure if the author is for or against it, but I have a few thoughts....
This feminist idea that woman can have carefree sex, abort while seeking prominent careers, have no need for men, then use fertility services to have children in their forties is not the sign of a healthy human species. This is perpetuated by women who keep trying to reject biology, and who keep tying to force women to be like men.
Twenty-something year-old women make the healthiest babies, yet if they are too career oriented or don't feel they need a man, they choose to abort. Our species is aborting our healthiest babies!
Statistics seem to confirm that people who marry later have a better chance of marital success. This runs contradictory to my family, who tend to marry young (my family has an extremely high marital success rate, no divorces except a few back in the extended family). However statistics also show that women with low number of sexual partners also have more successful marriages. The latter probably explains my family's marital success rate. Also might be why white men are seeking younger Asian brides (I think with good marital success.) What I am getting at is I have a hard time believing that men who are marrying later are marrying the 30+ year olds who have slutted around for the past 10+ years, or that these women ever make good wives and mothers.
This is why, IMO, it is so important to restore the balance of marriage to make it fair and appealing to both genders. For the healthiest human species, women should be having babies in their twenties and children need to be raised in committed two parent households.
I would never advise my daughter (or any woman) to have carefree sex. Promiscuous women are the downfall of society as they inhibit and destroy the formation of families, and healthy families are the foundation of a healthy society. It's a shame these college educated women don't see it, but I hear feminism runs pretty strong on college campuses.
Aldous Huxley
In "Brave New World", what we call "hooking up" was called "engaging" - as in "to engage in". He was wrong about the euphemism, bit absolutely right about the attitude. Visionary.
BBC special report
Related to what Kris wrote, but not addressing her particular points directly... saw this article today on the BBC news site section on the US and Canada. It's pretty old, written in 2011. But it's still relevant.
It puts the cause (or, explanation) for the child abuse/neglect rate in the US being as high as it is on a combination of poverty/young parents and a relatively poor gov't-funded social safety net as compared with other western countries. It seems to skirt a discussion of parental accountability. Well, that's typical these days.
Well first, "young parents/poverty". The typical person (male or female) is not likely to be able to afford parenthood in their 20s anymore. Even w/ a college degree applicable to an in-demand field, there's all those loans to pay back. Ppl in Europe don't have quite the same issue w/ coll. loans Americans have. In addition, most if not every European country that is comparable to US society has for right or wrong a nationalized health service. Having a baby therefore doesn't require 10s of 1,000s of $ (or €) or a good health plan to cover the costs. Finally, kids are mucho expensive. They have been styled "the most expensive hobby you'll ever have". Too true, esp. if you plan on trying to pay for college in 18 yrs., or part of it. (By 2030, who knows how much a US coll. will cost... $300,000?)
Point is, in the US, if you are going to reproduce *responsibly*, at the least you have to have your financial feet on the ground and be reliably employable. At the moment, this does not describe the average 20-something American. In fact, increasingly, it describes a lot of 30-somethings, too. Now, try having a kid alone. Go the single-mother route, either by choice or not. If you're the *typical* 20-something American woman, even with a 4-yr. degree, it's going to be hard. But even for a 20-something-YO couple, it's still going to be hard. Think this: Together, you make $70k. One of you making 40 and the other 30-- this is something a lot of 20-something couples would love to have instead of the $10/hr. jobs w/out health ins. many have (and count themselves fortunate in the current American economy). Now, there's a monthly $700 housing payment (rent or, let's say, a mortgage-- and obviously our couple doesn't live in NY, LA, or Silicon Valley, to name a few). The couple's net income is $52k even after the mortgage interest deduction. $700/mo. comes to $8,400. This leaves $43,600/yr., or $3,633/mo. Add a $400/mo. car + insurance payment (this assuming just one car needing a payment) and you're at $3,233. But wait-- they went to college. Now, the loans outstanding would vary greatly but let's say the total payment for both parents comes to $1,000/mo. (and w/ the recent doubling of student loan interest rates due to our dysfunctional Congress, new loans' interest rates will be yet more onerous). The couple now has $2,233 between them to meet expenses, such as food, electric bills, baby expenses, etc. this comes to $75/day, or $37 per person per day. And I haven't figured such things as any retirement acct. contributions or health savings acct. contributions, etc., because of course, employer pensions have gone the way of the dodo bird and by the time they are retirement age, guaranteed Social Security will be "needs-based", meaning if you have savings at all, you won't get a dime from The Man (well by then, it'll probably either be The Woman or The Machine).
Now, the foregoing was a *lucky* 20-something couple. Most 20-somethings in America today don't fit this scenario. Many in fact can't afford to live alone, much less pursue home ownership married or single. Far too many move back in w/ parent(s) w/ no seemingly viable plan for ever getting out of the guest room.
So there it is. It may be true young women do have the healthiest babies. But as long as the US economy is going to be lousy and marriage is going to be kept as unattractive as it is to young men, single motherhood among financially strapped 20-somethings looks like it'll be an increasingly common way babies get born to women in their young 20s. Worse yet, being financially insolvent but having a baby anyway to me shows evidence of irresponsibility on the part of the mother; with birth control of all kinds readily available (much of it available free by community srvcs./the gov't), really, there's no excuse. Worse comes to worst, she can give up the child for adoption. After all, the father has no real parental rights to speak of (he has some purchase if the cpl is married, though), so what's he going to do? This is assuming the father is ever even informed he's become a father.
As for the gov't becoming more involved in creating the kind of social safety nets found in Europe-- well, fine if Europe's ready to take over the "arsenal of democracy" role the US has assumed since WWII, effectively preventing a re-run of WWII (or worse) these past 65 yrs. And as bad as our various debts and deficits are, Europe needs to look at their own balance sheets and ask themselves if their super-nanny-state approach has made fiscal sense. Ultimately once ppl learn they don't need to work to get paid like they do, the result is too many consumers and not enough producers. That's actually now happening in the US. Can we afford more "safety net" programs that seem to exist largely to support the reproductive agenda of single women, most esp. now that our aging pop'n is seeking (nay, demanding) more and more financial resources for health care and Social Security payments?
So to me, the big factors are: Bad economy, financially insolvent ppl (i.e., single women living in poverty or near-poverty) reproducing irresponsibly, and men disincented to puruse lasting couplehood rel'ps w/ women due to a lack of parental rights and socially-sanctioned positively-reinforced rewards for entering into such relationships (quite in fact the opposite). I wouldn't want us to return to the 1950s. I just note that some factors did exist in such a way that serious problems such as child neglect/abuse were not nearly so rampant, and a welfare state wasn't needed to make it that way.