Setting the sex rules
Here’s the key graph in this piece:
“It doesn’t help that women outnumber men on most college campuses, where there are about 80 men for every 100 women. So men are the scarce resource, and they get to make the rules. And they know it, too.”
That’s what I wrote about in this piece about James Madison University.
chicagotribune.com
Hooking up’s gender gap
Men make the rules on sex today
By Jonathan Zimmerman
November 29, 2009
Hey, do you want to hook up?
If you’re like lots of American high school and college students, the answer is clearly “yes.” But when you look at the reasons, you’ll find an enormous gender divide. Girls have sex in order to score a boyfriend, and boys simply want to score.
And the boys are winning.
That explains the overwhelming success of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” teenage books, as well as the most recent film adaptation, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” which sold a whopping $140.7 million in tickets in its first weekend in North American theaters. An estimated 80 percent of the viewers were female, and half the audience was under the age of 21.
Why are young American women flocking to a movie where the hero — a hunky dude named Edward, who also happens to be a vampire — refuses to have sex with the heroine-loner Bella, lest he harm her with his supernatural powers? The answer lies in a University of Missouri survey of 4,000 “Twilight” fans. And it’s not that complicated: Girls want love, not just sex.
“This series represents a backlash to the ‘hooking up’ culture,” explained one author of the study. ” ‘Twilight’ has been a way for young girls to acknowledge their emerging sexuality without actually having sex.”
In other words, it’s a female fantasy. It’s also every boy’s nightmare. After all, the hooking-up deal works pretty well for guys. Lots and lots of sex, without all that messy relationship stuff? What’s not to like?
On this not-so-delicate subject, I’ve heard plenty of my 40- and 50-something male peers complain that they were born several decades too early. But I have never, ever heard a woman say she’d prefer today’s hooking-up system to the dating rituals we grew up with.
Remember dating? As quaint as is it might sound today, dating required you to get to know a girl before you did anything else. The goal might be the same — indeed, it often was the same — but you had to follow several distinct steps to get there.
That was far better for girls, who could decide if they liked a guy before physical intimacy began.
Now, the order is reversed: You hook up first, then decide if you want to “go out.”
And it turns out — surprise, surprise — that most guys don’t want the second part, so long as they get the first. “They’re in college, they don’t want a girlfriend,” one female college student told La Salle University sociologist Kathleen Bogle. “They basically just want to get (sex).” So why do women put up with this? As Bogle explains in her book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus,” part of the reason is that they overestimate the frequency of sex among their peers. Nationwide, about one-quarter of college students remain virgins. So when women presume that “everybody is doing it” — so they need to do it too — they’re wrong.
Moreover, “it” can mean many different things. In one survey at a large northeastern university, 78 percent of students had “hooked up” at least once. But among those students, only 38 percent reported a hook-up that culminated in sexual intercourse. The rest had kissed, groped or engaged in oral sex without going all the way.
No matter what you call it, though, many women feel that they must engage in a certain degree of sexual activity to have any hope of finding a boyfriend — or, down the road, a husband. They well understand that most hookups will not lead to the type of relationship that they really want. But they just don’t see any other way to get there.
It doesn’t help that women outnumber men on most college campuses, where there are about 80 men for every 100 women. So men are the scarce resource, and they get to make the rules. And they know it, too.
“No real commitment, no real feelings involved, this is like a guy’s paradise,” Bogle said one male student told her. “I mean this is what guys have been wanting for many, many years. And women have always resisted, but now they are going along with it.”
The male student is right. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women have made enormous strides in education, income and professional achievement.
But when it comes to sex, it’s still a man’s world. And that’s why young women are celebrating an imaginary one, in the movies, where the guy actually loves you before he makes love to you.
Even if he is a vampire.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
Tags: sex
November 29th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Errr… except that there is little hard data to support your or Zimmerman’s story. According to the American College Health Association surveys since 2000, fewer than 10% of respondent students had more than 3 sexual partners in the past 12 years, and a lower proportion in 2008 had had a range of sexual activities in the 30 days before the survey than respondents in 2000.
Is churn in one’s sexual partners a great thing? Probably not. But where is the evidence of this “hookup culture” apart from the word “hook-up”?
November 29th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I find the parallel to the baby boom era interesting. As everyone knows, after World War 2 came the baby boom. But along with the baby boom came a lowering of the age of first marriage ultimately to 20 for women and 22 for men. What, to me, makes the parallel interesting is that more boys than girls are born in the natural order of things. So girls at young ages are, overall, usually in a slight minority until middle adulthood, when things start to even out. And since they have a considerably longer life span, women are at a considerable majority as senior citizens. For the young, the only time the women usually tend to outnumber the men is after a major war. And just after World War 2, it was much more competitive for women. So here is another data point showing what happens when young women find themselves in the majority. At this time, their majority is only local, on their college campuses. If they were able to expand their horizons beyond their campus, there would be no problem. But that gets back to your marriageable mate question. Interestingly, one of the questions Betty Friedan asked in The Feminine Mystique was why women had allowed themselves to be so domesticated during the baby boom years. This seems to be part of the answer.
November 29th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
To quote my mother, “Don’t be a loose tomato”. Obviously the young ladies of the present generation are dummer than I thought. Apparently their mother’s never told them that you can get all of those that you want with one of these. In addition to that, why would you want a boyfriend who only wants you around for sex? If you’re going to have sex with men with no emotional attachment, you may as well become a prostitute. I alway’s found that by keeping my virtue intact, it made the boy’s wonder even more and made me more desireable than the “easy girls”. Dating by the way is a good thing, they should try it some time. These guys need to learn some manners as far as how to ask a girl on a date and that doesn’t mean texting. The current generation is completly lacking in the social graces. Shame on them and their parents.