The hookup culture and its effects on college students.
February 11th, 2010
I’ve been giving this article quite a bit of thought.
In it, Dr. Stuart Schneiderman gives his analysis of two articles about dating in college.
My first thought is about how difficult it is to predict the effects of public policies. For decades now, a variety of policies have been in place that increased the proportion of women on college campuses. Feminists have lobbied for many of these changes. What was the result?
If the ratio of women to men is 60%/40% this will obviously have an effect on dating and relationship behavior. One effect, as Williams points out, is that with men in such short supply those few remaining men have become empowered.They can do what they want, when they want, with whom they want… and women, unhappy about being alone, go along because they feel that they have no other choice. If the choice is between hooking up with an anonymous male and going home alone, no small number of women are choosing the former, on the grounds that something is better than nothing.
I don’t think this is the result that the feminists who cheered these policies had in mind.
In a related article, Charlotte Allen writes in The Weekly Standard that there is: “a buyer’s market in women who are up for just about anything.”…This feels crass and slightly exaggerated, but if Williams is correct, then it appears that on many college campuses and large cities there is simply “a buyer’s market for women.”How did things get to the point where women have been disempowered in relationships, to the point where they are being induced to act out adolescent male fantasies, regardless of their wishes or needs?
I really don’t think this is what the feminists had in mind. Schneiderman indeed casts some of the blame on various feminist thinkers who encouraged promiscuity on behalf of women, promising them that such conduct would be empowering. But, the sheer numbers probably had some effect regardless of the intellectual climate.
But what is the effect on men? Certainly some of the men on campuses have access to what amounts to a harem. These are the “alpha males” or the ones who can act like they are. Many other men have been left in the cold.
Women are attracted to men who seem to have had many women, because that is a sign of being an alpha male. Inexperienced men, who who are awkward and shy around women, need not apply for pick-up artist or alpha male status.(…)
Women learn to tolerate men who never call them again, because that too is a sign that he’s an alpha male, that he is never going to be hers, but that she belongs to his harem.
Of course, as Charlotte Allen points out, these pick-up artists are not really alpha males; they are ersatz. They are playing roles; they are imitation alpha males; they are most often gamma or delta males whose special skill is acting out a woman’a fantasy.
What Dr. Schneiderman omits here is just how some men became “ersatz alpha males.” An entire cottage industry has popped up teaching men to succeed with women in the new dating/hook-up environment. As far as I know, most of the people doing the teaching offer to teach men how to get women in bed.
My own thoughts on the desirability of such an industry are mixed. There is a obviously great potential for people to abuse the skills learned from such teachers by engaging in promiscuity and other anti-social behaviors. Frankly, I would imagine that the people who teach such skills have exactly that intent in mind.
But there is also the potential to teach awkward but otherwise good men the skills they need to attract a woman for a lifelong marriage.
It is quite analogous to the teaching of Karate. Fundamentally, Karate teaches an anti-social activity, as cracking somebody’s windpipe or breaking his ankle is clearly anti-social behavior. But Karate teachers are usually careful to teach their students to use their skills responsibly. I’m not sure that can be said of any of the “how to pick up women” courses on offer today. Perhaps some religious group could find a way to teach the shy and awkward men from among their parishioners how to find lifelong love in a hook up world.
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Arlemagne1,
Those sorts of skills and the guidance on being responsible, were once part of an intensive social feedback loop in which young people learned incrementally, through trial and error, how to navigate romancing one another. It was necessarily socially awkward but it was accompanied by little rituals and fairly clear social expectations.
It was known as courtship.
Heh.
A very long time ago, when I was a middle-aged father, I made a point of formally arranging a Dad date night with each of my daughters as they began their teen years. The girls had the example of their mom and I as a sort of baseline of how men and women properly treated each other. But the Dad date thing was very sentimental and also was a sort of rite of passage. It was a treat for me, too. We used to kid that it was as big a deal as teaching how to drive the big old family car. The rules and etiquette of the road.
Years later, when my daughters were married with children of their own, we’d sometimes renew the Dad date on special occassions. Two of my son-in-laws continued the tradition with their daughters.
We had different rituals for our sons. They learned to dance first with their mom and older sisters. They often went on social outings with their siblings and cousins as part of the gang. We weren’t as strict with the boys but their mother was the first line of discipline even during their college years as they matured their own self-discipline. They learned some big lessons from us both, but their mom was the social butterfly who seemed to have an unlimited, if discrete, ability to advise and to gentlely admonish. I often did not get the more subtle stuff that she imparted so deftly.
Of course, young people enter alll of this without these sorts of rituals. And without as many siblings — and often without even one sibling or one cousin — in their close families. And parents aren’t as deliberately involved in passing on the good habits of courtship. But I do think there is a sort of hunger for such guidance.
And so the skills training, as it were, is ‘out-sourced’. Or neglected altogether. For young men and for the young women too. That can’t be a great combination, overall.
I think this more a case of a breakdown of communication. This has been happening over time, but is more apparent with my generation. Things get faster, and people actually communicate less and less. It’s harder to actually take the time to communicate and discuss the issue at hand then to ignore it. Dating in college is, well, weird and hard. You’re on your own for the first time, and you do stupid things. Sometimes you learn and grow from these things, sometimes it takes longer for the lesson to be had. Society keeps throwing the empowered sexually free female and the pure virginal female around. Somehow, young women have to be both. And then we wonder why study’s report that many young women feel some sort of guilt around having sex. Instead of encouraging young women to search their own feelings, society tells them they need to be both the slut and the virgin. As far as young men go. Mainstream society has always touted the pursuit of sex by men as natural and normal. Why, a man not screwing at least two girls? Unnatural or he must be gay. Look at almost every male aimed teen movie released in the last 10-20 years. Society tells guys they have to be this kind of person, or they aren’t manly enough. And then we wonder why guys are such dicks. Because society tells them that not only are they supposed to be, but that people will forgive them for it. How do we know this? Because of articles like this. Why are young men rude and boorish? Because we tell them to be and we tell girls to put up with it.
That said, it’s hard for me to take anything with P.U.A’s (Pick up artists) seriously. I used to read one of their blogs for awhile I (I occasionally try to find blogs/groups whose beliefs I generally disagree with, just to try and see things from their point of view.) ((Hence why I’m reading this blog)) In general, they’re kinda sad. Most find women inferior, yet they largely define themselves by being able to sleep with a bunch of different women. It’s highly illogical and I believe personally indicative of self-hatred.