Bedsider

Surprise, Hooking Up Doesn’t Kill!

Originally published on December 23, 2009 on SexReally.com.

In early 2008, an article in The New York Times claimed that “no one at Harvard represents the hookup culture better than Lena Chen.” I’m Lena Chen. Right, how awkward is that? At the time, I was a college junior blogging quite publicly about my sex and love life — but the last thing I thought was that my vagina represented anyone else’s (let alone a whole “culture”). I tried to make that clear to the Times, obviously to no avail.

Now I have evidence on my side. University of Minnesota researchers recently debunked the long-standing myth that casual sex is harmful, after finding “no differences in the psychological well-being of young adults who had a casual sexual partner verses a more committed partner.” Want more? Only 20 percent of respondents described their most recent partner as a casual one, which suggests that – at least within the population surveyed — the hook-up culture might not be as pervasive as Fox News anchors lead us to believe.

But if this is the case, what explains recent alarmist headlines and book titles like “The Demise of Dating” and Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both**? The 2000’s have seen an unprecedented wave of pro-abstinence and anti-casual sex literature, much of it claiming that promiscuity leads to depression (false), suicide (false), and even inability to form healthy long-term relationships (even falser).

Obviously I have a personal stake in the above study, but a few things have changed since my sex blogging days. In the intervening period, I’ve entered a long-term relationship, waged a minor war over closet space, learned how to make truffles, and once created a small fire in my kitchen sink. I am decidedly no longer emblematic of anything but domesticity gone terribly, terribly awry. I know first-hand that hooking up does not, in fact, ruin your life. Given my sexual history, I would’ve offed myself by now if it did. Nor would I be nearly two-years deep in a happy relationship. But though I’m now monogamous and in love (and by corollary, boring), I still know a lot more about hooking up than most of the people raising moral panic over the issue. My sex life as a 19-year-old generated media interest. What was an Ivy League gal to do but to educate herself about actual sexual trends and statistics? As a result, I’ve been aware from Day 1 that the hook-up culture is a myth and have set out trying to disprove its existence ever since.

I’ll be honest. This endeavor has largely consisted of me flailing my arms and mouthing “Is! Not! Real!” at reporters who are too interested in Miley Cyrus and sexting to pay attention to me. I can’t count the number of times reporters have approached me hoping for a juicy sound bite about what the hook-up culture is really like, only to instead encounter a barrage of facts about the great majority of Americans having had premarital sex for, um, generations. Mainstream reporters either have a major aversion to peer-reviewed studies, or they don’t like being told that their granny probably didn’t keep her legs closed, because time and time again, they’ve dropped all communication the second I dare to question the phenomenon of college kids gone wild. The story becomes a lot less salacious when you realize that the so-called “hook-up culture” is just a new alarmist name attached to behavior in which young people have engaged for decades.

Hopefully, this new study will prompt some changes in the way we approach young people’s sexuality, but I’m not crossing my fingers. Federally funded abstinence-only programs are currently too busy preaching the dangers of premarital sex to teach kids how to use condoms, get tested, and to communicate about sexual health. Meanwhile, “sexting” has replaced “hooking up” as the newest fabricated sexual trend. Even with new evidence on the table, I have to wonder: have we missed the boat on destigmatizing intercourse for Generation Y?

I hope not, so let this be known: New York Times? No hard feelings. Call me. I’ll be the one flailing.

*****

Lena Chen is a blogger, writer and speaker on sex, gender and feminism. As a Harvard undergrad, she authored the blog Sex and the Ivy and her writing has been featured in The New York Times and Newsweek. She currently blogs at The Chicktionary.