American Hookup Culture

1. Lisa Wade explores the culture of sex within college campuses and how it has impacted the lives of the students she has researched in her book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. A major issue that she probes is the fact that her students are lonely and not in a physical way, but rather a mental way. The presence of hookup culture is causing students to feel out of place, unempowered, and objectified based on their traits. This peer pressure is undoubtedly inflicting objective harm causing students to feel unhappy (Wade 18). The hookup culture has taken an arguably new form that wasn’t seen before, which is that casual sex is now the norm (Wade 49). This new form occurs when American’s shifted out of the Victorian Era and

While the consensus may argue that the hookup culture is only a problem “depending on the person,” Wade has undeniably proven that it is indeed a problem with students more often than not. For the most part, teens don’t recognize the overall issues that the hookup culture endorses. This is important to recognize what the hookup culture is believed to be compared to what it actually is. Fun, freeing, and liberating are often what first year students new to the hookup culture would say and believe it to be (Wade 55). Yet contrary to their beliefs, the hookup culture brings with it consequences such as rape, loneliness, depression, and peer

Emotionless sex is not possible and yet so many students believe it is. While many truly enjoy their sexual activity, they are only in the minority. The hookup culture values men more so than women when it comes to needs and desires. However, to say that men are happy in the hookup culture is wrong. The hookup culture applauds masculine behavior and seeks to remove caring, affectionate, and loving behavior, yet so many of Wade’s students have reported that they want “meaningful connections with others” (Wade 245). In order to change the hookup culture, we “have to fix American culture” (Wade 248). Wade proposes that in order to do that, people must be caring and kind, dismiss all forms of racism and sexism, and realizing that “it’s not the hooking up itself, but hookup culture that is the problem” (Wade 247). Men and women want relationships that have meaning but have been taught (or recently learned from the hookup culture)