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Some time ago, I attended a party during which I found myself staring intently into the eyes of a man I knew. He is both physically and intellectually sexy, and he was staring at me like he wanted to devour me and pick his teeth with one of my ribs.
Nothing happened between us, and a few days later during a conversation about social media, he asked why we didn't hook up that night.
“I don't hook up,” I responded.
I wasn't trying to be holier-than-thou –- anyone who has been reading me for any amount of time knows I am the last woman to wish for a conventional relationship. But a hook-up –- at least in this scenario –- appealed to me even less. Why?
GIRLS GONE MILD?
Recently I read a Salon article by Jessica Grose about the apparent backlash against early feminist ideas about sexual freedom and our uncomfortable fascination with reversing the trend by doing what feminists before us were rebelling against to begin with: getting married (to whomever!).
Grose gives a fast and furious bibliography of history lesson in the piece:
In the '60s, Cosmopolitan's Helen Gurley Brown told us in Sex and the Single Girl that "sex is great, and that one should get as much of it as possible," as The New Yorker put it. In the '70s, the sexual revolution reached its peak with Erica Jong's "zipless fuck." But by the end of the '70s, Gail Collins argues in When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, women were obsessed with the casual-sex cautionary tale Looking for Mr. Goodbar, "which painted a picture of the new morality that was so dismal it's a wonder the entire generation didn't head for the convent." Then came "spinster panic," involving narratives that focused around the "beautiful, lonely career woman."
The current raft of regret seems to be a response to the Girls Gone Wild archetype of the late '90s and early aughts. Ariel Levy described the new era's version of sex positive in Female Chauvinist Pigs, "a tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular." We were supposed to dance on tables like Paris Hilton and wear ass-baring chaps and hump the floor like 22-year-old Christina Aguilera did in her "Dirrrty" video, or at least find that sort of thing appealing, otherwise we were marmish prudes. We were supposed to go to strip clubs and wear Playboy necklaces around our necks — -as Sex and the City star Carrie Bradshaw did.
But after a while, we did not really want to do any of those things anymore, as Tina Fey explained in an interview with Vogue earlier this year. We have been handed "a sort of Spice Girls' version of feminism. We're supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that's not panning out." […] Women are not quite ready to admit that we are ready to be domesticated again. But the Girls Gone Wild model doesn't appeal much either.
I agree with Grose that much of the current appetite for marriage and happily-ever-afters (as portrayed by Sex and the City and myriad television shows) is a response to our dissatisfaction with the random hook-up. I also agree that there's shame involved in our ruminations about what we did last night –- but I also think some analysis would reveal that it isn't necessarily that we're ashamed of what we did so much as ashamed of how dissatisfied we feel with this thing that promised us so much.
That, essentially, is the problem with the hook-up: We have forgotten what they're about.
Hookups –- particularly in their emanation as the “zipless fuck” –- empowered women to examine their desires and take action to fulfill them in a sort of vacuum of no-strings, no-last-names, nothing-but-the-moment. At the same time, they were a powerful political and social statement.
Hook-ups were never meant to infuse life with the kind of charge that is born of connection.
Whether you believe in marriage or monogamy or not, connection is essential to human beings. We are open-loops, requiring the presence of other individuals for our well-being –- not just any individuals, either, individuals who are fixtures.
Clans, tribes, families, groups of friends –- we need bonds to regulate ourselves emotionally, psychologically and, according to some studies, even physically.
The crisis experienced by many of us is a direct result of misusing the hook-up: to satisfy the need for connection, to build a different kind
