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The morning after: A portrait of the University's hook-up cu
Iture
By Bethany Biron
Curled comfortably beneath a red wool blanket, LSA
senior Michelle Cronin glances quizzically at her house-
mates lounging in the dimly lit living room of Owen
House, a co-op on Oakland Street.
"You're pretty in-between," Emilia Breitenbach, a recent
University alum, says after thoughtful consideration. "Your
mindset is in-between, definitely."
Cronin ruminates a moment longer, drawing the blan-
ket closer to herbody and fidgeting with the frayed threads
unraveling along the edges.
"I don't like hook-up culture, but I have gotten into some
random situations and always felt really weird afterwards,"
she says.
"You kind of have that guilt complex afterward," Breiten-
bach adds. "Where it's, like, 'Oh, this isn't right,' and you're
more looking for a serious person. But in-between, you're still
dipping into it.
"Whereas for me, I'm just straight up random hookups."
Breitenbach pauses. "I don't want to worry about it."
As they sit and mull over their experiences, Cronin
and Breitenbach find themselves trapped in an ideologi-
cal contradiction that plagues young twenty-something
women in the modern era. It's no longer enough to go to
college, find a boyfriend and get married. The priorities
have shifted.
As today's women navigate the tumultuous path between
romance and career, they've increasingly turned toward
"hook-up culture" as a means of escape. An arduous week
of academia paves way to the sweet freedom of Friday night,
and the streets swell with a cavalcade of stilettos propping up
scantily clad girls with berry-colored lips and black-rimmed
eyes.
With bags slung haphazardly across their shoulders, they
sip on gin and tonics between shots of Absolut before stum-
bling to the dance floor where their lips magnetically meet
with a stranger's, heads ultimately hitting the pillow in that
same stranger's bed.
The proliferation of hook-up culture - promulgated by the
sexual revolution of the 1960s, advancements in the women's
movement and the advent of birth control - has fostered a
generation that waltzes precariously atop a delicate thread of
empowerment and objectification, wavering between endors-
ing and rejecting a culture that shies away from traditional
notions of monogamy.
The transformation of the modern relationship
After trying her hand at monogamy with her first "real"
boyfriend during her freshman and sophomore years at the
University, Music, Theatre & Dance senior Laura Cohen
decided commitment ultimately wasn't for her.
"It was a big learning experience," she said. "It definite-
ly showed me that I have very little interest in monogamy
... I don't really think that it's something I care about in
my life."
Instead, she opted for an open relationship, establishing
a mutual understanding between herself and her partner
that outside hookups were allowed, even encouraged.
"Being inan open relationship is just great," Cohen said.
"You have all of the security and the support and the love that
you have in a traditional, monogamous relationship.-But you
also have the freedom to go out on Friday night with your
friends, and if you end up making out with some frat guy, you
don't have to break up over it."
As defined by Elizabeth Marquardt, the director of the
Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for Ameri-
can Values in New York City, and the late University of Texas
sociologist Norval Glenn, a hookup is "anything ranging from
'hooking up to having sex.' "An unbreakable criterion is that
it must take place outside the context of commitment.
Engineering senior Stephen Barnard met a girl at a party
last summer for whom he quickly developed sexual feelings.
They started regularly hooking up.
But as their sexual escapades persisted, they felt compelled
to take a stab at being in a relationship. They started doing
"coupley things," as Barnard put it - but their attempt fal-
tered shortly after.
"I was sort of pushing things forward artificially without
either of us really being into it, sort of out of obligation," Bar-
nard said. "Then it all sort of broke down, and we admitted
that we were just fuck buddies."
In 2004, Elizabeth Armstrong, an associate professor of
Women's Studies, conducted a study of the romantic lives of
53 female students at a dorm known for its propensity for par-
tying at a Midwestern state school.
She was surprised to discover how many subjects
expressed a desire to experiment with the concept of "friends
with benefits."
Armstrong cited one young woman who developed a con-
tract that defined the parameters of her and her partner's
relationship. This contract, the young woman stated, was
developed out of concern that the partner might develop feel-
ings for her.
Determined via text message and instant messenger,
the ground rules of the contract defined which sexual
acts would be allowed and which forms of birth control
were permitted. It set stipulations on spending time
together outside of the bedroom to prevent any roman-
tic sentiments that could have arisen over morning-after
pancakes.
Breitenbach, sitting at Owen House, said she agreed with
the woman in the study, saying her experiences with hook-
ing up in college had largely been focused on meeting car-
nal desires rather than facilitating meaningful and fulfilling
interactions.
"I've more just been kind of free-spirited about it, more
dealing with physical needs instead of emotional needs," she
said.
Similarly for Cohen, the woman in the open relationship,
sex became more of a biological urge than an emotionally
laden interaction, and served as a means for establishing
independence.,
"That sort of occurred to me - that I shouldn't really have The delay in marriage also derives from an unstable job
to base my life around these Puritan, Victorian morals," she market, forcing students to accrue additional degrees and
said. honors to stay competitive in the workforce as part of "cre-
dential inflation," Armstrong said.
The end of the "MRS." degree The years of additional schooling needed to rack up the
necessary credentials to exude marketability extenuates the
As young women become more self-sufficient, they have increasing average marriage age, she said.
subsequently pushed marriage further down the road. As an aspiring doctor, Cronin, the woman who described
According to data from the Center for Disease Control and herself as "in-between," said she simply doesn't have time to
Prevention's National Health Statistics Reports, the median meddle in the precarious world of collegiate dating.
marriage age based on aggregated data from 2006 to 2010 "I always knew I wouldn't think about meeting anyone
was 25.8 for women. Compare this to 21.8 for females in the until I was out of medical school and out of residency, because
1950s. you can't really deal with anything when you're in residency,"
Part of this spurs from the dissolution of a cultural dynam- she said.
ic associated with findinga husband in college, according to At a college renowned for its academic excellence, the con-
Jennifer Aubrey, an associate professor of communications stant strain to succeed among the University's sea of highly
at the University of Missouri and a former Ph.D. student at motivated individuals is pervasive. For many students, find-
Michigan. For many young women, a career has taken prece- ing the time for a relationship on top of studying for exams
dence over marriage. and participating in extracurricular activities can be impos-
"We don't think, 'Oh, we're in college to get a man!"' said sible, making non-committal hookups look increasingly
LSA senior Gia Tammone. "That would've been the attitude attractive.
maybe for our mothers, definitely for our grandmothers. "Especially at a top-tier university like this, everyone is
We're in college to better ourselves, not to get a better man." really, really busy," Engineering senior Bennett Howard said.
And while a woman still makes 77 cents to a man's dollar, "(Students) don't necessarily have time to be talking to a girl
the gap is narrowing: In 2010, the ratio of women's-to-men's out of state all the time, or spending all kinds of hours with
earnings among 25-to-34 year olds was up to 91 percent from a girlfriend or boyfriend. Convenience is definitely an issue,
68 percent in 1979, according to data from the Bureau of Labor and a more relevant issue at this university."
Statistics. Breitenbach also emphasized that committed relationships