When I opened my campus newspaper last week and saw an article titled “Unhooked: Ohio University women discuss the college hook-up culture,” I was expecting an eye-roll-inducing paean to women’s “sexual empowerment.” Who could blame me? Many college newspapers fill their pages with just that type of banal trash, including preposterous female “sex columnists” who hail promiscuity as the highest form of liberation. I hesitated to even read it.
But instead of inane prattling about condoms, lingerie and oral sex, the article was filled with quotes from women unhappy with the college “hook-up culture.” As a freshman identified only as Rachel said, “I think for guys, it’s a lot about hooking up; for girls it’s more of an emotional thing. Maybe the guy will call you; maybe he’ll just say ‘hi’ on the street. But he sees you as an object, while you’re upset. The guys are over-empowered.”
There goes the sexual revolution.
For decades, feminists have been propagating the myth that men and women have equal desires for and reactions to casual sex. A woman who engages in multiple trysts is “embracing her sexuality” – and if she has doubts afterwards, she’s simply experiencing unnecessary guilt heaped upon her by a patriarchal society. Women and men are really the same, they say, so why shouldn’t a woman “have sex like a man”?
College women are slowly starting to realize that it’s all a lie. Even women’s studies courses and three hundred episodes of “Sex and The City” can’t mask the fact that expert opinion favors chastity.
In her book “Unprotected,” published earlier this year, Dr. Miriam Grossman makes a medical case for sexual conservatism. As a psychiatrist at UCLA’s student health services, Grossman has seen firsthand the emotional destructiveness of promiscuity. She declares multiple hook-ups “hazardous to a woman’s mental health.”
Laura Sessions Step’s book “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both” details how women who settle for casual sex neglect their emotional needs. Of course, for even suggesting that women have emotional needs different from men’s, Steps was criticized by feminists. But her theories apparently make sense to college women, at least enough to inspire articles like the one I read.
As feminists assail traditional moral standards for sexual behavior as “oppressive,” they ignore the fact that the sexual revolution has created a culture in which men win and women lose. While women bear the unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and emotional pain wrought by casual sex, men are free to move on to the next bedmate.
Unfortunately, many college women have been brainwashed by a popular culture that embraces a combination of girl-power feminism and the Playboy philosophy. They believe that sex is just for fun and casual hook-ups have no emotional consequences. They believe they are just like men.
But, if the article in my school’s paper is any indication, others are catching on to the truth: the hook-up culture is more oppressive than traditional morality ever was. |