This spring, I took Professor Margot Canaday’s wonderful class on the history of gender and sexuality in modern America. In her final lecture, Professor Canaday told us she’s deeply troubled by the state of feminism in 2024, because young women have no cohesive movement to look to for guidance. We’ve had organic explosions of reactions to the cultural and legal misogyny of Trumpism – like #Metoo and the post-Dobbs midterm election blue wave. But we don’t have leaders who are household names or mass protests like those in the ‘70s in support of an Equal Rights Amendment.
Nowadays, even the word “feminist” carries a stigma. I kind of get it, because “feminism” evokes a well-meaning yet narrow-minded ‘60s caricature who only cares about the predicament of white women in the suburbs, or like, your mom wearing a pink pussy hat in 2017. It’s a vision Gen Z has transcended in our admirable concern for intersectionality.
Yet Professor Canaday is right (of course she is). We’ve regressed. Legally, obviously, but culturally too. It’s tempting to zero in on those more palpable legal regressions and neglect the cultural ones. But I learned from Professor Canaday that the cultural and radical feminists, the consciousness raisers and commune dwellers, were just as influential as their more mainstream, reform-minded counterparts. In other words, cultural change matters. I think this particular cultural change, this turn away from reading politics into the personal, has made us incredibly confused about sex.
For our grandmothers, the Feminine Mystique generation, the bra burners, emerging from the phenobarbital-induced oblivion of the ‘50s, I’d hypothesize that casual sex was empowering. It must have felt amazing, after decades of having your eroticism only tolerated as a means to domestic contentment, to fuck a lot, and a lot of different people, and because you wanted to do it. Then for our mothers, saturated with late-stage capitalism, sick of waifish Victoria’s Secret models and shaving their legs, learning about sexual harassment from Anita Hill and realizing yes, they’d experienced it too, monogamy was probably empowering. They were some of the first who could love other women openly, at least in some spaces. And even for straight girls, it must have felt amazing to reject the commodification of sex and reserve their bodies for those they loved. Our grandmothers had the second-wave feminists. Our mothers had the third wave. But feminism as an organized political crusade is dead, and we have no visionaries to idolize, no movement to lead us to healthy expressions of our sexual agency.
Now that our bodies are state property once again – an injustice not inflicted on our mothers and grandmothers – how do we reclaim them as our own? When I talk to my female friends about the sexual encounters we’ve had with men we didn’t love or even like, our feelings are complicated, resentful, and even regretful. We want to take back the orgasms we’ve induced, for the sweaty rando in a greasy-pizza-box-strewn Annex dorm or the nice Hinge date who took us to an Italian restaurant or the long-term long-distance low-commitment casual boyfriend. In the absence of an active school of feminism, in an era of increased government control over female bodies, we need to find a new way to explore our sexuality that doesn’t leave us bitter and convinced that all men are trash.
I rather presumptuously set out to address this problem by reading up on hookup culture, talking to Professor Canaday, and compiling data from a range of women, anonymized here as A., B., C., D., E, and F., who’ve hooked up with Princeton men.
- has engaged in casual hookups, but doesn’t want to be sexually involved with anyone she couldn’t envision eventually becoming important to her. “How is it fair that [situationships] get sexual satisfaction and I don’t get the emotional bond that I want?” she fumed. She believes hookup culture is a copout that enables us to shirk the emotional labor inherent in relationships. She thinks the social environment of Princeton exacerbates hookup culture’s harms; she told me that racial and economic privilege makes some men behave as though they’re entitled to sex. “I almost felt like I would owe men a good experience even if I wasn’t comfortable with it,” she said of her younger self. She also pinpointed a tension between Princeton students’ fixation on their reputations and the difficulty of discretion on such a small campus.
- is a “big dater” with a limited bandwidth for bullshit – once, she walked out of a hookup halfway through. She has a nuanced understanding of the social politics of hookup culture, describing in her underclass years, certain men were more appealing to her because of their eating club affiliations, and she felt that their sexual attention increased her social capital. Now that she is older and a member of a prestigious eating club herself, she’s a lot less concerned with how the social status of her romantic partners influences how she is perceived. She cited the insidious nature of gossip as well, musing, “I know teams talk to each other a certain way . . .I don’t like the transparency. In situationships and hookups the loyalty to the other person isn’t as strong.” Hookup culture hasn’t offered her what she’s looking for sexually, either. She believes it facilitates disregard for female pleasure, and told me she returned to a situationship primarily because the emotional connection made the sex better than it would have been with someone random.
- also thinks relationship sex is intrinsically better. “The simple explanation is that [a hookup] doesn’t know you and doesn’t know what you like, but there is also a difference between having sex and making love,” she said. She is acutely aware of how Princeton’s social politics shape sexual dynamics, relaying how a friend once told her to avoid public makeouts at certain eating clubs because of potential ramifications during bicker. She has felt volatile after a breakup, and thinks that her coping mechanism of going out, getting drunk, looking hot, and seeking male attention might be harmful. “The helpless girl act works on Princeton men especially well because of conservatism in the culture,” she said. “I’ve been conditioned to flirt by making myself seem small.”
In contrast, D. has found mastering flirting to be empowering. Hookups have been a fun avenue for her to develop “people skills.” But although she doesn’t typically wait long to hook up, she’s picky about her partners. “Everyone knows a lot about everyone else at Princeton,” she said. “I’m definitely influenced by talking to my friends.” Throughout college, she’s become a better advocate for herself, and now has a much lower tolerance for mistreatment. Although she finds it “warranted” that you can’t expect the same things in a hookup as you would in a relationship, she asserted, “I can want to be respected as a whole person in a casual scenario.”
Like D., E. is an acolyte of the plot. She believes hookups have been good for her; being an object of desire absent emotional connection has increased her confidence. She is averse to relationships because she doesn’t want to be publicly associated with a man. But she also ruminated that her preference for hookups might originate with “a tiny urge to wreck [her]self.” And like others, she’s had moments of discomfort, positing that because guys can be “a bit more pushy physically, things can happen that you don’t intend, but it’s not necessarily non-consensual.”
- is also versed in gray areas. She reflected that she’s “never felt coerced but [she] has felt compromised. It’s not a question of consent but of pushing myself too far and not realizing I had a limit.” She has felt “disposable” – once after casual sex, she was immediately handed her clothes and kicked out of the guy’s room. She cried on the walk home. She calls her old approach (only pursuing people who were emotionally unavailable in order to avoid hurt) unhealthy, and now needs to have an emotional connection with any prospective sexual partner. She called Princeton guys a “weird network” that reduces girls to their past flings, and feels anxious that the number of people she’s hooked up with on campus is preventing her from finding something real.
These women have remarkably similar stories. They’ve gone in seeking validation and left feeling cynical. Their boundaries have been jeopardized, if not exactly violated. They’re extremely aware of how their sexual decisions affect their social destiny. They understandably reject being defined by their sex life – and yet it’s integral to their self-image and experience of growing up. Their shared sentiments about hookup culture serve as preliminary evidence that there is an element of groupthink, conscious or subconscious, that influences individual feelings. We have a milieu – we just need a political vernacular through which to understand it.
We haven’t eradicated the gender dynamics of the past. Sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong argue that today, “women’s ability to get sexual (as opposed to romantic) attention from men [is] viewed positively by their peers,” but this feels imprecise. Most of the women I talked to are worried about being slut shamed. Concerns like these aren’t unfounded: a male friend once announced to me that he would never hook up with any girl who’s slept with more than three guys. I was disgusted but not surprised. Beneath our veneer of progress, the old Madonna-whore hypocrisies and insecurities persist.
As Professor Canaday pointed out to me, the feminism stigma is resilient, shape shifting across generations. Today, a lot of young people don’t want to be identified with feminism because we consider it insufficiently progressive. Out of all the distinctly 21st-century developments in gender relations, hookup culture seems most indicative of a belief that we’ve outgrown feminism. Sociologist Lisa Wade writes that many women in hookups and situationships strive to project emotional detachment because they view being “powerless to separate sex from feelings” as a “failure to be liberated, modern, strong, and independent.” We’ve dismissed our feminist foremothers’ worldviews as obsolete, but their activism made it possible for us to openly aspire to independence.
There are gender politics, and then there are social politics. Hamilton and Armstrong postulate that hooking up has replaced dating in “determining college womens’ erotic status.” If true, this association of hookups with status instrumentalizes sex, and by extension, our sexual partners, as props in our ascendancy. The women I talked to acknowledged this, drawing links between hookups and social rituals like bicker. Maybe it seems empowering to treat sex like conquest because it’s what men have always done, because high-fiving each other for our exploits is an implicit acknowledgement that we want it too, that we are active players in the game instead of passive receptacles for male desire.
Everyone I talked to reiterated that who you go home with after a night out becomes a political decision. Who we choose to associate with is an assertion of identity, but when hookups – perhaps the one domain in which we prefer to keep our associations mostly private – become a gossip topic, we lose agency over our public personas, maybe even feel less steady in our sense of self.
If we manage to keep our hookups under wraps, maybe the permission to pursue them grants us more autonomy over our identity. Professor Canaday identified the social acceptability of E’s disinterest in dating as a potential benefit of hookup culture for young women, at least in contrast with the ‘80s, when relationships were regarded as central to young adulthood. “It’s nice that [dating] doesn’t define the social ecology anymore,” she mused. The sexual flexibility that hookup culture affords enables ambitious women to have it all – their academic and professional commitments, their independent self-image, and sex.
Because if hookup culture was universally corrosive, more of us would go on strike. But we keep buying in. We generate anecdotes for our friends to laugh at and men for them to villainize, just silly men in beanies, holding iced vanilla lattes, shuffling around campus looking bemused, wondering if they’re supposed to small talk with us or just keep walking. And we know we’ll do it again, because we were drunk, or horny, or secretly in love with him (but not really secretly, because all of our friends knew, and some of them have big mouths), or because we were feeling bad about our bodies and were just craving some affirmation that our tits are perfect, actually, even if that affirmation was murmured in a dark dorm room on a twin bed that can hardly contain two grown-ups.
For me, some hookups have been silly fun, but more often than not, they’ve brought unnecessary emotional turmoil. That makes me exactly like other girls, despite my occasional indulgence in delusions of originality. However, that shared experience, and its facilitation of female bonding, is maybe the one positive I’ve extracted from hookup culture. I think that’s the case for a lot of other women, at Princeton and elsewhere. That seems like a compelling argument for reviving the second-wave tradition of political friendships, of consciousness raising groups, of seeing our interactions with men as extensions of political phenomenons.
One essential difference between D. and E.’s perspectives exemplifies our fragmentation. Of the women I interviewed, D. and E. had the most similar sexual approach, and saw hookup culture as more benign than their skeptical peers. After meticulously evaluating its pros and cons, D. qualified that she doesn’t see these characteristics as “gendered.” But E. was adamant that “it all feels gendered… all of my sexual and romantic experiences feel impossible to separate from my experience as a woman.”
I saw evidence of our need to rectify that fragmentation, or at least create social, intellectual, and political spaces dedicated to exploring it, in these womens’ openness with me. They all had so much to say. They liberally shared personal details; some semi-jokingly offered to drop names. It suggested paradoxically greater loyalty to me, someone some of them barely know, than the men with whom they’ve been deeply intimate. It revealed an urgency to connect, to repair the alienation produced by a sexual status quo that encourages minimization of the significance of something that is inexorably significant, even when casual. As C. implied, love is about vulnerability; hookup culture is grounded in aversion to it. If we can’t or don’t want to be vulnerable with men, we seem to crave heightened vulnerability with other women.
According to Professor Canaday, the ‘70s saw a “broadscale cultural withdrawal from womens’ relationships with men.” Some women realized they were lesbian, others experimented, others went on romance hiatus. Professor Canaday thinks this break from men was a “necessary phase” for a lot of women, but it wasn’t sustainable. We know now that we don’t need men to be happy, and while it’s sometimes tempting to form Amazonian enclaves and block all the boys in our phones, we’d miss them if they weren’t around.
But we do need women. Maybe we need feminism, too.