The hit HBO series Girls, which is wildly popular with twenty-something audiences, is also notorious for its frank portrayals of the dark side of the casual-sex culture reigning among America’s young adults. I’ve written about the show for Acculturated, but as a reminder, in the first season of the show, the main character, Hannah (played by Lena Dunham), finds herself in a dysfunctional relationship with an actor, Adam, whom she regularly sleeps with but isn’t dating in the traditional sense. She really likes him, though, so she asks him one day, during intercourse, “You want me to call you?” His response is to push her head down into a pillow.
For decades now, young women have been taught by popular culture that casual sex is supposed to be liberating. Shows like Sex and the City sent the message that promiscuity was no big deal and empowering. But stories like those on Girls, and those in Donna Freitas’s illuminating new book, The End of Sex, suggest that for many young women it proves instead to be dehumanizing.
I reviewed Freitas’ book for the Wall Street Journal today. Freitas explodes the myth of the “harmless hookup.” She also paints a picture of campus life in which sex and eroticism are completely decoupled:
One college woman describes juggling three men at once; a male student admits that a hookup is just a “trial run” for a date; a third student explains that oral sex is “almost expected” in a hookup: “People have these urges and they are trying to satisfy them.” Sex on campus, writes the author, has been reduced to a solitary and selfish act—basically, onanism “with another person present.”
In other words, many college students, who in philosophy class would surely recognize the ethical imperative not to use other people as means to an end, do so every night in their dorms. This selfishness is why, as Ms. Freitas argues, the hookup culture is intimately related to sexual assault. In both, one person uses another to satisfy a sexual or social desire without any regard for what that other person wants, needs or feels. Once alcohol is added to the mix, and there is plenty of it in the hookup culture, consent becomes a murky issue.
While Freitas does a great job of illustrating how harmful the hook-up culture can be, I think her solution for fixing it is less convincing. She also wants students to “feel empowered” by their sexual decisions. She says “it is their right to define what they want out of sex.” But feminists who champion the hook-up culture rely on the same rhetoric.
In the end, though, sex isn’t a political act, nor is it about empowerment. It is one part of a complete relationship between two people.
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