It’s another Friday night in Henle. A girl mounts the stairs, immediately greeted by the stench of beer and vomit soaked into the floor long ago. She passes a couple guffawing on the landing, trips on a can, two more steps, and she’s in. There’s a keg in the corner, vodka on the table, the pounding bass of Outkast’s latest and a wide array of dance partners, all ready for a night free of inhibitions.
This is the story of the quintessential college experience, at which those yearning to find the dark underbelly of the Georgetown social scene might point when describing the new trend in outlandish and overtly sexual behavior among modern college students. Such behavior undoubtedly occurs to some extent; however, it seems that it is neither a novelty on college campuses nor as extreme a situation as is commonly thought.
Tom Wolfe’s recent novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, for instance, depicts Charlotte, a na?ve young girl from small-town North Carolina entering a fictional university. Charlotte, immediately overwhelmed by the excesses in drinking and sex that she encounters, eventually enters the world of debauchery herself. She gradually spirals downward into a bout of depression and victimization. Wolfe portrays this culture of promiscuity as inescapable, using his fictional school to represent a new trend that has supposedly permeated college life throughout the country, putting academics and other cultural activities at a disadvantage. Students at Georgetown, however, might disagree.
The concept of hooking up isn’t foreign to the general student body. In a survey conducted by the Voice, 85 percent of students defined hooking up as “anything from kissing to sex,” giving it a broad description that could easily skew the perception of those who might believe the term refers only to intercourse. Judging by the same surveys, which used this definition of hooking up, it appears that O’Hara joins many others in her observations of sexual activity on campus, as 78 percent of students say they had hooked up with fewer than five people last semester; 27 percent had not hooked up with anyone.
“I think if you do it all the time, with many people, it cheapens the experience, because kissing, sex, etc. can be so much more romantic, sensual,” Katherine Anderson (CAS ‘05) said. “But as long as you make safe choices and feel like you’re maintaining integrity, I think it’s okay to do it sometimes. As soon as it stops being enjoyable, which I think inevitably happens for the majority of people, then it’s good to hold higher standards for who you’re going to be physical with.”
A study led by Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton of The American Enterprise came to the conclusion that “whatever it’s called, the alternative to traditional dating is developing a sexual relationship that is not intended to be emotional. On a given night, the typical pattern is to go to a bar or party off campus, get drunk and end up back in someone’s room.”
While studies such as this one and books such as Wolfe’s may generalize the idea of typical college life and speak of hooking up solely as a modern phenomenon, others feel that it is the continuation of a trend begun by the 1960’s generation.
“It’s the perception of a middle-aged man,” Chloe Kamarck (CAS ‘07) said. “I don’t think it’s as drastic and appalling as he might think. I’ve had this conversation with my mom, and … they were pretty appalling to their parents with the drugs and promiscuity. I think it’s all relative.”
Professor of Sociology Bill Daddio also saw the possibility of this being an older practice, especially considering Georgetown’s campus life, where bars and parties provide much of the entertainment and where so many people from ages 17 to 22, what Daddio says are the normal ages for sexual activity, can easily find opportunities to meet others who are also sexually active.
“Put a whole bunch of sexually active people together, and you’re going to have more sexual activity … There is talk about the hooking up culture being a new situation, and I’m starting to change my view on that, I really am,” Daddio said. “A one-night stand, which was not thought to be common or the right way of doing things, wasn’t much different than that but was done, so I’m not sure I’m convinced it was really different.”
Looking at this as a new trend, though, a number of studies have been conducted to determine whether hooking up has been detrimental to the college dating scene or if students’ relationships have remained essentially the same. One such study, conducted by the Independent Women’s Forum and published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2003, used a population of college-aged Washington, D.C. interns, to find that 26 percent had been on 10 dates or more within the last academic year, with the most common kind of date reported as dinner and a movie.
While this study conveys the idea that hooking up may not have actually replaced dating as a major form of romantic activity, it did not consider the number of dates that resulted from committed or exclusive relationships or how many of the dates actually started with a hookup. These two situations are commonly felt to be different from the experiences of the older generation, as students’ goals for their futures change and women become, if not necessarily more promiscuous, more liberated and career-oriented than their older female counterparts. The Levine and Cureton study, in concluding that “traditional dating, as well as intimacy, have all but disappeared,” contradicts the patterns that students see at Georgetown.
“It’s more rare now than for our parents’ generation for people to go out on dates,” Kamarck said. “I think a lot of people make the conscious decision that maybe they don’t want a relationship, but they aren’t going to stop having fun. Often I think hooking up leads to a relationship and dating. It’s a weird role reversal that you don’t start by dating but the other way around.”
This was the case for Kerry Clark (CAS ‘08), who was asked out by a male student she had been repeatedly hooking up with last December. The relationship developed, and the student is now Clark’s boyfriend. Of those who answered the Voice survey, 14 percent reported that they thought “hope for dating or a relationship” was the primary reason people at Georgetown choose to hook up with one another.
The pattern in less dating may be due in part to the unwillingness of students at Georgetown to take time out of schedules already full of extracurricular activities and homework.
“Dating is a lot of work, and at the early stages kind of an art if you do it right,” Anderson said. “But everyone’s busy, and there’s no motivation to be proactive about dating when so few people around you are. I don’t know if that makes it a substitute. A lot of people just want to get laid.”
The differences in relationships from years past, according to Daddio, are not necessarily due to hooking up; on the contrary, he says that new attitudes toward sexuality may actually have sprung from these differences. As the dating system became less formalized and men and women began to spend more time together as friends, they reached a comfort level with the opposite sex and sexuality that had never been considered common before.
“You’re much more comfortable with each other,” Daddio said. “You have a lot of shared experiences that we’ve never had. Talking about sports to a woman even today at my age would be an insult, but … you have a lot more boyfriends and girlfriends who are friends than was common in my generation, so you have more in common and understand each other. You don’t have those barriers that we did.”
The phenomenon of leaving high school for a community of much more independence and the possibilities for sexual encounters also raises the possibility of less judgment for all choices regarding sexual freedom.
“In high school there’s a lot more pressure either to be having sex or not having sex, or to be having sex with the right kind of people and only talking about it to the right kind of people,” Professor of English Dana Luciano said. “I think a lot of that pressure is lifted in college: that highly judgmental and moralistic attitude that there is in high schools.”
Despite gradually changing and possibly more forgiving attitudes towards sex, many reasons for engaging in romantic or sexual encounters remain the same, as have the accepted party scene for undergraduate students.
According to the Voice survey, 28 percent of those polled cited drinking and drugs as the most important reason that students at Georgetown choose to hook up. Drinking is obviously not a habit that started in this generation; still, it is considered a major reason for this supposedly recent trend up by such sources as the Levine and Cureton study.
“When I was an undergraduate we were having sexual experiences and enjoying the liberties that go with going away to college and drinking,” Professor of Psychology James Lamiell said. “It’s the sort of thing that people talked about.”
As the discourse continues with this generation, some students do see the need for a moderate viewpoint and understand that extreme opinions have the ability to alter a normal perception of sexuality.
“It is immensely distorted. On the one hand, we have ultra-religious psychos who deny that sexuality is a part of a human being,” Brodie Parent (CAS ‘07) said. “On the other, our crazed culture bombards us with images of bodies and neglects to mention the human spirit connected to them.”
Confusion from these conflicting points of view may affect the ways students approach and handle the aftermath of hookups, with some casually brushing them off and others treating them with the seriousness of a relationship, though the general opinion is that several fleeting encounters will not have a significant impact on later, more serious relationships.
“It is possible that a person will view future sexual relationships more casually if they have hooked up in the past, but it is also possible that a committed future relationship will be perceived as more unique and valuable,” O’Hara said.
Ultimately, Georgetown students agree that they enjoy a college experience that, while perhaps not identical to that of their parents, does include a wide variety of opportunities not considered by those lamenting the demise of traditional relationships and the intense social pressures of the world.
“That scene is certainly present, but only in an insignificant minority of our population,” Parent said. “Most of us have much more culturally and intellectually diverse interests that we nourish on the weekends … and occasionally a drunken binge with a hookup happens once in awhile. I find that Georgetowners are well-balanced for the most part – they can spend Friday night in a sex-filled coma but attend a ritzy jazz club on Saturday night.”
