Hookup culture is the acceptance and encouragement of casual sexual encounters, including one-night stands and related activities, without necessarily including emotional intimacy, bonding or a committed relationship. It is generally associated with Western late adolescent sexuality and, in particular, United States college culture. The term hookup has an ambiguous definition because it can indicate kissing or any form of physical sexual activity between sexual partners. The term has been widely used in the U.S. since at least 2000. It has also been called nonrelationship sex, or sex without dating.
Most research on hookups has been focused on U.S. college students; however, hookups are not limited to college campuses. Adolescents and emerging adults engage in hookups for a variety of reasons, which may include from instant physical gratification, to fulfillment of emotional needs, to using it as a means of finding a long-term romantic partner. Media reaction to hookup culture has been often considered as a form of moral panic. The introduction of cell phones, mobile hookup apps and websites has modernized hookup culture, especially among gay men.
History The rise of hookups, a form of casual sex, has been described by evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia and others as a "cultural revolution" that had its beginnings in the 1920s. Historians D'Emilio and Freedman put the beginning of casual sex, including college hookups, further back in history, to the early 1800s, and explain the phenomenon as shaped by historical and cultural forces.D'Emilio, John, and Estelle Freedman. (2012). Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Lisa Wade, a sociologist, documents that 19th-century white fraternity men often had what would be called hookup sex with prostitutes, poor women, and enslaved women (however, the latter is generally defined as rape).Wade, Lisa. (2017). American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. W. W. Norton. Homosexual men also engaged in hookup sex during the 1800s, meeting in spaces that were transient in nature, such as wharves and boarding houses. Since the 1920s, there has been a transition from an age of courtship to an era of hookup culture.. Technological advancements, such as the automobile and movie theaters, brought young couples out of their parents' homes, and out from their watchful eyes, giving them more freedom and more opportunity to engage in casual sexual activity.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought a loosening of sexual morals which allowed for sex to become uncoupled from relationships and non-marital sex to become more socially acceptable.
Support for sexual freedom became increasingly popular as new ideas and beliefs evolved about the positive and negative aspects of engaging in sexual intercourse.Bogle, Kathleen A. (January 2008). Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. NYU Press. . It became more widely accepted that having sex was not necessarily always intended for reproduction, but rather had more emphasis on physical pleasure. This new outlook was influenced by several factors, including the eradication of 1930s censorship laws regarding sexually explicit content in media, and also a growing accessibility to birth control pills, condoms, and other forms of contraception. Before the 1960s, unmarried women were usually denied access to birth control since it was traditional for men and women to refrain from having sex until after marriage.
Feminism grew substantially in the 1960s, with supporters arguing that a woman should have complete control over her own body. Supporters of the feminist movement also argued that women should be able to "pursue" men in the same way men traditionally approached women, and made efforts to change the negative attitudes usually associated with women that decided to have sex before marriage.
Kathleen Bogle has stated that the growing acceptance of casual sex in the 1960s could also be attributed to a sharp rise in female student enrollment at colleges and universities. The number of women attending college in the United States in 1972 was three times larger than the number in 1960. With a greater number of females on campuses compared to males, women had to adjust to the sexual scripts outlined by men, which are based more on engaging in uncommitted sex rather than on developing relationships.
Some scholars, including Garcia and Freitas, have found that dating, while it has not disappeared, has decreased as the frequency of hookups have increased. By the mid-1990s, Freitas found that hookups were an accepted form of interactions among sexually active adults, especially those located on college campuses.
According to a review by Garcia, this is "an unprecedented time in the history of human sexuality." People are marrying and beginning families at ages later than previous generations while becoming sexually mature at an earlier age. As a result, Garcia and other scholars argue that young adults are able to reproduce physiologically but are not psychologically or socially ready to 'settle down' and begin a family.
These developmental shifts, Garcia's systematic review of the literature suggests, is one of the factors driving the increase in hookups, a "popular cultural change that has infiltrated the lives of emerging adults throughout the Western world." The review shows that hookups are becoming increasingly normative among young adults and adolescents in North America and have taken root throughout the Western world, which represents a notable shift in how casual sex is perceived and accepted.
Garcia and others have noted that the "past decade has witnessed an explosion in interest in the topic of hookups, both scientifically and in the popular media. Research on hookups is not seated within a singular disciplinary sphere; it sits at the crossroads of theoretical and empirical ideas drawn from a diverse range of fields, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, medicine, and public health." However, research shows that COVID-19 has impacted hook-up culture by lowering the prevalence of casual sex. Difficulties in defining the term can lead to different perceptions of its prevalence. Hookup culture is vaguely defined due to a variety of perspectives taken on this subject relating to human sexuality. It is hard to make sense of hookup culture without understanding why it exists in society and why individuals participate in the culture.
According to Shannon T. Boodram, "hooking up is nothing more than settling; it is the microwaveable burrito of sex." Hooking up is engaged in for the instant gratification for sex, pleasure, a feeling of being loved, an emotional feeling of being adhered to, the thought of the potential of the hookup developing into something less casual, and many more reasons.
According to Kathleen Bogle, the phrase 'hooking up' is "a slang term" deemed unofficial and unpredictable due to the extended variation of its meaning. Many other slang terms for hooking up were and are still used such as "friends with benefits" and "booty call." Other terms for repeated acts of hooking up include, "casual sex" or "recreational sex," or defined as a relationship with "no strings attached."
Behavioral norms The definition of hooking up can vary depending on the person or on the age group. It can range from acts that involve kissing, oral sex, manual sex, or sexual intercourse. The term "hooking up," meaning an instance of casual sex, differs from hookup culture. A hookup is an act that involves sexual intimacy, claimed by many to be a sexually liberating act. On the other hand, hookup culture is thought to be oppressive and monolithic, with intimacy only occurring within a specific context. Jennifer Aubrey and Siobhan Smith have found that between genders there are minimal differences when it comes to behavior and frequency in hookups; on the other hand, women still face a harder social stigma, because their social status decreases with increased sexual partners, but men's social status increases with more sexual partners. There is also a difference between men and women when it comes to the reason to partake in casual sex. Men hook up to increase sexual experiences and to gain their manhood, but women tend to hook up with the hopes of it becoming a long-term relationship and to satisfy their partner. In a study conducted by Danielle M. Currier, she explores how the phrase "hooking up" conveys different meanings depending on whether a man or woman uses it when describing their sexual encounters; furthermore, Currier notes that men use "hooking up" to emphasize their masculinity and heterosexuality, but women use the phrase to preserve their femininity by being strategically ambiguous to downplay their sexual desires.
Gender roles Both men and women participate in hookups, but Bogle notes that males and females often choose casual sex for different reasons. Researchers suggest men and women have distinct sexual scripts, ways in which cultural influences can affect an individual's sexual behaviors. Furthermore, society judges the sexual behaviors of men and women in a completely different manner. For men, sex is characterized as "central to male identity," and research suggests men tend to "prefer nonrelational sex." In contrast, women are viewed as "sexual objects" and are normally "sexually passive compared to men." Society typically admires or glorifies men who frequently engage in casual sex, but women are scrutinized or admonished for the same behaviors. For that reason, a woman's sexual script has more focus on finding some type of commitment or relationship. Additionally, women pursue relationships to "protect their reputation" in college, but men have more sexual freedom without the fear of reproach. Women risk being called "sluts" or being accused of "getting around too much" since society has historically identified that as inappropriate behavior for women. Men are not held to the same standards, particularly in high school and college. Men who engage in regular sexual activity are seen as successful individuals who are "players." In fact, men are rarely reprimanded for their sexual behavior unless they are practicing abstinence in which case their peers might say that they cannot "get any."
Researcher Donna Freitas challenges society's perceptions of the male sexual script. Through conversations and interviews with men on college campuses, she states that they expressed a need to "fit in" with other males to be successful. Men claim to hook up more because of peer expectations, rather than to meet their own desires. Men also say they cannot express disapproval for hookup culture the same way that women can without facing criticism from their peers. To summarize, women face several risks by participating in hook-up culture, but Freitas says "men risk gaining a reputation by not being a part of it."
However, both men and women let societal pressure influence their sexual behavior on college campuses. Pluralistic ignorance leads people to behave in alignment with beliefs that they attribute to their group although they are usually false, regardless of the individual's beliefs. Research done on a college campus found that men and women overestimate their same-gendered peers' comfort towards hookups and act in accordance with their perception of how their peers feel, rather than their own comfort level. Pluralistic ignorance is supported by the results that women felt moderate discomfort with intercourse during a hookup, but 32% still reported participating, and all women rated their peers' comfort higher than their own. The study found that men were more comfortable with all sexual behaviors discussed than women were. Researchers argue that both lead to negative consequences like sexual assault, especially for women.
Homosexuality