What immediately struck me about this clip, however, is that the film shouldn't be about hooking up - but about booze. Perhaps the real problem on college campuses isn't that kids are having sex, but that they're having it drunk.

Yes yes yes. Couldn't agree more.

Thank You!!

By the time I left for college, I had long made an important choice. I don't drink alcohol. (My parents both struggled with alcohol abuse; I decided not to drink before my peer group started.)

So like my peers, I stayed up late hanging out and trying to get laid, or stayed up all night with sex partners, pretty routinely. But unlike some of my peers, when the sun peeked over the horizon and it was time to finish up the reading, shower and head to class, I wasn't hung over. And I remembered who I hooked up with the night before, and everything we did.

Like you say, Jessica, the problem with the "hook-up culture" is primarily a problem of alcohol abuse. It leads to unconsciousness, violence, poor communication, and forgotten or flubbed safety measures, all of which are antithetical to meaningful consent.

It's a vicious cycle, though -- there's so much pressure on women around dating and especially sex, that we shouldn't be surprised when they feel the need to drink to relax in a charged environment with potential sex partners. Then, there's so much guilt and shame and rule-making and judgment about sex that we can't be surprised when they drink more to feel comfortable being sexual.

Jessica! Thomas! Idiolect! Looking at sex and the hookup culture with reason! Sorry, I am exposed to so much crap with regard to sex, young people, and teh evil vagina, I forget people actually have reasonable viewpoints on this stuff.

It took me way too long to figure out that it's my body, my choice and that my biggest concern with my sex life shouldn't be society's view of virginity and hooking up, etc., but whether or not I am satisfied by my own sex life.

Turns out, hooking up doesn't work for me. Turns out, I can't orgasm drunk, or with a stranger. Hardly unusual, but it shouldn't have taken me that long to figure it out.

For a less slut-shaming study of hookup culture, check out Kathleen Bogle's book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. She's an alum of my current soc program, and I saw her speak about her findings earlier this semester. Interesting findings, great speaker.

The obsession over hookup culture isn't anything new, at least to my college career. Apparently the women and gender studies department at my school is actually offering a class on the idea of it now.

I really don't think a movie about hookup culture is going to solve anything. I mean, is our generation really any different than the previous? I doubt it. At least now there's emergency condoms in the hallways of the dorms (at my university at least, but there's actually a lot of resources for sexual health at my school, so I'm probably luckier than most.)

As for the booze, it's a problem that's probably not going to go away anytime soon. My school actually required this online alcohol education course (and I know a lot of universities use it) before you start the freshman year (although most students hated it and ignored it). Freshmen are also required to participate in a freshmen orientation program about sexual assault (and sexual health in general), and part of the focus of it is the effects of alcohol on the issue (I'm also proud to say that it's not a stereotypically heteronormative program, we discuss not only male on female assault, but female on male and same-sex assault). We also have sexual health programs for every dorm (which are exceedingly popular).

Unfortunately, in spite of all these resources, our rates of sexual assault are still at the national level, and 98% of cases involve use of alcohol by at least one person involved. Why?

I'm a member of a sexual health awareness group at my school, and having tried to work with students on campus for the last three years, I think why we still have such high rates in spite of all the resources and information is . . . wait for it . . . the culture of sex education! If, for eighteen years, kids are subjected to lectures that don't yield decent information, are condescending and judgemental, and push moral views on people who don't necessarily share them, they learn to reject sex education in most forms. I have peers who are convinced that the group I'm in exists only to make women hate men and reject sex altogether. They only enjoy the dorm programs because they involve banana/condom races and sex toy giveaways.

Basically, the origin of this problem is a lot farther back than people think. The problem isn't that kids are having sex or that they're drinking, it's that they don't do it responsibly because we haven't learned to value responsibility in these issues.

Screw hook up culture!

Sincerely,
Athenia who wishes male prostitution was acceptable for women because she would vastly prefer to have sex with a professional rather than stupid boys who think they're really cool.

P.S. Yes, I'm having a moment today. Bare with me.

Hooking up works for some young women, but many are dissatisfied with the script. Consider the following stats:
• 91% of students reported that hooking up was very common or fairly common on their campuses.
• 87% of college students report having hooked up.
• 73% of girls wish dating were more common.
• 12% of hookups eventually lead to relationships.
• 60% of sexually active teenagers will at some point have sex with someone they are not dating.
• 49% of students who had intercourse during a hookup never saw the other person again.
• 61% of women who say hooking up makes them feel desirable also say it makes them feel awkward.
• During hookups, guys have orgasms 44% of the time. Girls have orgasms 19% of the time.
• 12% of women say that it is sometimes easier to have sex with a guy they don’t know than to make conversation.
Check out my website, www.HookingUpSmart.com for sources and content that aims to support young women who both hook up and want relationships.

Yeah, maybe dealing with the abuse of alcohol or, you know, trying to change the culture so that women (and men) don't feel like they HAVE to engage in anything sexual that they don't want to. But then these people would be feminists already!

I expanded my comment into a post at my new project, the Yes Means Yes Blog. The blog is an outgrowth of the new book that Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti edited, Yes Means Yes, which is on store shelves in five ... four ... three ... two ... I have an essay in it, and the other contributors amaze and impress me.

Looks like porny voyeurism in the guise of 'looking at the issues' *eye roll*

I often have to restrain myself from responding to things like this with sarcastic commentary about how "hooking up" is clearly the end of the world.

How about let's talk about, yeah, the role alcohol plays in all of this. I drank only rarely in college (I graduated in May), imbibing a drink or two in the company of close friends.

Yet around me, women and men alike downed hard liquor and mixed drinks until they were plastered and could barely remember anything - including being helped into pajamas and then into bed by one's roommate.

So let's, as a society, talk about encouraging the responsible consumption of alcohol and discouraging binge drinking in college students. This is a factor in the "hook up" culture that cannot be ignored, yet there is ever so much hand-wringing about female sexual behavior and how young ladies "really" want to date/have a relationship.

I'm honestly find it obnoxious that this segment of college students is so often used to represent us all. There are plenty of us who have different sexual patterns, and different ways of spending our time.

Personally, I don't care for hook up culture but people can do whatever they like as long as aren't compromising themselves. My personal opinion? I think a body and person is more valuable than experiencing briefly during a drunken haze, and I also know a lot of women feel pressure to go along with a culture that values them as sexual opportunities above anything else. Which prioritizes the male gaze and sexual needs. I think the cultural accepted habit of liquoring girls up until one can sleep with them is an unfortunate facet of this culture.

However, again, this hardly represents all young people and their sexual / passtime experiences. I have had amazing, non-committal sexual experiences, heteronormative and not. I'd be more interested in seeing a film about all the different ways people express themselves sexually, and how it relates to the rest of their life and viewpoints.

And I agree... this film should perhaps have been more focused on the elements that make up this culture, including but not limited to alcohol. Try... media?

i know that i'm in the minority here, but i quite enjoyed the time when i was "hooking up" (how i hate that term). i think it was because i assumed that since myself and the other person involved were looking for something purely sexual, i always made certain that my needs were taken care of, regardless of what my partner thought we should do. i think that the problem is not with the "promiscuous" sexual activity, but more with the socialization of girls to feel that for some reason, a man's desire for orgasm is more urgent than her own, and the socialization of boys to believe that women don't have a "real," valid sex drive. i definitely do find that my friends in college have bad sex, both sober and not, and it seems to be more an issue of many college age men still not understanding women's bodies, or acknowledging that women enjoy sex and aren't using it as some kind of weapon or enticement for a relationship. i don't think that the sexual activities of college students need to be as pathologized as the media seems to believe. we're adults, we're responsible for our own decisions, and it's no one's business how women (or men) are conducting themselves sexually. i chalk up the media focus (not the feministing focus, obviously) on women's sexual activity to the perverse desire to control women's sexuality that has existed in most patriarchal cultures.

coldvoltage-
you made me wish the film was, rather than potentially about controlling women, about how to arrive at a hook-up culture that acknowledges and meets the sexual needs of women :).

I just graduated in May and some of the clips made me miss being an undergraduate. Anyway, I really do think its just trying again to convince women that they don't enjoy sex and even drinking to an extent. Especially if the IWF is endorsing it.

After thinking about this for a while, I've come up with a few questions: What do we think of, really, when we say "hook-up"? (And of course, then, what is a "hook-up culture" anyway?) I think that at least some significant amount of people use it to mean something more than any kind of casual and/or spontaneous sex. At the very least, there seems to be this association with drinking -- an association so strong that I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people think of being drunk almost immediately when they hear "hook-up." As Jessica said in the OP, maybe it's the drinking -- not the sex -- that is creating problems for people.

But on a somewhat different (although surely related somehow) note, I think there's sort of a residue of traditional, heteronormative images of male/female sexuality surrounding people's notions of what "hooking up" means or even maybe what some people actually do when they "hook up" -- the man has a certain goal he has to strategize towards, the woman gets to decide whether or not to "give in" or some such, so on and so forth. Or at the very least, the very phrase "spitting game" weirds me out -- as if the only way for people to have sex outside of the traditional committed monogamous relationship is for them to, like, bullshit really well. I mean, no wonder people might be feeling disillusioned, no wonder people aren't having orgasms! If you're in bed with someone through a strategic series of lies, of course it's not going to be very good.

I don't really understand why there doesn't seem to be a notion floating around out there of even the very possibility of having a healthy sex life that includes the spontaneous and the casual. The best we seem to be able to do as a culture is to think that such things are mistakes, the kind of indulgences in temptation that make us human. I mean, why must "no strings attached" always mean "no emotions involved whatsoever" in people's minds? From personal experience, I believe it is quite possible to have something fun and spontaneous and casual with someone as one real human being to another, without lies and without ludicrous posturing at being too cool for emotions or whatever. I don't know how to describe this kind of thing, though, because that doesn't seem to be what people mean when they say "hook-up."

As the provider of the hooking up stats, I'd like to clarify a couple o things about hooking up:
1. Shock: Cosmopolitan provides the statistic that 73% of girls wish dating were more common, based on their own survey of college girls. What is significant about this is that Cosmopolitan has a lot riding on the hookup culture, and has traditionally been loathe to acknowledge its downside. In their Oct. 2008 issue they included a piece on how it makes many young women miserable.
2. What's changed from previous generations is this: the supply and demand ratio. Today, men demand a lot of casual sex and women provide it. Traditional dating served as a way for women to "try out" different guys, and guys knew that had to provide romance and courtship to get sex. Today, they provide nothing to get sex, and women only get to try out different guys in the sack. When the sexual revolution changed the rules, men couldn't believe their good luck! Free love! That's fine if women are happy with the status quo today. Some are, many aren't. I wish there were more options for women who would rather have sex in a relationship.

Women should feel free to choose casual hookups, but not pressured to do so. On most college campuses, it really is the only path to a relationship, so women hook up because it is still their best hope for a real connection.

Susan Walsh
www.HookingUpSmart.com

The only Black guy in that trailer didn't speak. Sorry, but I just like to play "spot the Black person" in documentary trailers.

I'm not a drinker. I might have had one drink since turning 21 three years ago. I lived with a lot of young women during college who went more than once a week to get drunk, and that sort of turned me off to alcohol. I guess they thought they and their friends were so boring that they had to get drunk to have fun together. Pretty sad.

I agree that alcohol is a big part of the problem, but it's important to note that the causality runs both ways here. It's not just that people are engaging in stupid hookups, or that their hookups become problematic, because they're drunk. At least in my college experience, a lot of people chose to abuse alcohol in order to participate in the sexual culture of my campus: Guys felt they needed the liquid courage to approach girls and be the kind of pushy jerks their brothers (and a lot of girls) expected them to be in order to get laid. Some girls drank to excess because it gave them the "excuse" they needed to engage in sexual activities ("I'm not really a slut, but sometimes I get drunk and--ooops!"). Other girls I knew drank to dull themselves emotionally to take part in sexual activities they didn't particularly want or enjoy but that they were under pressure to do to maintain their place in the social pecking order.

Obviously, some people enjoy casual sex and that's their prerogative. But living in a culture in which you're expected to engage in casual sex, to use sex as a tool to prove your social worth (either by sleeping with as many women as possible or by providing "favors" to high status guys), and where there aren't other viable models of sexual or romantic fulfillment, is not healthy either.

Perhaps the real problem on college campuses isn't that kids are having sex, but that they're having it drunk. Just a thought.

The statistic about women wishing there was more dating might be just wishing for an alternative to the relationship/hookup ends of the spectrum. It's not that dating is something specifically desirable to women, but they (and I suspect men too, if asked) would like at least another option. There were plenty of guys in college that I would have liked to get to know better, but didn't want to sleep with (yet) or immediately make my boyfriend. "Dating" is hard on a college campus because being together is usually something like hanging out in someone's dorm room, going to the campus cafeterias together...and with everyone living so close together so it's really easy to be together all the time, and with everyone's nose in everyone's business, it's just really a strange sort of atmosphere for a nonsexual, laidback getting-to-know-you-without-any-strings-attached sort of thing.

Huh. I can think of some GUYS (multiple, see?) who would be okay with just making out and taking a girl home the next morning...or even that night. Some people just can't use their imagination (wonderful thing that it is) to find that WOW, some people AREN'T bastards who want into everyone's pants (someone's, but not everyone's).

"Sex is like a drug in college." WTF?

Did you hear about Mary? Yeah, she died from a sex overdose.

What about all the completely normal, healthy people who are hooking up or having sex on a regular basis? That's what always bothers me about these types of things: no one talks about the people who aren't all messed up because they have sex.

So I was interviewed several times for this documentary, I actually threw one of the parties where a lot of the footage came from.

I was interviewed with my fiancee, we "hooked up" and then dated, got engaged, etc. We talked a lot in our interview about the role alcohol plays, the role drugs, etc. We talked about everything that plays out in a situation where you have meaningless sex. We talked about how hookin up became a relationship. I also believe and hope since my face is in the damn thing, that the impression that the filmmaker gave me; that it would be more about what in college influences the culture, rather than about the sex and sex only, etc, will be a strong part of it. From what I know of what was shot and how our interviews went I think the trailer is a bad representation of what the doc could be about, but I haven't seen it yet, so I have no idea.

I know personally I spoke strongly about life experiences that influenced the stage in my life where the culture was prominent. I also spoke strongly about what society has done to encourage the culture, especially in the US because of the lack of sex ed and resources readily available to young kids before they get to college. I hope all of THAT got in there, because that is what I think it's really about.

It's not the college hookup culture, its really the sexual culture of this country because of our society.

But the trailer does look very preachy, but when I spoke to the filmmaker recently, it didn't seem like the final product was anything like the trailer. We'll see.

Hey All,

"The Filmmaker" here. What "Pantsoff" says about the overall focus of the documentary is true. I covered the heterosexual college hook up culture very comprehensively and did not leave any stones unturned. So, college students, and colleges, and parents responsibility were all covered. I documented it as it came to me. So, YES,there are comments about "Sluts" and "Cum-Dumpsters" in it and yes, there are "Frats Boys" talkin some REALLY bad shit and making themselves look bad. Are there students in it that don't seem to have a clue? YES, there are, and parents too. There are also experts talking reality about alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and consent issues. Call it preachy if you want. But, facts are facts. Including the fact that "there are so many horrible things that can come out of one drunken night of meaningless sex."

P.S. I am really glad that everyone is sharing opinions.The main intention of my doc. was to open a dialgoue about the pros and cons of "hooking up in college."