Anita Rao
It was while nursing a violent nosebleed at my very first frat party that I learned about the unwritten rules of attraction. I watched folks from my dorm flirt and pair off —hookup culture in action. But not all of us were playing by those rules. There were just as many people uninterested in a casual sexual encounter that night.
During my time on campus, and even years later, I've had questions about the so-called pervasiveness of no strings sex in my generation. I'm solidly a millennial, which means I'm probably supposed to know the answer to this: but what exactly is hookup culture? And how does it shape the sex we have? And the sex we don't?
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. After ample conversations with the Embodied team, I was relieved to know that I am not the only person a little confused about hookup culture. Our show's two producers, the folks whose job it is to research this stuff, have just as many questions as I do. Here's a little peek behind the scenes from some of our meeting chatter on Zoom these past few weeks:
Kaia Findlay
Okay, so part of me is thinking that hookup culture isn't actually a thing. It wasn't something that I ever participated in. And so I'm just I'm wondering if it's just something that like older people use to kind of critique younger people's sex lives or critique social media or stuff like that?
Audrey Smith
Yeah, I think that's a valid way of looking at it. There was definitely a period of about a year in my early 20s where I was having some more casual encounters. And for me, it was like a form of reclamation of my body of my sexuality. But I don't I do not consider myself to be a card-carrying member of hookup culture.
Kaia Findlay
Yeah, like, here's my, here's my official hookup culture card. I just have a lot of questions about also, yeah, who's defining it, I guess is my thing, is like, who's defining hookup culture? And what is it defined as?
Audrey Smith
I've heard people use that term since like middle school. But in middle school, it meant like, you maybe kissed once.
Kaia Findlay
Yeah, I remember in high school people would be like: Oh yeah, like this person hooked up with this person. It's like, what does that even mean? Like what happened?
Audrey Smith
Right? And I do remember having a conversation with a friend early in college — I think this was maybe freshman or sophomore year — where she said that she was hooking up with a lot of guys. And I asked her like, what does that — what does that mean? And I felt very silly for having asked that question, because it was just like, if this is a culture, then shouldn't I know what this means?
Kaia Findlay
I feel like it's like with so many things with sex. It's like you're supposed to know. But nobody actually knows.
Anita Rao
Nobody actually knows because there's not really a capital H capital C hookup culture. There are many hookup cultures. The go-to expert on this topic — sociologist Lisa Wade — defines hookup culture as a self-reinforcing set of norms uplifting the idea that casual sex is the best or only way to be sexually. The place where many of us first dip our toes in this set of norms? College.
Sophie Aaron
I'll set the scene a little bit. So Oberlin is located near Cleveland, Ohio, in kind of a rural area, where the student population is mostly coming from urban coastal cities. So you kind of show up with a closed circuit of people that you're going to be interacting with. There was a big divide between the young people in the town and the young people from the college.
Anita Rao
Sophie Aaron is fresh out of college. She graduated from Oberlin last spring and has plenty to say about her campus hookup culture, because she spent her last year there talking to her peers about their sex lives for her thesis.
Sophie Aaron
Hooking up is all about status. It's transactional, but in kind of a, like a LinkedIn kind of sexy networking kind of way. So it's more about adding to who you know than what you're getting from the situation. And so I think hooking up is more about self exploration. I'm going to use this term sexual projects, which was originated by Hirsch and Khan in their book, "Sexual Citizens." You have your long-term projects and your short-term projects. And these projects are basically what you want out of an encounter. And then when I say transactional, that's what I mean, is that hooking up is about you and what you want from a situation. And so if your long-term goal is to be in a committed relationship with someone, you probably are not going to be interested in hooking up for very long. So your sexual projects that you're looking to achieve through hooking up is going to be more about things you can accomplish in a night, like trying a new position, or trying a new dynamic.
Anita Rao
Well, you described things as being really transactional, you know, kind of knowing what you want to get out of it. How much of that is communicated to the other person? And what did you kind of learn about hookup culture and consent?
Sophie Aaron
I think what's changed during COVID is that the definition of what it means to consent to encounters has broadened. So before, there were a few things that you needed to disclose before you hooked up with someone, right? You needed to disclose if you have an STI. And you needed to disclose — you didn't even need to disclose what you were looking for, you just needed to set the barrier of like, this is not okay. And I think since COVID, there was a lot more communication about: Who are you interacting with on a daily basis? Do you have any conditions that might lead you to being more vulnerable?
And I have celiac. Before COVID, I, you know, was interested in hooking up with people. But I didn't necessarily want to do that in a committed relationship. But to not do that in a committed relationship meant that I was risking getting sick every time I made out with someone who had had beer, because gluten is in beer. And if you've ever been to a college party, you know that there's beer everywhere. So instead of being upfront with people that I was talking to, and saying: If you drink beer tonight, like, this is not happening — I would bring toothbrushes, like at an orthodontist's office that are pre-pasted, and I would hand them to people at parties. And I would say: Come back in a second when you've brushed your teeth. And it kind of caught on because who doesn't want to kiss someone with fresh breath? But since COVID, you're talking to people a lot longer before you actually meet up with them. And you develop more of a relationship. And so it's more comfortable to disclose things that can make you feel vulnerable — like I have a condition that, you know, if you drink beer, it's kind of doesn't feel great the morning after.
Anita Rao
Yeah. And I mean, as you're talking — the school you went to is really small, you kind of situate it in this remote area. I went to UNC, a public school, tons of students. And I think — I guess I want to bring you into this kind of comparison between how the institutions and kind of the vibe of a campus shape the hookup culture there. Oberlin in particular is known for being really queer friendly, and really like centering kind of kink and ethical non-monogamy are big parts of kind of campus culture. So how did the culture of the campus and the campus orientation shape how hookup culture took place, do you think?
Sophie Aaron
I think from the outside perspective, it is a very queer-friendly campus, which was really wonderful. For me, that was the environment that I intentionally was looking for, as a queer person. And it really did emphasize this self exploration element. And the prevalence of non-monogamy, really, I think, in ideal terms, would have created an environment where there's more communication between people and partners. But there was a bit of pressure if you didn't fit into these camps to act as if you did.
So I remember my freshman orientation week, the first thing my friends did — and I observed this throughout the years — we sit at a table. It's like, the third day of orientation, and someone whips out their phone and takes the BDSM test. And I was like, what is that? And it's an online test where you answer like 70 questions. And at the end, it tells you what kinks you have. And I remember one of my friends got vanilla. And they were kind of shamed for it, for not being into ropes, or leather, or whatever else the the test said, but just being listed as vanilla. And everyone was like, what does that even mean to be vanilla? And someone was like, oh, it means you're boring. And this person had never had sex before. So, this was the first introduction that you got with, kind of like, you had to go more extreme. Because at the end of the day, hooking up was about the stories that you could tell to people. So if you're having vanilla sex, that might be really romantic, that might be wonderful for you — but it's not so great when you're telling your friends about it. You know, they want to hear the craziest story of the night before.
Anita Rao
Oh, the hook up story. Honestly, I still find a good retelling as juicy and enthralling now as I did in my early 20s. But one thing I'm really stuck on when it comes to hookups — a quandary of sorts — is the false promises of hookup culture. There's this idea that greater access to birth control and less intense cultural judgment around casual sex creates conditions for sexual freedom and liberation. But I'm pretty sure that's only true for some, and that hookup culture doesn't serve all of us equally. I found an expert to talk to about this: Cherlisa Jackson. She's a sexual health educator and licensed professional counselor who's coached a lot of folks through hookup quandaries of their own.
Dr. Cherlisa Jackson
I think we are — we're not really understanding that we have ingrained in us very — I won't say archaic, but they are not current patterns of gender norms. We are still subscribing to things that are from like 1950s and before, and we're trying to apply that to casual encounters. And those two don't go together. You're either all in traditionally with those norms that have been bred into us by our parents and grandparents and whomever that did not agree with this kind of culture, and you're then trying to find liberation through those norms. And I think that's what happens now is everyone is in that space of thinking hookup culture has to be that there are no strings attached. But have you been trained to believe that there are no strings attached? Are you trained that you should wait for marriage? Are you trained with those thoughts in your mind? And if that's the case, when you go to hook up, you're going to have those narratives replaying in your mind that tell you to feel ashamed or judge. You'll tell that to yourself, because it doesn't agree with maybe the religious structures, the family structures, or anything that has been told to you before you got to the decision of liberation. And so we have to be really clear first, before we even enter into new spaces, that there has to be an understanding of why you're doing it. Can you handle this decision emotionally? A lot of people think they can handle it. But I talk to a lot of individuals who on the backside found out they couldn't.
Anita Rao
How does this look different for folks of different races and sexual orientations? As you've kind of talked with clients — I mean, how does hookup culture and how you feel participating in it look different for Black women in particular, um, a group of folks you've worked with?
Dr. Cherlisa Jackson
Yes, fantastic question. And your timing is awesome, because some of the research that I did for my dissertation required that I looked at all of the spectrum of women just in general. The dissertation topic was on HSV-2 in African American females. And some of the information that was discovered was that Black women specifically, we are kind of ingrained that we know that there are limited options. So if you are trying to hook up without the option to do so, then you could end up in kind of like the small pool of area, picking different partners that could be saturated in certain spaces. And then it just increases the STD rates and STI rates, because you aren't able to kind of spread out.
The other part of it is protection. And so I'm starting to see — or at least have also, you know, seen this with the clients, but also with the research — that hooking up without protection or having sex at all without protection is like the standard for Black culture right now. You see, you know, on TV, you'll hear it in music. And so in the minds of a lot of Black women in this research, it was that if I asked for protection, then I'm going to look suspicious. I'm going to look like I'm not clean, because everybody else is not really using that, or there's this, I can't fit the protection or it's too expensive. There's a lot of different perceptions that you cannot have the same kind of hookup culture if disease prevention affects your particular racial group or gender group. And if you are in a particular geographical location that has heightened results as well. So I have seen at least in the South, that the idea of meeting the hookup is kind of standard and even in the research when you're asking these women why they're doing it, it's like, well, it's the norm of my culture. It's what I hear in my music. It's what I do. I have no understanding of taking my time and getting to know someone and learning their compatibility. It's, I need to hurry up and do it before this person swipes on me.
Anita Rao
You've got to hook up because everyone's doing it — or are they? The data says maybe not. The go-to hookup expert who I told you about earlier. Lisa Wade, has conducted some studies on this and says that college students today have about the same amount of sexual partners as their parents did at their age. The average graduating senior has hooked up eight times in four years. And a third of students don't hook up in college at all. Plus, the definition of hooking up? Ambiguous. Study participants defined it for themselves. And their definitions varied. This data seemed contradictory to Sophie's experience. And she said the devil is in the details.
Sophie Aaron
I think the first question with that is, what are we defining as sex? And what are the researchers defining as sex? Because if you're defining sex as only penetration, then yeah, Gen Z is having a lot less sex. But that's probably because Gen Z is having sex in a lot of other ways. And that was what I noticed most. All of the research that I found, and all the people that I was talking to really, weren't having as much penetration. But they were having a lot more oral. And they were doing a lot more foreplay. So yeah, I think it was better. But I think you also at least at Oberlin, you knew who to stay away from. So if the people that this person picked out of a lineup to survey is like, I'm having less sex, it could be because other people around you were like, they're not so great. Like maybe don't. You're not going to have the most fun with them. But pleasure was talked about, at least among my peers, as the ultimate goal of a hookup.
Anita Rao
Yeah, I mean, I want to move to the pandemic a little bit, because obviously, that changed how hookups looked for folks, how comfortable people felt encountering people in the wild, casually. So Sophie, I mean, from your research, kind of what did you learn about how comfortable people felt hooking up?
Sophie Aaron
I think a lot of like, who you picked to hook up with happened in these spaces, which, I'm going to use a sociological term, which I love — it's called a "see and be seen." It's somewhere you go that's very public, and you go just to see other people and be seen by other people. So you put on your cute little outfit, and you go to the coffee shop, and then your whole dating pool is at the coffee shop. And then later when they're swiping on Tinder, they'll be like, oh, Sophie looked really cute in that little skirt today. I'm going to swipe right. So there was less to talk about, there was less to see, and people kind of forgot. And so kind of the reasons why you would hook up — to tell the stories to your friends — kind of disappeared. And at this point, I was a senior so I can really only talk about the senior experience. But I think for me what changed the most was I had to really sit with myself and I had to really reckon with like, the reason that I'm hooking up with people — yes, is to, you know, have partnered sex, which, you know, I find personally fun — but also to just experience some intimacy, and have some potential to talk to people who aren't in my pod of 10 people.
Anita Rao
The pandemic has certainly made introspection possible — when we have the energy to do it. For a cohort of Gen Z'ers, these two years of slowing down has made them enthusiastic critics of hookup culture — so much so they're trying on celibacy and abstinence and talking about it on TikTok. Join me as I scroll.
Joseff Inspiration
If you're sexually active — if you're sexually active, celibacy is something you may want to consider. For me, it gives you the opportunity to cultivate a self-care routine where you can cultivate your own energy, ground your own energy, because when you're mindlessly and compulsively sharing that energy with another, then it creates an imbalance. It's an uneven exchange of energy. When it's balanced from within you, then you'll be a little bit more mindful and a little bit more conscious about who, when and how you share that energy with another.
TikTok Creator
Good morning everybody! Did...
Jordan Jeppe
The first time I was celibate, I did it for five months. In those five months I discovered I was repeating the same pattern of my mom that I witnessed growing up. Once I discovered that pattern, I thought I was ready to be intimate again. It took one man where I self-abandoned and had no boundaries to know I had more work to do. So I went celibate again for eight months. And that's when I created my list of non-negotiables. This act instilled boundaries. It was my guideline for when I was ready to say yes again.
Single Woman Chronicles
I couldn't just have sex with no strings attached. I couldn't just have sex and get up and leave it like, Oh yeah, that was just sex. Every time I had sex, there was something taken out of me. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, I felt like I was less than with each person I had sex with. I felt like my worth was dwindling the more people I entertained and the more times I had sex. Because honestly, I wasn't having sex for pleasure, I was having sex for approval.
Anita Rao
Celibacy TikTok has exploded in the past year, with everyone on it defining celibacy slightly differently. It could mean no sex for a defined period of time, or no intimacy at all for a while. But it's definitely not the version of celibacy that's coming from a place of religious beliefs around sex.
Cindy Noir
Most people who claim to be celibate are not meaning it in the textbook version of celibacy, which is to never do anything ever. Most people do mean abstaining. So whenever I hear people use the term celibate, I pretty much in my mind say, you probably mean abstaining.
Anita Rao
Cindy Noir is a motivational speaker and celibacy TikTok celeb.
Cindy Noir
Hookup culture can definitely be a scam that not many women are actually aware of. In my opinion, hookup culture is being advertised to women to be a lot more enjoyable than it really is for us. Don't get me wrong. I am very much pro hoe and I support women getting their lives as they should, okay? But the unfortunate reality is for women who are engaging in hookups with males, most ain't getting they lives at all.
Anita Rao
Cindy is 25, almost 26 and began her celibacy journey about four years ago. She was in college at the time and already sick and tired of hookup culture.
Cindy Noir
I felt used more times than not. I was not being satisfied. I experienced even sexual assault in some situations, and just overall experiences that showed me that like, this is not what I want to do at all. And so yeah, it began for me at 22 when I just said, you know, let's just put our priscilla on ice and take a chill pill for a little while because this is just — it's not it. And I don't know what I'm doing wrong as far as I'm choosing to be partnered with, I don't know if it's just the culture in and of itself, but I'm going to sit down to figure it out. So that's where it started for me.
Anita Rao
So when you were in it, I mean, you kind of described it as saying you were doing it wrong. But your experience sounds really similar to a lot of other folks I know. So I don't know if you were doing it wrong, or the culture in itself just kind of operates in this way. But I mean, what did you kind of begin to think about your own sexuality as part of being in hookup culture? As we've said, there's kind of this myth that it is liberating, and not all folks find it to be that way. What was it like for you?
Cindy Noir
It was a very mixed emotion. There were times where I will feel empowered at the idea of calling somebody up just to give me pleasure, and then leaving. But even though they came and I didn't, and they left, I still had this weird feeling of like, yay, congrats to me. But it would always leave me with this mixed feeling of like, pat on the back for adhering to the social standard. But you and I both know we did not — this was not enjoyable, fully. So what are we doing here, if that makes sense.
Anita Rao
It does make sense. I'm curious about how you went from that to abstinence? What was the turning point for you?
Cindy Noir
The turning point for me was the last guy that I was intimate with, I was in college. And there was a moment in our intimate act, where we're in the middle of everything, and I look up at him and my intuition said to me, what's his middle name? And I could not answer the question. And then the next question was, okay, what's his last name? And I had no idea. And it was just this really weird kind of like, out of body experience of like, girl, what are you doing? Like this is — you don't even know this person's middle name and y'all are together right now. Y'all are in this act, and this is such an intimate act for you to be so disconnected to him in any other way. And so the drive home from that situation was like, just this real, tough love, like sis, what are we doing? How did we get here to where we're okay with opening our bodies and I don't know their middle name. And that's just, that's a real drastic zero to 1000, you know. So that was my turning point of, I felt like at the time, I don't think this is a proper act of self love. And I'm not sure why I am essentially self-harming me in this way, but I want to figure out why I think this is okay. And I just saw it as me kind of saving myself before I did anything that I couldn't reverse as far as like, getting pregnant, catching STIs, anything like that. So I just saw it as stopping while I was ahead.
Anita Rao
After the real talk conversation on the drive home, Cindy decided to try celibacy. For her that meant all non-solo sexual encounters were off the table. And she stuck with it for three and a half years. Her name for this period? A beautiful nightmare.
Cindy Noir
I've learned so much about me. I figured out — while hookup culture is a negative thing, in my experience — I was also acting from a negative place internally. So I was able to assess those things and work through that in these past three-and-a-half years and everything. But I call it a beautiful nightmare, because we're still humans. We still have wants. We still have needs. And to go against those needs is very difficult. You have very hard times, very hard weeks where you are craving the intimacy. But because you have a bigger goal in mind, you refuse that for yourself. And it's very hard.
Anita Rao
So when you chose to break your celibacy, what led you to make that decision? And how did that go?
Cindy Noir
Well, first and foremost, I'm bisexual, and most of my hookup culture was with males. Well, the whole thing was with males. And so this was my first time being with a woman. And she was the first person that I'd experienced, in my 20s really, who seemed to really want to get to know me for me. It did not feel physically driven at all. She knew that I was abstaining and respected that and had no — she had no real want to try to push that envelope or try to break that boundary. And it was very nice to get to know somebody who was just trying to get to know me. Having experienced that, she was the one for me, and that was who I decided to, you know, break my celibacy with. Unfortunately, she and I did not last. So since her I haven't been with anybody else, but it was refreshing to finally talk to somebody who saw me as a person and not an object.
Anita Rao
There's so much about this conversation that's kind of making me wonder about how we talk about sex and consent with new partners and long-term partners. And I'm wondering kind of what's changed for you and how you bring up conversations about your sexuality and what you want out of sex differently now, because of this experience.
Cindy Noir
Before, I was afraid to let my boundaries be known, let my wants and my needs be known, out of fear of losing out on that person. However, given these past three-and-a-half years of me experiencing an immense amount of rejection, quote, unquote, or people falling off once they found that I'm abstaining, it no longer hurts to see people walk away because of my wants and my needs not being met. So I'm very upfront. I need to see your STI panel. I need to know how much you care about your partner's pleasure. I need to know how successful are you at pleasuring your partners. All those things I like to talk about pretty early because I refuse to grow in intimacy with somebody who is not meeting those needs at all. And it's really interesting — because a lot of people like to hook up, a lot of the questions that I ask end up being filters of who is serious and who is not. The question of an STI panel has turned away so many people, it is sad and scary. You would think that people would care about their own sexual health in that way. But I've literally had people where I've asked for an STI panel, and they will literally tell me, it isn't that serious, and then block me.
So, there's, there's definitely — I've gained a level of self-advocacy of, if you're going to get access to me, you're going to do it in a way where I feel safe and accounted for and my needs are being met. And if I'm not experiencing that, you're not gonna get access to me. And it's just that simple. And it took me three-and-a-half years to get to this point, because it was just really hard to let go of this idea that if I don't agree to it, I lose that person. But now I understand if they don't agree to my boundaries, they can get lost. It's okay, you know. So that's the transformation that I experienced in this time frame.
Anita Rao
If you don't agree to my boundaries, you can get lost. If that's not a good second tagline for Embodied, I don't know what is. It is clear that at the end of the day, hooking up is ambiguous. There is no agreed-upon definition, no common set of rules, and how liberating it feels? That's also highly variable based on your own sexual narrative, upbringing, and comfort setting the terms of the encounter. If you're still curious about hooking up — because you want to experiment sexually, or in this moment, it does feel like it would be empowering — Cindy says great! But proceed with care.
Cindy Noir
I believe that, I think at the root of it is having an abundance mindset versus having a scarcity mindset. If you go into hooking up thinking that this person who was in your face today is who you should latch onto because there's no telling who will come after that person, you're going to experience so much more pain and heartache than you realize.
I think the reason why some people are able to do hookup culture so well is because they have the abundance mindset. They have their list of needs and wants. And they only want people who can meet those needs and wants. If that means they go through a three month stint without anything, they're okay with that, because they're not going to settle for anything less than what these parameters are, even though it's casual. So I would just say if you're considering, you know, engaging in this culture, have your list of non-negotiables, things this partner must be able to provide you before you're able to give your body to them. You need to have a list. Hookup culture is not just not having any boundaries at all and just taking whatever comes your direction. That is not what it should — that's what it is for some people, but I don't advise that. You experience a lot more negativity with that kind of thinking. So go into it with your own list of what you do want in that experience, and do not settle until you get that. That's what I would say.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast and WUNC's other shows on demand, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. Incredible storytelling like you hear on Embodied is only possible because of listeners like you.
This episode was produced by Audrey Smith and Elizabeth Friend, with help from Kaia Findlay and Amanda Magnus. Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer and Quilla wrote our theme music.
This show is supported by Weaver Street Market, a worker- and consumer-owned cooperative, selling organic and local food at four Triangle locations in North Carolina. Now featuring online shopping with next day pickup. Weaverstreet market.coop. If you enjoyed this show, share about it on social media or text an episode to a friend. When y'all tell people about our show, it really means so much and helps grow our base of listeners.
Until next time, I'm Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.