I Was Wrong About Hookup Culture

Don’t be fooled by the top percentile of attractive, sexually liberated women

This week, I saw a tweet from a young woman criticizing the show Sex and the City because the characters slept with too many men.

tfw too many men

As a millennial who came of age in the Sex and the City era, this is amusing—of course they slept with lots of men. Imagine if I asked why all the characters on Seinfeld had to be so neurotic, nitpicky and Jewish-coded.

But this woman was probably not a millennial, and I imagine she didn’t know the context behind the show. Sex and the City might be considered basic bitch chum today, but it was revolutionary for its time. Speaking of Seinfeld, the main reason that the famous “masturbation episode” never actually mentioned masturbation was because they weren’t allowed to. That kind of raunch just wasn’t seen on TV. Sex and the City, on the unleashed HBO, took TV where it typically wasn’t allowed to go. It might not seem shocking to me today, because I can open Twitter and, without my consent, be served a close-up photo of a clitoris. But back in the late ‘90s, you couldn’t even talk about clitori on cable TV, and there was Sex and the City, with an entire episode dedicated to Mr. Pussy, a character whose main trait was being good at cunnilingus.

Now, my mom didn’t let me watch Sex and the City. It’s not hard to imagine why. But her main concern wasn’t the explicit nature of the show. She was worried that I, as a teenage girl, wouldn’t understand the cultural commentary. Sex and the City wasn’t necessarily aspirational—the point wasn’t to glorify commitment-free sex, or present it as a cultural norm. In fact, if you actually watch the show, you’ll see that most of the women ultimately crave marriage and a family. If Carrie wanted to fuck every Chad in town, she wouldn’t have been so embarrassingly down bad for Mr. Big. Had I watched it in my formative years, another piece of the show would have been lost on me, which is that it satirizes an extremely small, outlier group of women. But because that show was so popular, it seems that this group (and the behaviors of this group) have been misconstrued as a societal norm.

Dick so good he got me talking like Chalamet

Most people today aren’t watching Sex and the City—at least men aren’t. But Sex and the City has taken a new form. No, not the form of all the spinoffs and movies, but in the form of TikTok, where the top tier of attractive urban women—especially those who talk about their very active dating lives—are disproportionately boosted. It’s easy to see how people (including me) can be led to believe that the accepted societal norm is lots of commitment-free debauchery with multiple partners.

Some of the women sharing lurid dating stories are influencers, others are just over-sharers, and many others are actual sex workers, especially the ones who are suspiciously always being flown to different cities by rich men. I’m not passing judgment on any of them, but it’s safe to say they don’t represent your average woman. They don’t even represent your top 20% of attractive, socially active women. But because these videos are so popular, and because attractive people in general are boosted on TikTok, many young people believe exactly what my mom was trying to prevent me from believing by watching Sex and the City—that everyone but you is having loads of glamorous, casual, cosmopolitan, sex.

Not to beat a dead horse but that isn’t your POV

Well, I have the data, thanks to a recent survey of mine.