Yes, Hookup Culture Was Real.
But it didn't start with "millennial feminism."
Between the backlash to Lindy West’s questionable polycule (okay, I promise this is the last time I mention her—I think) and baby radfems on Twitter cancelling blowjobs, the discourse seems to be at a place where “millennial feminism”—or more vaguely, the sex-positive and anti-traditional (yet definitely not radical or gender separatist) feminist ethos of the 2010s, is under a microscope.
While I wrote about millennial feminism myself not too long ago, taking the stance that it had its problems but is still better than sourdough tradwife freeuse-as-Godly-mandate LARP or the cancellation of heterosexual sex as abuse and 2-year age gaps as “grooming,” I realized it was too unofficial a concept and too diffuse to accurately characterize. It was impossible to perform an autopsy on millennial feminism precisely because it was not a cohesive movement, and I kind of regret attempting that. But one particular subtopic of this era keeps popping up—hookup culture. Or at the very least, the idea that millennial feminism was (or wasn’t) responsible for it.
First of all, hookup culture doesn’t really exist anymore, because young, single people today are having less sex than ever. I’m aware that people like Clavicular and Myron Gaines believe that every decent-looking college girl is being “flown to Miami” (why is it always Miami?) but most single young women aren’t getting much action at all. But it did exist, although I’m aware many people still insist it was a fever dream we conjured up by watching too much Girls and reading too many R-rated confessional essays. But I would say hookup culture, as the dominant cultural vibe in media and secular urban centers reached its peak somewhere between the late ‘90s and mid-2010s—and yes, it was real, even if you personally did not interact with it.
But how, and why?
Hookup culture was not simply the acceptance of the fact that sex is fun, and women shouldn’t be ashamed of enjoying it, or that it was okay for consenting adults to have casual sex. If that was all “hookup culture” was, I’d have heartily endorsed it. But to its credit, hookup culture was also not the express forbidding of monogamy. Even in its heyday, people still got married. When you criticize hookup culture, its defenders (who also insist it never existed) are quick to strawman your argument as “they made it illegal to have a traditional marriage.” Which, obviously not.
Rather, hookup culture was the normalization of casual sex as the default within certain secular, young populations (especially college students) and the rejection of the idea that sex should carry any particular emotional weight. If you wanted monogamy, hooking up for a while beforehand without any discussion of commitment became a normal, expected stage before you became a couple. You didn’t have to do this in the sense that nobody would imprison you for abstaining, but it made dating a lot harder outside of religious communities, especially for teenage girls and college-aged women who never knew anything else.
