Freitas View on Hook Up Culture vs Hookup Culture at Scu

Donna Freitas’ book The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy reflects eight years of research about casual sex in college. Her observations lead to the fact that students exaggerate how much sex they have, and stay silent about their real feelings. In her view, students are struggling, which means that they need to be provided with resources to answer their unmet needs. Freitas combines intensive research and her own experiences as a theologian and teacher to investigate the struggles of college students to reconcile two features of their campus life — spiritual longings and sexual freedom. In this paper I’ll compare Freitas’ general observations on hook up culture and dating with the hook up culture in SCU and examine how it is distinctive.

Freitas finds that most people are ambivalent about it at best. Though longing for something more serious, people go along with it because their peers do, an act of conformity. Of students who reported hooking up was a part of their lives, she finds that 41 percent used words such as “regretful,” “empty,” “miserable,” “disgusted,” and even “abused” to describe the experience. An additional 23 percent expressed ambivalence, and the remaining 36 percent said they were more or less “fine” with hookups. When nearly two-thirds of students say they don’t think their own decision was “fine,” it is blatant that there is no absolute connection between cultural and spiritual expectations and real experience. Many students don’t even like hooking up, but pretend they do due to the social pressures and hook up culture being a big part of campus social life.

I think SCU is one of those typical colleges where its hookup culture is not as severe as the hookup culture at larger colleges. It is not a culture that anybody is forced to be a part of, but it is there. I feel like there are a lot of serious relationships here unlike at other colleges. This makes the hook...