Damn. I had like a five page expose on why “Hook up culture” isn’t real and the locked thread eated it.

Very quick version - Hook up culture isn’t a real thing.

What’s actually happening is that no-fault divorce (California, 1970, last state adopted it NY in 2010) allowed women to leave abusive relationships for the first time.

Women gaining the right to be financial independent(Equal credit opportunity act, 1974) - have checking accounts, hold credit cards, take out loans - granted women a great deal of economic freedom.

Roe happened in 1973

Single women gained the right to contraception in 1972.

So very suddenly women could leave abusive husbands, handle their own money, get abortions, and control their pregnancies.

HUGE FUCKING CHANGES. Unprecedented in history. All these things had happened at various times and places (except the Pill), but for the purposes of this post this is the first time they had all been legal together at the same time. Women now have an unheard of amount of legal, economic, and sexual agency.

So this doesn’t produce huge changes right away. Young women in their 20s in 1970 go through pretty much the same pattern as their parents. But their children, women coming of age in the 80s and 90s, are the first generation to grow up with these freedoms, which means they’re the first generation to have to figure out what to do with them.

The result was, very broadly - More sex, more single parents, more living alone, more delaying marriage, more education, and more labor involvement (for middle class white women. Minority and poor women always worked). As the kids of the women of the 80s grew up (me!) and came of age in the late 90s and early 00s we continued the trend - Women, at least in urban cities, could have relatively shame-free casual sex, they had jobs previously bared to women, they had (a few) more partners than their parents, they could marry later and have kids later. And then the zoomers, who came on line post-Millenials, have taken those trends further - more sex, later marriage, more labor force participation, yadda yadda you know you’re living it.

So when people talk about hookup culture htey overwhelmingly focus on this idea that young people are having lots of unsatisfying casual sex, can’t find fulfilling relationships, and are marrying and having kids much later than usual. And all the articles talking about it throw their hands up on confusion about why this is happening. they blame it on phones. They blame it on tinder and grindr and snapchat and tiktok. They blame it on feminists. they blame it on feminists a lot. They’re really dead-set on blaming third-wave and sex-positive feminism for tricking women in to thinking it’s okay to have sex when they want with who they want and that’s why they’re unhappy now. They’re promulgating the idea that actually women want deep, meaningful relationships and men are using hookup culture to pressure young women in to having unsatisfying, exploitative, no strings attached sexual encounters.

What they’re not doing is talking about what’s actually changed between when hooking up started in 1993 and where we are thirty years later in 2022.

The 90s were a time of relative economic prosperity. You could still afford a decent house and all the other crap you needed on one middle class income. Being poor still sucked, but there was a relatively large cohort that could have a house, a family, go on occasional vacations, and send their kids to college on one income. Then NAFTA happened and fucking annihilated America’s unprecedented working class prosperity. All of America’s industry and manufacturing was dismantled and shipped overseas. Huge swathes of the US became economically post-apocalyptic. The .com bubble in '99 caused some problems for people up in the middle class, but that whole lifestyle came to an abrupt, violent end in 2007-2008. The Financial Crisis happened. Millions upon millions of people were financially ruined. Banks just outright, illegally, literally theft theft stole millions of people’s houses with no consequences. Millions more lost their houses when they couldn’t pay their mortgages. It was a massive disaster. I imagine even some of the younger zoomers remember how fucked up things suddenly got.

So now, suddenly, there were a ton of people who had just graduated college who couldn’t get the same well paying jobs their parents had, and thanks to Joe “Harm Reduction” Biden they were saddled with college debt they couldn’t discharge. Everybody lower on the economic ladder was just fucked (You know what I should have mentioned NAFTA I’m going to go back and do that). So all the middle class jobs were fucked, all the working class jobs were fucked, everyone was fucked. No one had money.

So what happened? Millenials started living at home longer than their parents. They started having more and more roommates than their parents. They couldn’t afford to buy houses until later in life, if at all. They couldn’t afford to have children later in life.

Meanwhile the financial crisis was scouring society of what un-alienated community remained in America. Vast numbers of communities were annihilated by poverty and economic insecurity. Established communities fractured as people had to move away for economic reasons. The bars, venues, and coffee shops those people loved all folded. Some were replaced by soulless corporate pod-people versions like Starbucks. Many just weren’t replaced at all.

So all these Millenials were living with their parents or a dozen roommates. Which meant they had little or no privacy at home, which meant they had a harder time bringing their hookup or date or sweetie home with them. Which meant, overall, less dating, fewer dates, and more hookups that didn’t require as much time or privacy. The communities and third places Millenials and their parents had used to meet people were diminishing. That meant it was harder to find partners, which meant less dating, fewer dates, fewer hookups.

Tinder, Grindr (especially Grindr), and other social media helped for a little while, but everyone quickly learned that online dating fucking sucked, so they didn’t do much to stem the overall tide of alienation.

And all this has just continued to build for the last fifteen years - More precarity, less entertainment as higher costs, less privacy, more expensive housing, education, and medicine, shittier jobs that took up more and more and more time, buying houses later in life turned in to never buying houses, rents increased obscenely further shattering communities, you know all this, you’re living through it.

For the zoomers coming of age in the 20s, what this meant was unprecedented economic stress, unprecedented social alienation and isolation that made it hard to meet people, economic and social problems that interfered with dating, and the total disruption of what had been markers of maturing and becoming an adult pre-2007.

Now Zoomers have all the same problems previous generations had - rape culture, terrible sex education, shitty dating culture, immature understanding of relationships, poor communication skills, alcoholism, all kinds of relationship problems.

But they’re having them mixed with all this other social, political, and economic bullshit - rising fascism, anti-feminist backlash, climate despair, doomerism, covid.

So what’s happening is people who don’t have a good perspective to see all the massive upheavals over the last thirty years are seeing Zoomers having trouble with maintaining stable relationships and having unsatisfying hookups and facing sexual violence and the nuclear proliferation of pornography, and they’re saying “Ahah! Hookup culture is the problem! if we just end or change or refute hookup culture things will be good again!”

And this takes a lot of forms - People blame porn, not recognizing or acknowledging that sexual violence and rape culture existed long before the proliferation of internet porn. Likewise, people being bad at sex, demanding, unconcerned about their partner, manipulative, and abusive have existed long before internet porn. Internet porn may have exacerbated this to some degree, but it seems unlikely to me, especially when other potential causes like the erupting of reactionary anti-feminism from “Dark Enlightenment” losers or Andrew Tate

People blame casual sex, with fascists claiming that women are being oppressed by the immorality of casual sex and that they only think they’re empowered when men are really using them for cheap gratification, and the solution is to reject feminism and embrace traditional gender roles (sexual and economic slavery).

Resurgent sex-negative second wave feminists, which I have learned to my infinite regret still exist for some awful reason, likewise say that third wave and sex-positive feminism deceived women, and that actually learning about your sexuality, masturbating without shame, and hooking up without being socially shunned was a dirty trick by the patriarchy and actually you need to… do… some second wave radfem bullshit I honestly don’t understand those people at all.

But none of this is going to solve the problem, first because the problem isn’t a new problem. Dating and relationships have always been really hard. The perception that dating was “easier” in the past is actually a misunderstanding. In the past huge forces of social violence forced people in to relationships and then kept them legally and economically trapped there with no escape. Conservatives love to hammer on increasing divorce rates as some kind of evidence of social dissipation when really divorce rates have shot up because women can now get rid of their abusive husbands without having to poison them. People have collectively chosen to forget that dating only a small number of people before marriage was often because you would suffer huge social or even physical violence if you were perceived to be a “slut”.