MUST-READ: Who is to blame for the hook-up culture?

I found this post over at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog.

What’s the problem anyway?

If girls are induced to make hooking up their most predominant mode of relating to boys, then they will be giving their sexual favors to a certain type of guy, one who is called a pick up artist.But what happens to another young man, the one who works hard at his studies, who is preparing himself for success in the world, who does not spend his weekend taking a course on how to pick up girls? Isn’t he going to be overlooked, and thus, devalued, by young women who are settling for hookups.

The hookup culture thus undermines a work ethic.

And if the model of the modern relationship is something called friends with benefits, what does that say about the values of commitment, loyalty, and fidelity.

Clearly, many young people have been induced to act as though these values do not matter, because they have learned the amoral lesson that it is alright for two people to exploit each other if they have agreed that they are not exploiting each other.

So how is to blame?

Meantime, Flanagan offers a useful analysis of how the hookup culture started, and how it took hold with the unintended connivance of mothers.

It began in the late 1970s with a generation of feminist mothers who had decided, quite consciously, to bring up their daughters differently.

In Flanagan’s words: “… a large number of modern mothers were committed to helping their daughters incorporate sexual lives within a normal teenage girlhood, one in which sex did not instantly and permanently cleave a girl from her home and her family.”

It might seem dated by now, but these mothers took it for granted that their daughters would experience their sexual awakening within the context of a relationship, with a boyfriend.

In her words: “This set wasn’t in the business of providing girls and young women the necessary information and services to allow boys and men to discard them sexually. Their reaction to the kinds of sexual experiences that so many American girls are now having would have been horror and indignation.”

What started out as a permission slip for teenage girls to have sex with their boyfriends morphed into the hookup culture.

Unintentionally, so.

We are dealing with unintended consequences. Feminists decided that the double standard was unjust. Mothers everywhere bought this idea and taught their daughters that they had as much of a right to sexual pleasure as any boy did. If the unintended result was the hookup culture, then surely they bear some responsibility.

It may well be that they have now learned why there is a double standard and why feminine sexuality should never be confused with masculine sexuality.

Read the whole thing. This is a must-read. I want everyone to click though and print it and read it. Please.

UPDATE: Kelli sends this link to a recent CNN column by Racquel Welch in which she attacks the birth control pill as one of the reasons for the over-sexed culture that is harming young women today. The pill is considered to be a cornerstone of feminism because it divorces sex from procreation and allows women to have sex without having to form relationships with reliable men and vulnerable children.