Roxanne Appleby
Masterpiece
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- Aug 21, 2005
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Hook-Up or Shut Up
By HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
WSJ, April 29, 2008
Sex and the Soul
By Donna Freitas
(Oxford, 328 pages, $24.95)
However high-minded their courses may sound – "Mirror of Princes," say, or "The Political Philosophy of Aristotle" – college students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom. In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after. And it's free. The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women – as long as the man is a fellow student and minimally artful about his approach. If he is thwarted in one overture, he may try another with a reasonable prospect of success.
No doubt lurid anecdote and popular myth cause us to exaggerate the actual frequency of campus hook-ups: Most college students do not share in these delights. But most students also believe that "everyone does it," even if the individual student, for some reason, cannot locate a partner. Thus an active minority sets the tone and makes hooking up a "culture." When there are no sexual boundaries, either official or informal, the standard becomes the extreme, and all students feel the pressure to appear more promiscuous than they are. The traditional double standard of sexual conduct – more restrictive for women than for men – has been replaced by the single standard of the predatory male.
In "Sex and the Soul," Donna Freitas, an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, acutely describes this "liberated" campus culture and wisely analyzes its effects. She is especially concerned to measure conduct and expectation against the inner life of students, including their religious feeling or "spiritual" selves. Over and over again she finds a conflict that does not resolve itself happily.
According to one feminist professor of health – the head of a recent Harvard committee on student sexual relations – sex on campus should be "mature, respectful and life-affirming." But, as Ms. Freitas shows, it usually is not. Instead it degrades both women and men. Women lose their sense of having a choice, to say nothing of "autonomy," the supposed goal of sexual liberation. They feel compelled to offer a hook-up when they really want a date without the expectation of sex. And yet they fear "getting a reputation" for doing just what they are expected to do. "I felt a lot of regret . . . ," one female student tells Ms. Freitas, speaking about a hook-up experience. "I felt that I kind of just gave myself."
College men, meanwhile, degrade themselves by becoming callous. They behave like charmless Don Giovannis who cannot sing. They are indignant at girls who "want to spend time with guys during the day." The nerve! One young man, speaking to Ms. Freitas, concludes that it is more acceptable for girls to be virgins than boys because girls are "a more docile gender." His experience has led him to speak in generalities about women – something supposedly now forbidden – and even to discern the traditional double standard in the very practices that are intended to destroy it. The only thing he has learned from promoters of sexual liberation is to say "gender" instead of "sex."
Ms. Freitas does not celebrate this state of affairs, but neither does she spend most of her prose denouncing it. Instead she wants to understand how the hook-up culture functions and what forces might be at odds with it. Rather than confine her interviews to secular colleges, she visits religious ones, both Catholic and evangelical. The Catholic colleges, she finds, are little different from their secular counterparts; they seem "more adept at creating lapsed Catholics than anything else."
But evangelical colleges make an effort to oppose the hook-up culture with a "purity culture," asking a level of sexual restraint that would seem, for most young people today, all but impossible. One is inclined to admire the students who attempt to meet the purity culture's strict demands. But it is clear that such students often suffer deep anxiety in their search for a mate. The boys find it troublingly difficult to put off sex, and the girls are fearful that they will have failed in college if they do not get a "ring by spring" (of their senior year). While students in the hook-up culture appear more promiscuous than they are, purity students appear more virtuous than they are.
Ms. Freitas considers sex to be a yearning of the soul, not an expression of power (as feminists would have it). She thus dubs secular colleges "spiritual," noting that women in particular enter into hook-ups looking for a "relationship." Both sexes, she argues, foregather "for a reason," if not necessarily for marriage. Both would like to have a shot at the romance (from olden times) they have read about. But romance requires holding back, and no one at Ms. Freitas's "spiritual" colleges has a respectable reason for doing so.
Ms. Freitas is not afraid to use a word like "soul" because her method is qualitative, a welcome contrast to quantitative social science, with its neutral questions, narrow statistics and ignorance of philosophy. Ms. Freitas gets students to talk, listens to them and asks for their reasons for believing as they do. She passes along some interesting student phrases, too: "the walk of shame" (back to your dorm the morning after), "frugaling" (pairing off short of dating) and "yes girls" (no explanation needed).
Colleges find it risky, Ms. Freitas notes, to oppose the hook-up culture. They do not boast of it when parents visit, but they are happy to look the other way throughout the year. Their main concern is to be sure that they cannot be accused of treating men and women differently, and they do not care, or do not see, that the result of sexual liberation is a culture that does harm to the young people caught within it. "Sex and the Soul" doesn't offer an easy way out, because there isn't one. But it makes us eager for something better than the goings-on at colleges today.
Mr. Mansfield is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of government at Harvard.
By HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
WSJ, April 29, 2008
Sex and the Soul
By Donna Freitas
(Oxford, 328 pages, $24.95)
However high-minded their courses may sound – "Mirror of Princes," say, or "The Political Philosophy of Aristotle" – college students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom. In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after. And it's free. The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women – as long as the man is a fellow student and minimally artful about his approach. If he is thwarted in one overture, he may try another with a reasonable prospect of success.
No doubt lurid anecdote and popular myth cause us to exaggerate the actual frequency of campus hook-ups: Most college students do not share in these delights. But most students also believe that "everyone does it," even if the individual student, for some reason, cannot locate a partner. Thus an active minority sets the tone and makes hooking up a "culture." When there are no sexual boundaries, either official or informal, the standard becomes the extreme, and all students feel the pressure to appear more promiscuous than they are. The traditional double standard of sexual conduct – more restrictive for women than for men – has been replaced by the single standard of the predatory male.
In "Sex and the Soul," Donna Freitas, an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, acutely describes this "liberated" campus culture and wisely analyzes its effects. She is especially concerned to measure conduct and expectation against the inner life of students, including their religious feeling or "spiritual" selves. Over and over again she finds a conflict that does not resolve itself happily.
According to one feminist professor of health – the head of a recent Harvard committee on student sexual relations – sex on campus should be "mature, respectful and life-affirming." But, as Ms. Freitas shows, it usually is not. Instead it degrades both women and men. Women lose their sense of having a choice, to say nothing of "autonomy," the supposed goal of sexual liberation. They feel compelled to offer a hook-up when they really want a date without the expectation of sex. And yet they fear "getting a reputation" for doing just what they are expected to do. "I felt a lot of regret . . . ," one female student tells Ms. Freitas, speaking about a hook-up experience. "I felt that I kind of just gave myself."
College men, meanwhile, degrade themselves by becoming callous. They behave like charmless Don Giovannis who cannot sing. They are indignant at girls who "want to spend time with guys during the day." The nerve! One young man, speaking to Ms. Freitas, concludes that it is more acceptable for girls to be virgins than boys because girls are "a more docile gender." His experience has led him to speak in generalities about women – something supposedly now forbidden – and even to discern the traditional double standard in the very practices that are intended to destroy it. The only thing he has learned from promoters of sexual liberation is to say "gender" instead of "sex."
Ms. Freitas does not celebrate this state of affairs, but neither does she spend most of her prose denouncing it. Instead she wants to understand how the hook-up culture functions and what forces might be at odds with it. Rather than confine her interviews to secular colleges, she visits religious ones, both Catholic and evangelical. The Catholic colleges, she finds, are little different from their secular counterparts; they seem "more adept at creating lapsed Catholics than anything else."
But evangelical colleges make an effort to oppose the hook-up culture with a "purity culture," asking a level of sexual restraint that would seem, for most young people today, all but impossible. One is inclined to admire the students who attempt to meet the purity culture's strict demands. But it is clear that such students often suffer deep anxiety in their search for a mate. The boys find it troublingly difficult to put off sex, and the girls are fearful that they will have failed in college if they do not get a "ring by spring" (of their senior year). While students in the hook-up culture appear more promiscuous than they are, purity students appear more virtuous than they are.
Ms. Freitas considers sex to be a yearning of the soul, not an expression of power (as feminists would have it). She thus dubs secular colleges "spiritual," noting that women in particular enter into hook-ups looking for a "relationship." Both sexes, she argues, foregather "for a reason," if not necessarily for marriage. Both would like to have a shot at the romance (from olden times) they have read about. But romance requires holding back, and no one at Ms. Freitas's "spiritual" colleges has a respectable reason for doing so.
Ms. Freitas is not afraid to use a word like "soul" because her method is qualitative, a welcome contrast to quantitative social science, with its neutral questions, narrow statistics and ignorance of philosophy. Ms. Freitas gets students to talk, listens to them and asks for their reasons for believing as they do. She passes along some interesting student phrases, too: "the walk of shame" (back to your dorm the morning after), "frugaling" (pairing off short of dating) and "yes girls" (no explanation needed).
Colleges find it risky, Ms. Freitas notes, to oppose the hook-up culture. They do not boast of it when parents visit, but they are happy to look the other way throughout the year. Their main concern is to be sure that they cannot be accused of treating men and women differently, and they do not care, or do not see, that the result of sexual liberation is a culture that does harm to the young people caught within it. "Sex and the Soul" doesn't offer an easy way out, because there isn't one. But it makes us eager for something better than the goings-on at colleges today.
Mr. Mansfield is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of government at Harvard.
