Should We Blame Porn and Hookup Culture?

Or are we just losing track of how to be humans?

I’m pretty unimpressed with humans right now. Although some part of me knows that the world is always going to hell in a handbasket (and yet we survive), my normal optimism about life just isn’t there. Maybe it’s due to two years of living in a global pandemic, or maybe I’m still grieving the loss of my mother, but I just don’t seem to have the same resilience that I once had when contemplating the state of the world.

I’m not just talking about things like the naked aggression of Putin, and the unrelenting stupidity of people who insist that the last election was stolen, despite zero evidence of that. People just seem meaner, more self-involved, and less able to go about much that resembles humaning. Relationships, in particular, seem to be suffering, and that goes double for romantic/sexual relationships.

It’s apparently a new trend to assert that marriage is some kind of “divine tedium” where anyone who has been married for more than a few years actually kind of hates their spouse. Demeter Delune recently wrote a story about someone claiming that it was a regular part of marriage to sometimes loathe your partner's touch. When did this become a thing?

I’m coming up on 30 years of marriage to James and I totally agree that marriage is a lot of hard work and that you aren’t always going to get along, but if you don’t both like and love each other enough to work through those times, what’s the point of even getting married in the first place? If you get to the place where you loathe each other’s touch, you need a therapist or a divorce lawyer, or both.

James and I kind of half-joke that we do the work it takes to keep our relationship healthy and vibrant because we both want to avoid the dating scene like the plague. It was hard enough 30 years ago, before hook-up culture, before dating apps, before ubiquitous porn. Now everyone seems to be emotionally stunted, transactional, and unreliable. I do know a couple of people who actually met terrific partners on dating apps, but I also know a lot more who found nothing on them but rudeness, entitlement, hatefulness, and boredom.

I saw a headline the other day declaring that young people in America have sexual freedom, but that it has come at a heavy cost. I didn’t bother to read the story because I think I already know what it would say. In the mid-1980s, traditional dating transitioned into a culture where people get with partners they barely knew or had no ongoing relationship with for the purposes of sex. I was once a swinger and now am a polyamorist, so I have no fundamental issue with that.

The problem arises, however, in how the people in these hook-ups are expected to treat each other. You aren’t even supposed to really like the other person, much less have any significant emotional connection to them. “Catching feelings” is looked down upon, and instead it’s meant to be a drink-fueled but also transactional way to get your sexual rocks off, although to be truthful, it’s a way for guys to get their rocks off. Many women participate willingly in hook-up culture, but it nonetheless prioritizes male pleasure and satisfaction.

Blowjobs at least are expected for guys for pretty much any sort of hook-up that takes place in college years or later, and many high school students expect this as well. Oral sex for women does not have similar standing, and is widely considered something that is reserved for “real relationships.” Partners drunkenly come together and he at least tends to leave with an orgasm, but for the most part, nobody is actually all that satisfied because it’s all so devoid of intimacy or actual human connection, which is what makes sex really good, even when done casually.

As Lisa Wade, who has long studied hook-up culture says:

After hearing about hookup culture, many older Americans wonder whether today’s students actually enjoy it. The answer appears to be both yes and no, as I learned from years of fieldwork. About a quarter of students thrive in this culture, at least at first. They enjoy hooking up and adapt well to hookup culture’s rules calling for fun and casual, short-term encounters. At the same time, about a third of students opt out altogether; they find hookup culture unappealing and would rather not have sex at all than have it the way this culture mandates. The remaining students are ambivalent, dabbling in hookups with mixed results. Overall, about one in three students say that their intimate relationships have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle.” Many of them experience a persistent malaise, a deep, indefinable disappointment. And one in ten says that they have been sexually coerced or assaulted in the past year.

Notably, my research suggests that hookup culture is a problem not because it promotes casual sex, but because it makes a destructive form of casual sexual engagement feel compulsory. Students who don’t hook up can end up being socially isolated, while students who do engage in this way are forced to operate by a dysfunctional set of rules. Hookup culture encourages a punishing emotional landscape, where caring for others or even simple courtesy seem inappropriate, while carelessness and even cruelty are allowed. At its worst, it encourages young men and women to engage in sexual competitiveness and status-seeking while meeting impossible standards of attractiveness. It privileges immediate pleasure-seeking and heightens risks that students will become either perpetrators or victims of sexual crimes.

I see hook-up culture as a reaction to the Relationship Escalator, the cultural expectations that when you date someone, you should either break up or take it to the next level until you ultimately end up married. There’s nothing wrong with resisting the Escalator. It’s completely fine to enjoy relationships of different sorts that may or may not lead to “the next level.” But what isn’t OK is treating other people as disposable, and interacting with them largely like human sex toys.

That’s where porn comes in. I saw my first (and my second) porno in a college classroom that was used as a theater on Saturday nights. On Sunday mornings, it was used for church services, which made it all the more transgressive to see a porn flick there. I had a friend who was a nursing student, and she needed to see a porno for her human sexuality class. A bunch of us went along and had a bit of a scandalous time. Just a few years later, porn was widely available on the internet.

I know a lot of people enjoy porn, women included. But there is really no doubt that it has warped our sexuality and our relationships for the worse. The issue isn’t sexually explicit material. The issue is the violence, misogyny, and transactive nature that are too often a part of the kind of porn that is most readily accessible. At the bare minimum, porn has led to worse sex, for both men and women, because it is entertainment and not a how-to manual. Even though most people say they understand that, it doesn’t prevent their brains from being influenced by what they repeatedly see as “normal” sex.

We know for a fact that what we routinely put into our heads has a marked influence on what we feel to be regular, normal, or usual. This is brain science, and also Marketing 101. Sex education in America is woefully lacking, so many if not most American kids who came of age since the mid-80s have learned the bulk of what they know about sex from porn. That means they see it as transactional, about “doing things to each other” and devoid of any real interpersonal connection.

I’m a sex-positive person who runs and edits a sex-positive publication, Sensual: An erotic life. I have no issue whatsoever with open sexuality, but this doesn’t mean treating each other like living sex dolls. True sex positivity, true openness to the naturalness of sexuality means valuing your partner(s) as human beings. My husband and I regularly have sex with an escort. I’m going to posit that our relationship with her is a lot less transactional than a lot of regular “dating” that is going on in the world right now.

We really like Tamara and value her as a person. I’m not sure the same could be said for a lot of “regular” dating these days. There is absolutely nothing wrong with casual sex. The problem arises when you don’t treat the other person/people you are involved with any respect or thoughtfulness. As far as I can tell, hook-up culture has not served anyone. It has fostered disembodied, “Get off” experiences that aren’t actually that satisfying for anyone.

Most porn is not any better. There is nothing wrong with showing explicit images of people having sexual connections, but overwhelmingly, that isn’t what porn is presenting. From what I can tell, the past 35 years or so have degraded sex, degraded real connection, and brought up a lot of folks into a sad, transactional paradigm.

People don’t seem to know how to date, how to connect, or how to be anything other than “me, me, me” hedonists, which ultimately leaves them feeling alienated and alone. Sensuality is beautiful, sexuality is wonderful, and can even be sacred, although it doesn’t need to be. And to be human is to be interconnected. Our brains are hardwired for cooperation and love. To intentionally move away from that is criminal. I really despair at times at the state of the world, because the human element seems to be so often degraded.

I find myself more and more feathering the nest of the world that I have created for myself with the people that I love. We are in a reasonably secure place, and we are somewhat immune from the vagaries of the outside world. Right now, I don’t feel that there is much else I can do. I nurture my beloveds. I try to give back to those less fortunate where I can. I try to feather my nest in a way that doesn’t take from other people.

And more and more, I just want to kind of write off the rest of the world. A lot of you people are mean and crazy, and you’ve embraced a culture that values that. I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m doing my work, and it’s often gut-wrenching. If you aren’t willing to do the same, then F U!. I’m creating a sanctuary from that sort of thing, and I am no longer going to feel bad about cutting you out. I support sexual freedom and openness in a way that is self-responsible. I don’t support “I got mine” narratives or bros who want to pretend they are progressive and poly all the while embracing “I’m gonna do whatever I want with no actual relatedness to you.”

Enjoy mainstream porn if it actually feeds your soul, but ask yourself if it truly does. Engage in hook-up culture if you can do that in a mature and self-responsible way. Maybe I’m just an old lady shaking my fist at the kids, but you all looked both miserable and eff-upped to me. Meanwhile, I’m having multiple sexual connections (covid allowed) that are congenial, warm, connected, and fostering the human predilection for connection — as well as getting off. Don’t be stupid. Humans are hardwired to be interconnected. Trying to play with sexuality in a way that is devoid of that is madness, and also ultimately not satisfying.

Your culture has failed you. You can be casual and still be connected and caring. You don’t have to marry or even date every person you sleep with, but that also doesn’t mean that you have to treat them like trash. It’s not an either/or paradigm. More open sexuality is a good thing, as long as it comes with basic human fundamentals of respect and connection. Porn has the potential to be enriching but it’s mostly toxic. Hook-up culture has the possibility to be freeing, but it’s mostly alienating.

Find your own ways to be sexually expressed in healthy ways in a culture that mostly doesn’t support that. Underneath it all, we are still human beings, hardwired for connection and interdependence. That is our biological imperative, no matter the current culture. Go for that and fuck the rest!

© Copyright Elle Beau 2022