time 
for 
more 
im­
port­
ant 
what they’re looking for but also 
doesn’t have a Title IX” against 
them.
Among pro-hookup-ers, there’s 
this conception that this new 
era of sexual freedom has ush­
ered in one of sexual equality 
as well. And that’s true to some 
extent—it is more accepted now 
to engage in casual hookups, 
and if anything, it has created 
more space for women to talk 
about their sexualities, at least 
with other women. However, 
the idea that hookup culture 
has waved its sexy little wand 
and magically removed all the 
stigma around “overly sexual” 
women is largely untrue. 
Take the experience of Jasmine. 
An enthusiastic participant 
of hookup culture over the 
past year and a half, Jasmine 
keeps a log of every person 
she’s hooked up with—mostly 
men—and how they performed 
(which includes “bad, good, 
terrible, awful,” and, one time, 
“treacherous”). Jasmine is not 
treated as a liberated woman by 
her Haverford peers, however; 
quite the opposite. “I feel as 
though the responses to wom­
en who participate in hookup 
culture are very deliberating 
and very negative,” she says. 
This doesn’t mean hookup 
culture can’t still feel liberating, 
and many women know others 
who staunchly defend it even 
if they them­
selves are on 
the fence, 
but it’s also 
often hard to 
tell where the 
endorsement 
of hookup 
culture comes 
from. “Am I 
actually even able to do this 
for myself or am I telling myself 
that so that it feels more okay?” 
Amy asks herself. A state away, 
Jasmine is struggling with the 
same thing. “I have a lot of my 
ego attached to this idea of sex 
positivity because I feel like I’ve 
been slut shamed a fair amount, 
so it would be nice to feel em­
powered and not victimized,” 
she explained. “At the same 
time, it can be very saddening.” 
“Am I actually even 
able to do this for 
myself or am I telling 
myself that so that it 
feels more okay?
For so many women like Amy, 
Jasmine, and Iris, it can be 
difficult to distinguish feeling 
empowered from feeling objec­
tified; feeling sexy from feeling 
sexualized. Hookups can feel 
shitty and self-actualizing at the 
same time. It’s hard to recon­
cile this dissonance for many 
women—feeling unhappy or 
ashamed of something they’re 
supposed to feel empowered 
by, or, on the other hand, 
feeling proud and excited by 
something they’re told to feel 
shame about. 
The more interviews I do, the 
more obvious it becomes that 
looking to “solve” whether 
hookup culture is empowering 
or not is absolutely doomed. 
No person, or culture, feels just 
one way about something that 
intimate. As Amy jokes on the 
the phone to me, “people 
have sex for three reasons: 
power, connection or fun.” The 
hard part, then, was figuring 
out which of these categories 
hookup culture belongs to. My 
theory? All three.
*All names have been changed 
for anonymity
4

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