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Written by: Dan Merica
With Valentine’s Day lingering only a few short days away, many young men and women on campus are evaluating where they stand with one another, skating the line between two people who are “hooking up” and two people who are dating.
With almost total unanimity, eight students, one male and one female from each grade, stated that hooking up is generally more common that dating at Bentley.
The Women’s Center Executive Board exemplified this sentiment by saying, “We think dating first is less frequent today; the opportunity to date is less available for people our age and on our campus especially.”
Though nearly all the students questioned said that hooking up was favored over dating, many students struggled with why a culture of hooking up is taking root.
For one female senior, the culture exists because guys don’t have to go through the dating process to get what they want. “Guys can get with a girl without having to wine and dine her, and if they can get what they want without taking her out to dinner, why are they going to?” the student said.
A male sophomore agreed with this, stating, “There is no courtship or foreplay in any respect when it comes to hooking up.”
With that type of courtship generally void, most students agreed that the majority of hook ups originate at parties and under the influence of alcohol.
In the statement from the Women’s Center, all the members agreed that alcohol plays a large role in the hooking up culture. “We identify alcohol as a ‘social lubricant.’ It seems that alcohol often enhances one’s confidence and acts as an enabler,” they said.
The Women’s Center went on to point out that many people use alcohol as a justification for any action they made in the past. “It gives them a sense of removal and allows them to say, ‘I was drunk so it didn’t count,’” concluded the Women’s Center E-Board.
While Bentley may be a culture more grounded in hooking up, there was little to no unanimity in how hooking up is defined from person to person.
When The Vanguard sampled sixty random students in an unscientific study and asked them, “How do you define hooking up?” the responses varied from “just making out,” to “anything between making out and sex,” to “just sex.”
Though the definitions of hooking up may vary, according to a 2006 National Collegiate Health survey, a majority of Bentley students are either opting to not have sex or are monogamous.
According to the results, 63.8 percent of student responded to only having one or no sex partners in the last school year. While the number of people who had no sexual partners in the last year between men and women was comparable, 25.8 and 27.7 percent respectively, the numbers for one sexual partner in the last year show that women are more monogamous than men. According to the survey, 29.4 percent of male had only one partner in the last school year, compared to 47.7 percent of women.
In 2008, a survey of students from all over the United States by the National Collegiate Health Assessment found that a larger number, 75.8 percent of students, reported having 1 or 0 sexual partners in the last 12 months. The sample size for this survey was 26,000 students.
Those questioned who were dating someone, whether on campus or off, did say that sometimes, keeping a relationship can be difficult. One female sophomore described that occasionally parities attempt to broadcast your relationship status to all those in attendance.
“Yes, it is often more difficult to get into certain parties when you are dating someone and people know it,” said a sophomore female as she was describing a stop light party she attended. At the party, you wore red if you were dating someone, yellow if it was complicated and green if you were single.
“In my situation my boyfriend would have been uncomfortable if I wore anything but red,” said the female. She also stated that occasionally guys take her relationship status lightly, something that was confirmed by a male junior.
“It’s a challenge,” said the male. “It’s fun, it’s interesting to see how she reacts to certain things. It’s intriguing,” He continued. A male senior stated that sometimes he looks at boyfriends as just “minor obstacles,” and a male freshman said that he has broken up two relationships in the last three years.
All these opinions clearly point to some subjectivity in the hook up culture at Bentley, Mixed in with all these opinions are clear-cut emotions on the situation, ranging from acceptance to disgust.
While a male sophomore said, “It gets me down. I am sick of all that stuff,” a male junior said that he accepted the hook up culture, saying, “I don’t feel there is a need to have girlfriends and boyfriends on campus.”
Female explanations had just as many emotions, with one female senior saying it would be nice to have a boyfriend that she connected with on campus, and a female sophomore expressing disdain for some males by saying, “Their main priority is not going to be that I want to talk to this girl because she is a cool girl that I want to get to know. Their main priority is to get laid that night or as far as they can go.”
With hooking up becoming more and more common on college campuses around the United States, many believe that social norms will continue to change, causing students to redefine what it means to be in a relationship with one another.
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