“Researchers at Kinsey date the inception of hookup culture to around 2000-the same year Tom Wolfe wrote about a new emerging definition of “hooking up,” which used to mean just meeting up but now meant “a sexual experience.” But I think the change in sexual culture was actually already well underway in the mid-to-late nineties due to a convergence of many factors-most significantly, the spread of the Internet and the availability of online porn”
“Women were being told that the reason for the decline in men’s interest in commitment was all our fault. A new wave of dating books appeared-notably 1995’s mega bestseller The Rules-which said that if women wanted men to commit to them, they had to play hard to get, not five it up on the first date like sluts. “All these years of feminism—-so we could learn to behave?” wrote my friend Elizabeth Wurtzel. “Did Germaine Greer importune us so long ago with the words, Lady, love your cunt’…so we could be told not to succumb to sexual abandon on the first date?”
“Psychologists who study relationships call this “technoference”-the way in which smartphones have disrupted our ability to focus on each other in relationships and even in conversations. The sociologist Sherry Turkle calls this being “alone together,” meaning that technology demands so much of us, we’ve stopped being present when we’re together in person”
“Like so many other things seen as sexist, wanting to be a princess-which the writer Marjorie Williams once deftly described as “to aspire to perpetual daughterhood, to permanent shelter. To dependency”-had been repackaged as “feminist”…..But looking back, it strikes me as a kind of unwitting indoctrination. “I wish I’d never seen that stuff either,” my mother told me later. “I wish I’d grown up on Wonder Woman”
“I’ve wondered sometimes whether millennials-who seem to so resent baby boomers for being at the wheel of our collective car as it sped toward the cliff at the end of the world-have ever stopped to consider the fact that online dating, which millennials were the first generation to adopt en masse, was actually popularized by a white male baby boomer…He belongs to a generation of guys, the father of the young men using online dating today, who were raised on pop culture flooded with sexism and sexualization”
“And you can say that that isn’t so different from society at large,” McLeod went on, “but I do think the way that these services are designed sort of like tops the scale in culture toward hookups and sort of gives men-or gives those looking for hookups-the upper hand, essentially, in this new world”
“This is a common misreading of both feminism and hookup culture-a misreading whose veiled message is slut-shaming, suggesting that feminism makes women easier to get into bed, and men therefore more likely to score. But hookup culture, as it has been defined by researchers, isn’t about having more sex, necessarily-it’s about having sex without an emotional connection, and, arguably, this has been driven by men, since studies also show that women are generally more interested in forming relationships”
“What exactly are dating apps engineered to make us do? Why, to use them more and more. The primary aim of all social media companies, according to Sean Parker in that 2017 interview, stems from the question: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” The value of these platforms rises with use; the more people use them, the more data is collected”
“And it’s the tech industry that has actually “won” in this situation, as we’ve become even more dependent on its products to mediate everything we do”
“Millennial men were born and came of age during what, in 1989, Andrea Dworkin first called the “war on women”-now understood as the persistent decades-long effort by the Republican Party to overturn the gains made by the second wave of the feminist movement in areas such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, and workplace discrimination. And this political hostility and its cultural reverberations have, I think, done a number on young men’s attitudes towards women. Millennial men were also born and came of age during backlash and its media-driven assault on feminism. During their lives, they’ve seen the rise of a type of hypermasculinity more extreme, and certainly more crass, than that ever exemplified by James Bond or John Wayne”
“But most significantly, I think, millennials were the first generation of men to grow up with the Internet, with cell phones, social media, and online porn-all innovations led by men in deeply sexist industries: tech and porn”
“And porn hurts men as well. Recent research suggests that young men who consume porn have lower sexual satisfaction and are more likely to be “depressed, unable to enjoy intimacy, and suffer from desensitization of feelings, dissatisfaction, loneliness, isolation, and compulsion,” according to a 2012 article in Psychology Today. What’s more, studies, say that girls and young women suffer from a loss of self-esteem from seeing women sexualized in mainstream porn-which almost always shows women pleasing men and not the other way around”