Apps are free to facilitate easy hooking up, but they should encourage users to respect and engage their sexual partners, not disregard them, and they need to take a stand against discrimination. This culture of normalized casual sex, often fueled by dating apps, is prevalent across college campuses. Certain dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are even recruiting student ambassadors on college campuses, and features like TinderU specifically cater to the college experience.
Students could easily think that a culture that embraces casual sex, including sex outside relationships and sex with multiple partners, is synonymous with a sexually liberated culture. Yet despite its promise of liberation, hookup culture often fails to live up to that ideal. And our generation is hardly the first to try to cultivate such a culture. Newhouse School of Public Communications. In fact, what has brought about our new conversation surrounding hookup culture may not be so much that the concept of sexual liberation is new, but rather that we have many new forms of connecting with others, mainly because of apps designed specifically to make hooking up easier.
That potential is often marred by interpretations of casual sex that cast women as a prize to be won, a conquest, which is hardly liberating. This commodification of sex and dating, along with the robotic and artificial nature of premeditated messages, is a far cry from the free-love ideas of the sixties. People and their bodies deserve respect, and disrespect can quickly become discrimination.
The apps, in my opinion, are simplistically designed just to make connections, not to be able to have the in-depth conversation that needs to happen when you want to be physically and emotionally intimate with other people. If we want to truly realize the goals of the sexual liberation movement started so many decades ago, we need to stop telling people to hook up and engage in casual sex or stay committed and monogamous.
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We need to empower one another to make the choices that are best for us as individuals. Mallory Stokker is a junior magazine journalism major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at [email protected]. Read more ». Photographer Nabil Harb beckons people to see his central Florida hometown in its true essence.
