The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Hook-Up Culture: ‘Since I Started Having Sex With Men, Back in, Like, 1997’

Posted on | January 24, 2017 | 4 Comments

“Hookup culture has been alive and kicking since I started having sex with men back in, like, 1997. And I didn’t even have a Hotmail account then.”
— Meghan Murphy, Aug. 10, 2015

Did you ever hear of the “Three-Date Rule”? When I was a teenage hoodlum, the cynical view was that if you weren’t, uh, becoming intimate by the third date, you were wasting your time. Back in the Disco Age — before AIDS, and before MADD had forced the national drinking age up to 21 — there was no shortage of casual female companionship, so why should a guy bother with all that ridiculous slow-motion “relationship” stuff? If you’ve seen Dazed and Confused or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, you get some idea of what a reckless time that was.

 

Many of my readers, of course, are themselves old enough to have direct memories of that era and they can tell their own tales of how it was when, as Bob Seger sang, we were all workin’ on our night moves.

Really, there ought to be a T-shirt, “I Survived the ’70s,” and it’s easy to pretend that was all harmless fun, but there were too many who didn’t survive, or who sustained such damage as to permanently wreck their lives. Looking back, I’m reminded of what General Sherman told an audience in Ohio about 15 years after the Civil War: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”

Having learned my lessons the hard way, I was eager to make sure my kids didn’t repeat my mistakes. There is nothing to be learned, nor anything to be proven, by a repetition of the errors of the past. Movies may make the ’70s look like “all glory,” but it was all hell. This brings me back around to the old Three-Date Rule. Once you discarded all constraints of morality or social respectability, as teenage hoodlums do, what was all that “relationship” stuff about anyway? The whole point of a devil-may-care Bad Boy attitude was to convey a message: “Hey, you wanna party?”

This was a yes-or-no question, you see. No need to play games. Better to be up-front and direct about it, instead of wasting time. Oh, sure, there was necessarily some aspect of romance involved, but we knew we were all just a bunch of young sinners, and why pretend otherwise?

Who was it that told me about the Three-Date Rule? I’ve forgotten, and it doesn’t matter, because it was just standard operating procedure. No teenage hoodlum was going to waste weeks or months going through a lot of slow-motion romance when there were so many disco dollies who were ready to get down, get down, get down tonight, baby.

Baby, baby, let’s get together.
Honey, honey, me and you.
And do the things, oh, do the things
That we like to do.
Oh, do a little dance, make a little love,
Get down tonight, get down tonight.
Do a little dance, make a little love,
Get down tonight, get down tonight.

So much for the 1970s, then, and all of that was preamble to discussing Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy’s column about online dating:

Now, speaking only from personal experience, I am not a fan of online dating. When I was single a couple of years ago, everyone was on OkCupid and told me I had to do it because that’s just how people dated nowadays. I tried it for maybe a month, found it super annoying and time-consuming, realized there was no way in hell I was going to go on a date with some stranger from the internet, and went back to my regular life meeting men through friends of friends, at parties, bars, and in my neighbourhood, and lived to tell the tale. . . .
I do not believe either that “hookup culture” is new, directly connected to online dating, or that it has caused The Young People to eschew commitment and relationships completely.
In fact, I think all the hookup culture fearmongering is part of the problem, in that it convinces women they will be SINGLE FOREVER DUN DUN DUNNNN because today’s modern man just wants to f–k and has no interest in committed relationships. Hookup culture has been alive and kicking since I started having sex with men back in, like, 1997. And I didn’t even have a Hotmail account then. Hooking up was just what you did on the weekend and, quite honestly, as a young woman, I really didn’t care about being in a relationship. It wasn’t a priority for me at all. I’ve been both single and in relationships, on and off, for all of my adult life and there is very little that has changed since I was 17.

Read the rest of that if you want, but I just want to make three points:

  1. Online dating is for losers, as I’ve said before;
  2. Not only has the game not changed since 1997, but it has’t really changed since 1977, because sin is still sin;
    and
  3. If you’re still “dating” when you’re 35, you have lost the game.

Point #3 is where we confront the sad truth about Meghan Murphy’s “feminism.” Is she being honest when she says she “really didn’t care about being in a relationship” when she was young? Did she never have any romantic dreams of a happily-ever-after ending? Wedding bells, etc.? If so, she was a very unusual young woman, even by feminist standards.

Even the most cynical Bad Boy has to recognize that his hedonism is not harmless recreation. Bad Girls have their romantic dreams, too, and there is a limit to how many heartbreaks anyone can endure.

Smart girls never play that game. One useful term popularized by the pickup artist (PUA) community is sexual market value (SMV) and the smart girl realizes she doesn’t increase her SMV by, uh, becoming intimate on a casual basis. Furthermore, the smart girl recognizes that youth is a crucial factor in her SMV. There’s no point complaining about unfair double-standards here. We are describing how things are in real life, rather than theorizing an alternative universe of “social justice.” So when we read about Meghan Murphy in her mid-30s “meeting men through friends of friends, at parties, bars, and in my neighbourhood,” we are apt to shake our heads in pity. Oh, “as a young woman, I really didn’t care about being in a relationship,” she says, but what does she have now? Nothing but fading memories of her youth, looking toward a future that probably involves a tiny apartment and lots of cats.

It’s a death trap.
It’s a suicide rap.
We gotta get out while we’re young,
`Cause tramps like us,
Baby, we were born to run.

Yeah, smart girls never get into that game, but if somehow they do, they’re smart enough to get our while they’re young. Sing it, Bruce.

 

Say what you will, kids — the music was just better back then.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

4 Responses to “Hook-Up Culture: ‘Since I Started Having Sex With Men, Back in, Like, 1997’”

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    […] minds think alike and, at the very moment I was tsk-tsking over Meghan Murphy’s sad fate, Zaklog the Great was posting this […]

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