The Hook Up Culture: When Sex Becomes Sport
...Popular culture has instructed us that sex has no moral significance. Rape is bad; all other sex is good. If this is true, then why is unwanted, but unforced, sexual activity a crisis?- an article by Jennifer Roback Morse
...The "hook-up mentality" is one of the legacies of the sexual revolution. The assumption behind that mentality is that sex is just another recreational activity. Yet many college campuses have date rape crisis centers, where female students can go after being traumatized by having unwanted sex, sex that may not have been strictly speaking, coercive.
...Popular culture has instructed us that sex has no moral significance. Rape is bad; all other sex is good. If this is true, then why is unwanted, but unforced, sexual activity a crisis? After all, young people eager to impress a member of the opposite sex let themselves get talked into all kinds of things. But we don't have "basketball game date crisis" centers, to counsel people traumatized by going to a basketball game they didn't really want to see.
...Posing this absurd comparison between sex and basketball games helps us see that there really is something unique about sex. The major premise of the sexual revolution is that sex is nothing more than a pastime. But the presence of date rape crisis centers demonstrates that no one really believes this. If sex were really just harmless fun, then being talked into it shouldn't be any bigger deal than being talked into a basketball game. The issue of consent wouldn't loom so large nor be so difficult to discern.
...The sexual revolution, given to us by both the Life Style Left and the Libertarian Right, pretends to promote morally neutral sex. But in fact, our modern sexual norms have a very vigorous, if tacit, moral code. For instance, we aren't supposed to feel bad if the guy we slept with never calls back. We are supposed to celebrate the freedom and independence of the hook-up. In short, we are not allowed to assign meaning to our sexual acts.
...Yet we keep assigning meaning to sex, in spite of ourselves. We want our sex partner to matter to us, or at least, we want to matter to them....Either sex is a big deal, or it isn't. If it is really no big deal, then "unwanted sexual activity" shouldn't be particularly traumatic. If sex really is a big deal, with substantial physical and emotional consequences, then we can't very well say that sex is just another recreational activity.