Avoiding the Hook-Up Sinkhole: Personal Faith and Parental Fidelity

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• April 9, 2015

Nothing reveals the hellish consequences of the Sexual Revolution more than the emergence on American campuses of a new “hook-up” culture involving all kinds of polymorphous sex and no kind of moral or even emotional commitment. Because their own radical ideologies helped incubate this world of subhuman coupling, the university scholars who study such behaviors have been extremely loath to acknowledge that the hook-up culture is not part of the best of all possible worlds. But some evils are too palpable for even a twenty-first-century Pangloss to ignore.   Because of accumulating evidence that perhaps, just perhaps, some people—especially women—are being hurt in the sexual free-for-all that progressive theorizing has let loose, researchers at Brown and Syracuse Universities recently looked closely at the hook-up culture to identify those characteristics that bring female students into the hookup vortex and those characteristics that keep them out. As it turns out, a personal outlook (religious faith) and a family circumstance (an intact parental marriage) both shield against this nightmare of boundless and frenetic carnality. As an understandable preliminary to their investigation, the Syracuse and Brown researchers define just what “hooking up” means. Though they acknowledge that “casual sex can be considered a form of hooking up,” they see the hooking-up phenomenon as something “distinct” and broader. Hooking up refers to “a variety of sexual behaviors” (not just intercourse). What is more, “hookup partners usually know each other (e.g., friends) and may hook up on multiple occasions.” The researchers believe that hooking up is also recognizable by a prevalence that now runs so high that it “appears to be a normative experience of young people attending college today.” A defining characteristic of hookup is also manifest in the way that those who participate in it manifest a “desire to delay or avoid romantic relations