Does hooking up hurt our future relationships—and should we be adjusting our private behavior for a potential audience?
Who gives a fuck about the Fuck List? Well, everyone. In the past few weeks, the so-called Duke Fuck List—a comprehensive “study” of 13 undergraduate men and their bedroom behavior—has become so sensationalized that even the New York Times and the Today Show have picked it up.
The story stirs up the sometimes dormant, but always present, fear that monogamy is in dire straights and the demise of monogamous relationships among today’s college students is a—key word—trend.
This is not the kind of trend that tricks you into buying a pair of orange plaid pants that ends up in the Goodwill pile. This is the kind of trend that is felt, a silent threat to the social order.
So let’s indulge the trendophobes, and ask: What exactly are the trends signified by the Fuck List, and what do they mean?
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College students have replaced monogamous relationships with hookup culture. Their focus is on a continuous stream of hookups, not on dating and building long-term relationships.
There’s a pervading notion that habitual hookups will stunt future relationships. How will students develop relationship skills beyond buying drinks or batting their eyelashes?
I think this problem seems worse than it is. Relationships and hookups can closely resemble each other: they both involve highly gendered roles, and revolve around a principles of sex and attraction.
As the word itself indicates, relationships encourage us to see ourselves in relation to others. As the needs, demands, and desires of our partners change, we must constantly reposition ourselves. When our words and actions deeply affect those we care about, we begin to understand the necessity of self-reflection and personal accountability.
None of this is to say that these lessons can only be learned—or, for that matter, are always learned—in the context of a monogamous relationship, or that hookups cannot provide the same opportunities for growth. Hookups provide opportunities to explore and fulfill desires. They can help to develop and understand one’s sexuality.
Admittedly, pleasure on demand is not very conducive to communication and introspection. If you examine the Fuck List, however, the author actually demonstrates self-reflection. She writes of feeling self-conscious or mentally unprepared for sex, and explores how these feelings impact and limit her sexual pleasure. In her “findings,” the author confronts and examined her complex sexuality; the fact that the whole saga is presented as a thesis indicates that something was learned.
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This leads us to the second trend: Women are having sex for pleasure—and thinking about it.
While decades of feminist efforts have promoted the acceptance of women’s sexual desires and pleasures, the response to the Fuck List indicates that it’s still not commonplace. Society still struggles with the idea of women getting pleasure from sex.
For men acting in hookup culture, the attractiveness of a woman is enough to signify the quality of the sexual encounter. Hook up with a hot girl? Way to go, dude. Whether the sex was good or not is secondary: male pleasure, it’s assumed, comes from the ranking of his partner’s appearance and the thrill of having possessed it.
But men’s bodies are not as readily available as eroticized objects. For a woman to validate a sexual experience, she must discuss, analyze, and evaluate the tiny details.
This is the unspoken discourse embedded in the Fuck List chatter: discomfort with the author asserting herself as an independent sexual being and giving some male partners poor evaluations. And this is what strikes me as the root of the issue.
If the Fuck List had been called the Date List, and included evaluations of the men’s bodies and behaviors in equally explicit terms—except in the context of a polite date—I can’t imagine the story would have gone viral.
Similarly, some have said that what’s buzz-worthy is the mere act of a woman gloating of promiscuity. And in some cultures, this behavior is certainly frowned upon. But imagine this: if the author had given all her “subjects” glowing, gushing, fawning reviews, would it have really gotten the same reaction?
No, the author’s pleasure per se isn’t threatening. The issue is that she declared her dissatisfaction with her male partners’ regard for her needs—she asserted that a man was not good enough.
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There are valid critiques of the Fuck List’s scientific method. It is unacceptable that the men involved did not have the chance to provide consent before their names and faces were publicly attached to private and personal information. No one deserves that treatment.
Some may argue, citing Ariel Levy and her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, that the Fuck List isn’t doing women any favors: it’s simply endorsing the male “raunch culture” and facilitating an atmosphere where women can be more freely objectified. The HarperCollins editor who called the Fuck List author “the female Tucker Max” wasn’t helping her case. To be sure, the crude objectification and even cultural bigotry make for some awfully cringe-worthy moments.
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The invasion of privacy is another major issue. Is the Fuck List a natural development from our public life in the Facebook era? Should we no longer be surprised when intimate details from our private life go public? When those details do get out—and they will—are we prepared to rethink our sexual behavior for public consumption? Should we be reevaluating our actions—sexual or otherwise—knowing that our privacy is no longer a clearly defined right?
This is the discussion we should be having. Criticizing the author and the generation she represents is counterproductive. Instead of fretting about the state of our emerging adults, we must examine what our society’s reactions say about gender roles and sexuality, the dissolution of our private lives, and how our behavior—now documented for the world to see—must evolve to confront both of those things.
If anything, what the Fuck List brought about was a wake-up call to anyone sexually active. Behave like you’re being judged—you probably are. Put a toe, or anything else, out of line and the private is put up for public examination.
All this proved is that some women can be boorish, screw-anything slobs just like some men.
We have finally risen to the level of bonobo apes.
It will be funny to see how her exploits play out to future relationships and jobs–I see her future in writing sex blogs.
The problem is with the “raunch culture” is that its beginning to hurt the perception women have of men in general. All of the sudden my intentions are questioned; put under a microscope to see if they are wholesome. Men are now longer assumed as inherently trustworthy, they are assumed to have less-than-perfect intentions.
This is a wonderful commentary and analysis. Monogamy has always been challenged only the current generation of emerging adults are more free and open in their sexual habits. How this actually works out in the end remains to be seen. With a 60% divorce rate it is obvious that long term committed relationships are difficult and the older generations do not have it all figured out. I’m a boomer and I can’t say that we made it work all that well – and we tried free love and communes. In the end we gravitated to families like we invented them… Read more »
News: Duke undergrad woman gets regularly juiced and screws her way through the baseball team, discovering the joys of dirty talk in person and by text, as well as performing the occasional blowjob in a stairwell. She assesses her sexual partners by their inventive forcefulness at sex and the size of body parts. She goes public with this information. Dialog ensues: Is this the end of civilization? Is she a slut or trailblazer? Non-news: Duke undergrad athlete regularly screws mildly drunken sorority girls and cheerleaders, bragging to his teammates on the body parts of his sexual partners, their willingness to… Read more »
If the F* list had been made by a man, he would be demonized, called a sexist, and …
… given a book deal. And later a movie.
Yes, just like Elizabeth Gilbert.
Miriam – I enjoyed your article because you dig beneath the f**k list itself to the source of the media attention – what is going on here? what is new here? what isn’t ? and what does it all mean? I appreciate your thoughtful attention to how hookups exist on a spectrum of ways of relating to each other. We of older generations should be careful not to narrate declension around social change, our sexual coming up and coming out was exactly magicaly, and as gender inequality lessens I HOPE new social forms will emerge for sexual initiation, experimentation and… Read more »
Miriam, Your article brought up an interesting side of this issue which is usually glossed over in the 24 hour news cycle. However, is it really because The List included a frank discussion of sex by a woman who admitted both her enjoyment and lack there of with sex with a variety of men that it was so readily up taken in the media, or simply because it involved lurid details of sex on a college campus? You are absolutely right that if it had been called the date list and graphically described men in a date setting it would… Read more »
Nope, you’re in training. Seriously, hooking-up seems to be a little casual/brief. But I’m grateful to have had quite a few relationships. Sex needs experience, like anything else worth doing. I handle the “public” exposure question by not paying attention to it. It’s as George Bush said post 911, “Don’t let this scare you off from what you’d normally do.” (Never thought I’d quote Bush, BTW.)
My issue is publishing this stuff without any consent. That’s abhorrent. Much more so than the behavior itself. And Tom is right, it could all be bullshit. There’s no way of knowing what’s truth and what lies she made up as part of her own personal agenda.
Hypothetically, if she had these guys sign off on this with full knowledge of her intent, I have no problem with it. I understand that skews the whole point and compromises her objective, but there’s no other way to do it that is right.
Given that she meant it to be a private joke between her and two friends (one of whom leaked it), it’s tough to say what her “objective” or “agenda” really was, and she had no obligation to let the truth get in the way of a good story. I don’t think she intended to seriously exploit her subjects.
My question for you is do you think that men who engage in similar behavior (talking about/and or writing down sexual details about an encounter with a partner, including judgment on that partner’s performance) get their permission? I think not.
Stacey: I’d be upset by anyone who is responsible for this kind of stuff being published with names and faces. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. However I do find it interesting you’re trying to turn this into an argument regarding sexism simply because it was a woman who did this and not a man. Talking about sexual exploits I do not have a problem with. That will always occur. I can only speak from the male perspective, but we’re sure at some point to exaggerate our own experiences. As long as it doesn’t rise to the level of slander… Read more »
The woman who created that list is a publicity seeking female dawg (yes, women are as well, though I’ll refrain from saying the proper term). And I won’t give her what she so desperately wants: fame. I just ignore any news story relating to her campus freak shows.
You ignored it so much that you posted a comment. You just fed the dawg. :/
Thanks Miriam for this powerful piece centered on an issue we are grappling with at The Good Men Project. Casual sex is, of course, not new. I grew up in the 60s of free love in a commune where there was plenty of sexual swapping going on, much of it homosexual. So I have no problem with that. But as the father of a 16 year old girl and 14 year old girl the dominance of the hook up culture does scare me. And I hear consistently from my daughter and her friends that they are hooking up because monogamy… Read more »
“Behave like you’re being judged—you probably are.”
THAT is what will ruin any possibility of strong relationships. Period.
Wow! Bold post. Thanks for “going there” – I remain fascinated with how social media and its omnipresence is impacting EVERYTHING. If Facebook had been around when I was in school I would have joined a convent for my education just to be safe.