It’s Sunday morning at 11 a.m. and I roll over, hand slapping my phone to turn off an alarm that is blasting through the room and ringing in my ear, like God himself has placed a marching band on my nightstand and they are determined to play until my brain gives out. I need coffee and to figure out how to get the 190 lb man spread-eagle across the bed next to me home so I can actually finish the problem set I said I’d do on Thursday. A text sits unread at the top of my lock screen as I finally figure out how to shut the alarm off.
“Did you have a good night and did you hook up with him?”
I start to write out a text explaining that I didn’t hook up with him as we had only made out and talked until 2 a.m., and then passed out unceremoniously on top of the blankets of my bed. Then I realized maybe that was a hookup. It was an encounter with decidedly sexual connotations that had taken place in my bed — did that not count for something? My brain turned in circles as I fell back into a deep dive that had troubled me since high school:
What the fuck is a hookup?
Upon Googling the term, I was presented with an informal definition that stated: “an instance of people meeting, communicating, or cooperating, with the example sentence of ‘he had an hour-long phone hookup with his six Senate colleagues.’
To be honest, the image that came to mind was, of course, that of a phone sex orgy between seven Senators, complete with screams to completion at a mental image of fellatio while filibustering — but I was fairly certain that was not what my friend intended. Universally at Cornell, a hookup tends to mean a casual sexual encounter — most people would assume that sex is involved and perhaps specify in the instance that a hookup occurred without sex.
There is a universal understanding and casual belief on campus (and frankly in the millennial world) that the gold standard of a hookup is fucking. I’m not certain this should be accepted without some skepticism. Let’s all hope and pray that my mother never finds out that I have had a one-night stand, given I’m absolutely certain it would induce some form of cardiac distress — to her sex is something that must involve a level of meaning and emotional attachment to the partner. And while her form of feminism is arguably rooted in second-wave narratives that call on women to fight a patriarchy that oppresses them rather than my favored branch of third-wave “it’s 2017 so let me do whatever and whoever I want” feminism, I would be negligent to not remember my mom’s viewpoint is shared by some of my peers.
So what, then, does it mean that the best version of my night is getting laid and that hookups are solely sex — as demonstrated by the innate nature through which the questions I was asked were tied together?
It probably means both good things and bad things. Good for me, in that I know what I want and probably get satisfaction out of it. Bad for me in that I probably spend too much of my night focused on finding a boy who looks decently cute and getting him to want to take me home rather than having fun with my friends. Good for whoever I take home. Bad for the Collegetown bars who inevitably suffer because we just use them as a petri dish for experimentation, running laps around Hideaway in the hope of finding someone we would want to hook up with. And most importantly — good for the people who feel affirmed by this mentality and bad for those who don’t.
Everyone has their own standards for what a good night is, and everyone has their own definition of what a hookup should be. This column isn’t to say that hookup culture is a problem in and of itself because, frankly, that’s rhetoric used to uphold antiquated notions of gender and sexuality that are more oppressive than constructive for our community. Rather, it’s to say that we should remember hookup culture comes in different flavors: you wouldn’t ask your friend specifically if they got chocolate ice cream and then tell them they had a bad time at Purity because they got strawberry instead. So I’m trying to not ask my friends if they fucked when I’m asking them if they had a good night, and I’m not trying to imply that it’s what I’m getting at either — let’s let everyone set their standard of success, whether sex is involved or not.
Honey Ryder is a student at Cornell University. Sex on Thursdays appears alternate Thursdays this semester.