The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/hook-up-culture/)
With the ultimate sexcapade comes the ultimate playlist — that’s what 13 year old me thought as I sat in geometry class crafting the perfect progression of Spotify songs to accompany my first time. Lana del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful”? Perfect. The entire soundtrack from 50 Shades of Grey (though I had never seen it before)? Epic.
Creepy boys don’t often think of themselves or their actions as creepy. The rants my friends and I often have about how men suck don’t register in their minds as having any relation to them. They’re too nice to hurt a girl, they say. Still, there are many things that men have done to women on campus to make them uncomfortable and yet there are very few men who recognize this. That doesn’t add up.
I recently took my best friend to my date night, tucked her into bed and then woke up in the middle of the night to find her gone. I didn’t have to check Find My Friends to know she was one block down the street at a fraternity annex in the bed of a guy who only texts her as the hour approaches midnight every Saturday — like clockwork. It’s officially November, so this next-level trifling behavior is becoming increasingly common among my female friends. Days grow shorter, seasonal depression sets in as the first waves of snow trample the ombre leaves and I find myself yelling at friends over text more and more to get their self-worth in check. These are the signifiers of cuffing season.
All of us romance lovers have been there: a seemingly unimportant moment — maybe they’ve got food on their chin, maybe they roll their eyes at us — when we look over at our significant other and unpromptedly think, “God, I fucking love you.” Yesterday we were on top of the world, wiping mustard from their face. Today we’re cradling ourselves in bed while listening to James Blunt’s “Goodbye My Lover.” It’s at points like these when we envy our casual friends who prefer one night stands and labelless partnerships. Many romance lovers find ourselves falling head over heels time and time again. Once for the person in the grade above us in high school, once for the friend we’d always insisted was just a friend and once for the pair of unfamiliar eyes across the beer pong table. We love the idea of romance and gleefully look past early red flags (she still talks about her ex, he only talks about himself) to tell our friends we’ve found someone.
The “dating” app Tinder is ubiquitous at Cornell and most other college campuses. “Dating” is in quotations because, as most of us know, Tinder is usually not used to find significant others, although some have certainly had success in doing exactly that. Most Tinder users in my demographic see the app as a conduit to casual hookups. Tinder and other apps like it do have a function in society, but the way in which they’re used now is aiding the degradation of our society’s morals. At the risk of sounding like a prudish Luddite, let me explain.
There are coping mechanisms you invariably adopt during a dry spell. You rationalize it: Has it really been that long? Have there really been any eligible candidates? You download Tinder, delete Tinder, redownload Tinder, change your settings, swipe through and realize that your hometown Tinder is not what you had remembered it to be when you were swiping through the slim pickings of Ithaca Tinder. When an interaction with a member of the preferred sex doesn’t end in the wondrous, distant land of Hookup, you wonder, like Cher from Clueless when she was rejected by, as it turns out, a gay man did my hair get flat?