Yes, I am publically admitting that I read The Chicktionary. Whatever, I find it thought provoking, because I disagree as often as I agree.

I’m obviously not into abstinence. Time and again the inefficacy of abstinence-only sex education, for example, has been clearly demonstrated. I’m also in favor of radical changes to the institution of marriage - separating its legal component completely from its religious component. The state should not dictate what the church can recognize and vice versa. I don’t think that same-sex marriages are bad for anyone, especially not children - as a child of a divorce I believe that everybody’s better off with two parents, with no concern for gender.

Where I disagree with Chen is her staunch defense of “hook up culture”. It’s pervasive, to be sure, and that feels like an accurate way to describe it. However, she seems to equate it or at least throw it in a similar bucket to feminism and the disappearance of strict gender roles. I know feminism is a whole different can of worms/discussion (how many waves are there again?) so I won’t get too far into it here.

I’m hesitant to believe the “research” that these groups publish showing that hooking up (i.e. the act of engaging in physical intimacy in the absence of other kinds of intimacy) is neurochemically a travesty and terrible for our mental health. Though their argument that it releases certain chemicals but not others (ones that would be released during an encounter between two people who were also emotionally intimate) and therefore presents us with a combination we’re not equipped to handle sounds plausible, I’m not a biologist so I can’t evaluate.

However, buried somewhere deep under the backwards conservative moralistic rhetoric, I find a viewpoint that I do agree with or at least find valuable: When we take the easy way out and fast-track to physical intimacy before first establishing emotional intimacy, we miss out on a critical learning experience. We may never learn to be emotionally intimate. Again, these groups go further with it than I would by claiming that this is responsible for the abysmally high divorce rate, while I’m hesitant to make the judgement that all marriages were conceived as intimate affairs to begin with (they happen for all sorts of other reasons, you’d be surprised).

Instead, I’m inclined to make the claim that hookups should be treated like a common controlled substance (alcohol, marijuana, etc): If you do it once in a while and are careful and smart about it, you can probably have a lot of fun with minimal if any averse effects on your life otherwise. However, if it’s a habit and you do it frequently, you put yourself at risk for some unfortunate and sometimes serious consequences.

In general, lately, I’ve found myself becoming very middle-of-the-road on a lot of issues like this one. The Bay Area (and specifically my wonderful high school) raised me to be a bleeding heart liberal by simply concealing from me the ugly side of many of these issue - they don’t exist there. That is probably shortsighted but I don’t remember the dating scene or the “party” scene (such as it was) being an inherently sexist or racist institution like it is here. Boston, and college, have shown me some of the pitfalls of the liberal ideas I so blindly espoused as a child of the Silicon Valley. My experience here has shown me precisely why conservative and religious groups push back against the trends that they do. Of course I still think that they go about it all wrong (Bible-thumping etc), but I can sort of see why they knee-jerk-react to things the way that they do. But this is probably a separate rant that deserves its own entry, I’ve gone on long enough.