The Failure of the Hookup Mentality
By Maurine Proctor

We are a nation divided against ourselves and our own best interests when it comes to our outlook on sexuality. On the one hand we demand and value loyalty from spouses to each other and their families, yet on the other we drive a hookup mentality that is supposed to be sexually liberating, yet in reality cheapens sex, deadens the soul and too often thwarts the very capacity for fidelity.

There has been much speculation on what irrational craziness would drive Gov. Eliot Spitzer to a sleazy and illegal liaison with a call girl named “Kristen” from an international prostitution ring. Thus run the musings — since there have been so many high-profile politicians who have either tainted their reputations or gone down in sexual infamy, is there something about the “Alpha male” arrogant and powerful political personality that drives such behavior? Is there a tendency for some types to trample every form of decency in their quest for what gratifies them?

It is hard to say, but what is certain is that in America we condition people for sexual promiscuity and set up the mindset for disloyalty. Three articles from a page in last week’s Washington Post capture this sexual lunacy and irony.

The first article, “Bad News Travels Fast and Furiously” was about how bad news travels at warp speed in this Internet age and lists a string of politicians whose careers had “vaporized” under sexual scandal. Words used to describe the promiscuous politicians were heavily pejorative — as well they should be — like “tawdry,” “indecent,” “philandering” and “salacious.” America is definitely condemnatory of this.

Yet, on the same page is an article about the infamous Kristen, “Just Days after Scandal, the Promise of an Audience.” It seems our call girl is really Ashley Alexandra Dupre, and according to her MySpace Internet site she is an aspiring singer. Rather than hiding in shame, suddenly she has, according to the Post, a new hook to hang a career on. “The songs she’d posted online were suddenly getting what they apparently never had before: an audition with some of the more powerful figures in the music biz.”

Apparently, her sorry infamy was getting her more attention than being a finalist on American Idol. Though her vocals aren’t much, her trashy notoriety is and may be enough to boost her into a career.

But, it was the third article on the page that was the most telling and indicative of how heedless and accepting our culture is becoming of the most casual sex. It was an advice column from Carolyn Hax, who apparently specializes in relationships. The question from an anonymous person in Phoenix was whether you had to tell someone you were going to have a relationship with about your “numbers,” meaning how many others you had had sexual relations with. Wasn’t it, in fact, “judgmental or insecure” for them to even ask?

Hax said you should find out why that person wanted to know. “If you get the ‘truth is important to healthy relationships’ lie in return, or some other guilt-generating vehicle, then please don’t question the need to resist this blatant invasion of self.” That a “significant other” should even be concerned is “distracting, silly, juvenile, pointless, judgmental, [and] shame-centric.”

All this was accompanied by a cartoon with a young woman and man sitting across a table at a restaurant. She says, “What’s my ‘number’? One less than it was about to be.’”

You’d have to be asleep to miss the implication. It is that those who might be concerned about the hookup culture who are off base or hopelessly sanctimonious. It is concern for sexual fidelity that is shameful or perhaps Puritanical.

As an American culture, what do we glean from this bankrupt philosophy that pervades not just newspaper advice columns, but also entertainment media, schools, and college campuses? For one thing, we get news of a sexual epidemic that also came out last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National STD Prevention conference.

The CDC presented studies showing that 1 in 4 teen girls — amounting to 3.2 million — have a sexually transmitted infection. Nearly half of the African-American girls ages 14 to 19 were infected with the four diseases studied.

Yet it is not just potentially life-threatening infection that takes its toll. The so-called sexual liberation has been anything but the freeing and expansion of soul that it was promised. It has in fact, not only devalued sex, and stripped it from its foundation in marriage, but it has also made us numb. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom quoted a student who said of casual sex, “We are all obsessively going to the well, but we always come up dry.”

When American popular culture unhooked sex from marriage, our finest instincts became casualities. Lost were loyalty, self-discipline, and ironically, even passion. Bloom said that what he saw in his college students concerning sex is that they became “competent specialists” but “flat-souled.” He said that today’s students are marked by “is the astonishing fact that they usually do not, in what were once called love affairs, say, ‘I love you,’ and never, ‘I’ll always love you.’”

Our culture’s sexual attitudes are self-destructive. Nothing about the casual sex thrown at us at every turn can possibly incline and prepare people for the lifelong sexual fidelity critical to marriage and family stability.

So, in some ways, learning that another married man, this one a governor, had illicit sex is tragic, but still not surprising. America is reaping what it sows.

But if anyone should wonder if it matters, Silda Spitzer’s humiliated and chagrined face, as she stood next to the governor as he made his damning confession, is forever burned in our national consciousness.