{"id":1433,"date":"2004-06-05T16:07:07","date_gmt":"2004-06-05T20:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/06\/05\/hooking-up-and-dating\/"},"modified":"2004-06-05T16:07:07","modified_gmt":"2004-06-05T20:07:07","slug":"hooking-up-and-dating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/06\/05\/hooking-up-and-dating\/","title":{"rendered":"Hooking up and dating"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week’s NYT Magazine had this article about the teenage culture of dating and sex<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An interesting quote:<\/p>\n

…And while gay high-school boys frequently advertise that they
\n”don’t do hookups” and are only looking for relationships, fewer
\nstraight teenagers make that claim — and many make it clear that
\nthey’re looking for anything but commitment.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

”Straight teens have abandoned the rituals of dating, while
\ngay teens have taken them on,” says Peter Ian Cummings, the editor of
\nXY, a national magazine for young gay men. The Internet, Cummings says,
\nhas made it possible for heterosexual teenagers to act the way ”most
\nof straight society assumes gay men act.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it’s quite interesting that the gay boys are acting in this
\nway.  It seems that their understanding of the world’s working is
\nmuch more realistic than that of the straight teenagers.\n<\/p>\n

The straight teenagers in the article seem to have the attitude that
\nthe culture of hooking up that they have created will last only
\ntemporarily, that once they’re ready to “settle down” that there will
\nbe a mate and a life for them.  But until then, they can have sex
\nwith no consequences.  But I’d contend that they probably do
\nencounter some consequence, in that they don’t get the chance to do a
\nlot of learning about relationships while they are forming models of
\nrelationality.  I fear the possibility that these straight kids
\nwon’t be able to find the sorts of relationships they want “when
\nthey’re ready” because they won’t have learned how to find and hold a
\nrelationship.\n<\/p>\n

In addition there seems to be an element of wanting what you can’t
\nor aren’t supposed to have.  People in our society aren’t
\n“supposed to” have lots of random sex, just for the sake of sex, with
\nno relationality attached to it.  The norm, at least on some
\nlevel, is that sex is supposed to somehow go with relationship. 
\nWhat these kids are doing is a form of rebellion, like many of forms of
\nteenage rebellion, but this one may perhaps have long-term relational
\nconsequences, as opposed to dying one’s hair and so forth.\n<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the gay teenagers are “rebelling” in some sense,
\nalso.  The straight people in those teens’ lives tell them that
\nbeing gay has dreadful relational consequences (at least if their
\nupbringin has any similarity to mine).  They’ll live lonely lives,
\nthey’ll never have children, the relationships that they do have will
\nbe unfulfilling, and they will be cut off from “normal” society. 
\nThe normal is abnormal for gay kids, and so they strive for it with all
\nthat they’re worth.  They try to court one another, to go to the
\nprom, to hold hands in public.  They want to get married, perhaps
\nhave kids, and die with a person they love.\n<\/p>\n

The delicious irony in all this, is that it’s those who are
\nsupposedly unable to create and sustain stable, productive, socially
\nuseful, perhaps even ethical relationship who offer the better examples
\nfor all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s NYT Magazine had this article about the teenage culture of dating and sex. An interesting quote: …And while gay high-school boys frequently advertise that they ”don’t do hookups” and are only looking for relationships, fewer straight teenagers make that claim — and many make it clear that they’re looking for anything but commitment. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ontheweb"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-n7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}