Noncommittal Sex and Other Drugs

By Squire A. Cole

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*All names have been changed for anonymity

A fellow Haverford junior described hookup culture as “an interesting little way to keep from going crazy with boredom.” A third-year in an overseas university said it was a good way to “decenter men.” An NYU junior compared Hinge to DoorDash—as in “DoorDashing women to you.” The more women I talk to, the more confident, self-aware, hurt, funny, conflicted stories I’m given about hookup culture and the way it manifests in their lives. 

“Hookup” is a wildly frustrating term, because it can mean anything from a teensy peck to full-on sex. Whatever happens between the sheets, the most important part of all “hookups” is that they are non-committal and often spontaneous. Hookup culture refers to the growing feeling around young people that this type of sexual encounter is the norm—widespread, accepted and, often, expected. 

This norm isn’t established everywhere. When Diana, an international student at Haverford, first encountered American hookup culture while watching an episode of Euphoria (albeit a show that exaggerates it), it made her question whether she should come to the U.S. at all. “There were so many things, including hookup culture, that. . .I couldn’t resonate with,” she told me about that time. In conversations around hookup culture, it’s important to remind ourselves that not everyone chooses to partake (myself included) and many people that appear to are not actually hooking up. 

As a feminist, what interested me the most about hookup culture was about how women fair in all of this. I know we feminists have our differences, but it’s shocking how opposite the feminist conceptions of hookup culture are. To oversimplify it, half the feminists believe hooking up is empowering, and the other half think it’s victimizing. The women I talked to, however, argued less amongst each other than they did with themselves. They would offer a rendition of hookup culture that felt right to them, and then second guess it a minute later. Iris, a young woman I talked to who grew up in the U.S. but left for college, struggled with this tension throughout our entire interview. Although she’s participated in hookup culture, she wouldn’t call herself a participant; although she relishes in the “freedom and choice” hookup culture gives her, she amends that this enjoyment is only possible if you “protect your heart.” As she was reflecting on the one-night-stands she’s had, she wondered aloud, “Is it actually bringing joy and adding to my life or is it wasting my morning trying to kick them out?” 

To explore this contradiction, I read a couple personal favorite books on the topic to try to make sense of the public discourse around hookup culture (I know, I spend my free time in such a normal way). I found that one side of this spectrum sees the sexual freedom that hookup culture offers as liberating, and think that casual hookups save time for more important things. From this perspective, collegiate women are overachieving, highly-focused “girl bosses” who simply didn’t have time to be tied down to a man, and so turn to hookup culture as the most time-efficient type of relationship. 

With hookup culture, “you still get to manage your dreams and aspirations and your career without. .needing to give too much romantically to men. It’s kind of like de-centering men,” Iris hypothesized. 

Like Iris, many women also see their participation in hookup culture as a way to rail against the stereotype that women are more emotional and dependent. “There is the narrative of an expectation that the woman should want more and the man should want less,” Haverford junior Jasmine explained, and hookups are one way to disprove that sexist idea. 

However, this cut-and-dry version of female empowerment doesn’t sit right with everyone. Some of the women I spoke with noted the ways in which hookup culture seems to be set up against women, and—ironically—intimacy. Because hookups are often between acquaintances and strangers, and because our generation has a pathological fear of awkwardness, the culture is designed in a way so participants have to do the least amount of communication possible. This ambiguity means that students can avoid the dreaded awkwardness, but it also means that women are often subjected to unwanted or aggressive attention from men that they aren’t given much vocabulary with which to disengage. 

Not just that: if you treat your partner too lovingly or respectfully, it could seem like you are looking for a relationship, and since talking things through itself would be implying too much seriousness, the only way to prove you are being “cool and casual” is to treat your partner poorly. 

Amy, a junior at New York University who has “dabbled” in hookup culture over the years, echoed that idea in my interview with her. “The actual connotations around dating have shifted so heavily, so you only do those sweet things given you’re committed,” she explained. Iris notices the shift after a hookup has finished. “The bad thing about hookup culture,” she told me, “is because it’s so casual. . .you sort of skip all the steps of intimacy.” She gets scared by the way that, once the hookup is over, “you wake up in the morning and [the person has] completely changed”: they’ve revoked the kindness they used to get her in bed as a way to remind her that she’s just a hookup. 

To many women and men alike, hookup culture can feel very transactional, and deep connection—something important for social wellbeing—seems to take a backseat. It is absolutely true that not every woman wants a relationship out of a hookup, but for those who do or for those who are unsure, it can feel conflicting. Amy had this experience with her most recent boyfriend, who started as a casual hookup. “I had this service—which sounds kind of awful—but [hooking up] was a service I could give and it was something that he wanted, and that was maybe my way of keeping him around. And that definitely felt awful,” she admitted. “It would bother me when we would hook up and he would say thank you,” Amy continued, “because that meant I was giving him something.” 

It is that transactional expectation—whether feigned or real—that is a breeding ground for dangerous behavior. Maddie, a Haverford junior who is “generally an abstainer” but has met partners through hookups, quipped that her straight female friends at Haverford find it “hard to find a person who fits what they’re looking for but also

doesn’t have a Title IX” against them. 

Among pro-hookup-ers, there’s this conception that this new era of sexual freedom has ushered in one of sexual equality as well. And that’s true to some extent—it is more accepted now to engage in casual hookups, and if anything, it has created more space for women to talk about their sexualities, at least with other women. However, the idea that hookup culture has waved its sexy little wand and magically removed all the stigma around “overly sexual” women is largely untrue. 

Take the experience of Jasmine. An enthusiastic participant of hookup culture over the past year and a half, Jasmine keeps a log of every person she’s hooked up with—mostly men—and how they performed (which includes “bad, good, terrible, awful,” and, one time, “treacherous”). Jasmine is not treated as a liberated woman by her Haverford peers, however; quite the opposite. “I feel as though the responses to women who participate in hookup culture are very deliberating and very negative,” she said. 

This doesn’t mean hookup culture can’t still feel liberating, and many women know others who staunchly defend it even if they themselves are on the fence, but it’s also often hard to tell where the endorsement of hookup culture comes from. “Am I actually even able to do this for myself or am I telling myself that so that it feels more okay?” Amy asked herself. A state away, Jasmine was struggling with the same thing. “I have a lot of my ego attached to this idea of sex positivity because I feel like I’ve been slut shamed a fair amount, so it would be nice to feel empowered and not victimized,” she explained. “At the same time, it can be very saddening.” 

For so many women like Amy, Jasmine, and Iris, it can be difficult to distinguish feeling empowered from feeling objectified; feeling sexy from feeling sexualized. Hookups can feel shitty and self-actualizing at the same time. It’s hard to reconcile this dissonance for many women—feeling unhappy or ashamed of something they’re supposed to feel empowered by, or, on the other hand, feeling proud and excited by something they’re told to feel shame about. 

The more interviews I do, the more obvious it becomes that looking to “solve” whether hookup culture is empowering or not is absolutely doomed. No person, or culture, feels just one way about something that intimate. As Amy joked on the phone to me, “people have sex for three reasons: power, connection, or fun.” The hard part, then, is figuring out which of these categories hookup culture belongs to. My theory? All three.

This article was originally published in CHICK Magazine Issue #1 on December 10, 2025