From a young age we are socialized to believe that pair bonding is innate to our species. That is, you are expected to form an emotional and romantic connection to just one other person. Even as society has rapidly progressed to hold an increasingly equal view of heteronormative couples and those between people of different sex and gender identities, the notion of bond pairing as the only option for truly emotive and physical intimacy continues to percolate throughout Western culture.
To be sure, our society allows exceptions in the form of break-ups and divorces should your feelings towards that one person change and you develop a connection to another. At no time, however, are you permitted to feel such connections to two or three people simultaneously, even if never acted upon. We are led to believe that healthy relationships are only those in which each person does not so much as think of engaging with another and remains faithful in mind and body to the other.
Hookup culture is pervasive on college campuses across the United States where many students are free to explore their bodies for the first time in their lives. While college is by no means the real world, in many ways it serves as a petri dish for the way our species might act were the restraints of societal and parental oversight relaxed.
Pundits and professed experts will claim that such noncommittal sexual behavior is potentially detrimental to one’s mental health and induces a string of unhealthy relationships. Naturally, if we deviate from behavior we are told will bring us—and might have already brought us—true happiness and satisfaction (i.e. pair bonding), we are bound to feel some level of cognitive dissonance no matter the amount of physical pleasure we experience.
Accordingly, numerous college students feel disaffected and alienated by hookup culture because of that engrained, immutable belief in pair bonding. But when committed between emotionally mature and enthusiastically consensual persons, the very act of hooking up carries with it no such malicious qualities.
Sex in any form remains one of the most natural activities we can perform as a member of a species of animal. Only when we are reminded of the constructs fabricated by human society about sexual relationships do we assign regret, disdain, or indifference to such intimacy. In reality, this rare ability in the animal kingdom to separate sex and reproduction could give rise to a more peaceful and empathetic society. Indeed, evolution suggests there might be connection between hookup culture and compassion.
Among bonobos, our second-closest relative among the great apes, the ecological equivalent of hooking up is rampant. In the past twenty years, numerous studies have emerged documenting bonobos’ markedly peaceful social behavior and how polygamous sexual relations play a central role.
In 1995, primatologist Frans de Waal first noted that bonobos regularly use sex as a means of forming social bonds, resolving conflicts, and as a simple greeting between neighboring groups. The diversity in how bonobos experience sex should also give us pause. In addition to straightforward copulation between a male and a female, mutual masturbation, oral sex, and relations between bonobos of the same sex have also been observed. In fact, sexual activity between female bonobos made up 60% of all such activity observed in one study.
In stark opposition, our closest relative, the common chimpanzee, appears as a war-mongering brute that kills infants in neighboring tribes. Whereas groups of bonobos are exclusively led by female-female dyads, chimpanzees are strictly male-dominated. Like bonobos, chimps also display altruism and compassion, but that behavior is restricted to members only within the same tribe. Moreover, while both species are polygamous, chimpanzees rarely use sexual activity recreationally and limit the act to reproduction.
Certainly hooking up with others is by no means a panacea to long-fought wars and political strife. Love might be able to solve a great deal of problems, but nothing beats diplomacy. Nevertheless, the presence of peace and compassion within bonobo societies suggests we might want to reassess the insistence that our species is monogamous and relax our critique of hookup culture.
Beyond the furthering of peaceful relations, hooking up may beget us other gainful insights. In the acclaimed Czech novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the protagonist Tomas exhibits promiscuous behavior akin to that of bonobos. As readers, we witness his going from bedroom to bedroom seemingly every other week, trying to elucidate what he deems the “one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.” Barring a scalpel, only the most intimate act known to our species can bring to light our most unique selves.
This ability is at once the greatest triumph of hookup culture: we are permitted to seamlessly form deep emotional bonds and directly explore that which makes each person a true individual. At the same time, the hurried intimacy that must be shared to permit that discovery leads many to feel distanced. Indeed, a single night in a shared bed is insufficient to fully examine the dissimilarity that Tomas was so intent on grasping.
Although Tomas’ sexual escapades often involve one-night stands, the novel also puts great emphasis on the German proverb, einemal ist kinemal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. Surely the act of sex illuminates characteristics and qualities of a person otherwise cloaked by the constraints of society, but a single brusque, drunken encounter is hardly the type of experience that will form deep emotive bonds.
Our tendency to ignore or show disdain towards those with whom we have hooked up is indicative of the fact that we wanted to share our one-millionth dissimilarity but were unable to in that episode—indeed, it might as well not have happened at all.
Meanwhile, when we are able to have amicable and enduring platonic relationships with former sexual partners we have grasped that dissimilarity and glimpsed someone at their most vulnerable state. Again, that is the most redeeming quality of hookup culture.
My argument of the value of hookup culture notwithstanding, I recognize that not everyone is able to equally share in these experiences. Patriarchal components remain pervasive. As a cis white man, hookup culture is more accessible to me than it is to others. If I happen to hook up with someone every other weekend, there will be few social repercussions, whereas a woman might face some level of admonishing or slut shaming.
Ultimately I hope to bring to light the idea that hookup culture has the potential to positively benefit all those who choose to engage in it. As bonobos evince from their centralization of the female-female dyad, hooking up doesn’t inherently involve patriarchy. Should the conditions be ripe, people of all gender identities can experience pleasure as well as the passion of discovering the most basic, unique qualities of another human being.
One needn’t be ashamed of hooking up. Pair bonding be damned; love is natural.
Ayres is a member of the Class of 2017.