Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus Kathleen Bogle (general ebook reader .txt) 📖

out of place. . . . I just find that a lot of them hadn’t drank a lot in high school and they go to a party and get sloshed, and then, it’s funny to look at them sometimes.

KB: So you could almost spot at a party who is a freshman?

Kyle: Yeah. Definitely. And also they’ll get . . . real sluttily dressed, I find. They wear those black sex pants and there will just be fifty of them rolling up to your house and you are just like: “Oh man, I don’t want to drive anyone to the hospital tonight.” KB: Because they are going to drink so much?

Kyle: Or they just don’t know how to handle themselves.

KB: What do you mean handle themselves, besides the drinking?

Kyle: That is what I mean. They drink too much and get themselves in trouble. Throw up all over the place, take their clothes off, or something stupid that they normally wouldn’t do and I don’t think they would do if they were a senior and had been exposed to the college culture and drinking. A lot of the time it is like letting a kid out of a cage. Your parents in high school, they are like: “Oh be home by 1:00 A.M.” You bring the kid to college and it’s like no cage, go nuts, run wild.

KB: Do freshman males do that also or is it specifically girls?

Kyle: I think males do it too. It’s just displayed differently. Guys would get drunk too, but maybe a guy would do something he wouldn’t normally do like get in a fight or something, not like take his clothes off [the ways girls do].

KB: Would you say then that females change more over the four years [in college] than males do?

Kyle: Yeah. Definitely. Females change a lot more. They come to college and figure it’s a big school and no one is going to find out what they do and then [they learn this is not the case].

[Senior, State University]

Kyle refers to several of the ways women can get negatively labeled: how much they drink, what they wear, how wildly they behave, and so on. However, Kyle also noted that men did not have these same 112

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concerns. Men may need to learn their limits with drinking and to avoid starting fights, but men were not being judged in the same way as women. Moreover, women’s behavior is specifically being scrutinized and sexualized. As Kyle points out, drinking may lead to guys getting in fights, but it is girls who “take their clothes off.” Just because these unwritten rules for women within the hookup scene exist does not mean all women follow them. The guidelines are sometimes vague and they may not be known to all women on campus.

As Kyle and many other men I spoke with indicated, some women had to “learn the hard way” over time what is acceptable within the hookup script. This is particularly true for freshman women who may be naive about the rules at the outset of their college careers. Other college women may know the rules and flout them intentionally. However, most of the women I interviewed said they were aware of these rules and they “watched” their behavior accordingly.

BREAKING THE RULES

For women who break the rules there are consequences. One consequence is that students will label women who are seen as promiscuous.

Being labeled a “slut” goes well beyond hurt feelings. Some students indicated that some women on campus were severely stigmatized. In my interview with Emily, a sophomore at Faith University, she reveals how a label can overtake a woman’s identity.

KB: Are there people who have bad reputations for how they act with guys?

Emily: Yeah, I think so, like . . . supposedly there’s a girl named

“Blow Job Jen” and supposedly she gives a lot of blow jobs, I don’t know, but when I see her I think about that so I guess there are [people with bad reputations].

In addition to women being labeled by others, women also evaluate their own behavior by the standards set by their peers. As Adrienne, a senior at Faith University, put it:

Guys talk about girls like this, like it’s a number. It’s like: “What did you do with this girl? Oh, she was hot.” But I think for girls, if they like M E N , WO M E N , A N D T H E S E X UA ll D O U B ll E S TA N DA R D

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the guy or whatever [they hope it’s not just a one-and-done hookup].

Or maybe it’s because then [girls] don’t feel like as much as a slut too if they can talk to the guy the next day. If they never talk to the guy again, then it’s like: “Oh yeah, I hooked up with him one night and I haven’t talked to him since.” I think that [makes them feel like]: “Am I a slut for doing that?”

Another consequence for breaking the rules is being ostracized.

Several women spoke about close female friends who were severely stigmatized for their behavior within the hookup scene. For instance, Gloria, a freshman at State University, had a friend who “could not be seen” at a certain fraternity house because she had sex with a few different fraternity brothers during the course of a semester.

Gloria: I have a few [female] friends that have a rep, like a bad rep.

First semester we couldn’t go to certain frats because they were like with too many guys.

KB: What do you mean you couldn’t go?

Gloria: Like she wasn’t wanted there. She would have sex with this guy and then this guy [at some later point] and they’d be three frat brothers. They obviously don’t want this girl at their parties.

KB: I don’t understand why that is obvious