The Unhappy Hook-Up

   So Aziz Ansari hooked up with a young woman and now his name's been dragged through the mud, thanks to the woman's account of the hook-up told to and published by an acutely distasteful website called "babe." (Or maybe "babe" is not in fact distasteful. Maybe I'm just 'way behind the times).
    On the other hand, the mud generated by the article has also splashed back considerably on the girl who made the complaint against Ansari - or would have splashed back on her had the girl been required to give her name instead of being allowed to spill all the excruciatingly clinical details of the hook-up anonymously under the pseudonym "Grace."
      In any case, the hook-up that will live in infamy - at least for a few more news cycles - obviously left considerable pain on both sides.
       But amidst all the commentary and discussion generated by the incident, a few things seem pretty clear to me:
      First of all, "Grace," at 22 years old, was far too young to have already had so many unhappy hook-ups that this one, as she related in the article, left her to tearfully conclude that guys are all the same and that she hated men.
       Second of all, Aziz Ansari, at 34, had already had too many hook-ups with too many willing girls to be able to see that this girl, who was more or less going through the hook-up motions, or he thought she was, wasn't asking him for more foreplay or to try some different sex technique; she was trying to drop him verbal and non-verbally clues that she didn't want this date to be just a hook-up.  She wanted something more. Some tenderness, maybe? A relationship, maybe? Romance? Love? But he wasn't hearing what she didn't know how to say.
       But the clearest of all is that the unhappy outcome of that evening is the sort of thing that
can - and probably does quite often - befall young men and women who've come of age in the Hook-up Culture.
     Young men expecting sex without a meaningful relationship. Young women believing that it's expected of them to have sex with men they don't love and who don't particularly care about them either except for sex. Young men believing it's expected of them to expect young women to want to have sex with them. Casual sex. Sex for fun. Sex without intimacy or trust or commitment. Brief, meaningless, loveless, joyless sex. The bottom of the relationship barrel where, as both "Grace" and Aizi Ansari learned, young women are disempowered and young men are ill served beyond a moment of physical gratification.
     Maybe the Hook-up Culture is just the poor dregs of the Sexual Revolution launched by my generation.  So maybe the time has come to launch a new Sexual Revolution, the first campaign of which should be the demolition of the Hook-Up Culture.

References
https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355

https://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/552582404/hookup-culture-the-unspoken-rules-of-sex-on-college-campuses​

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