By Riley Scheffler
Swipe right, left, right, MATCH! This is the hottest “dating” app out right now and yes some individuals do call this a “dating app.” Tinder is an app where individuals meet each other just by swiping right on a profile of an individual, if you are attracted to them. This is how many millennials now-a-days are finding a “casual hookup.” Casual hookups can be explained as many things. Whether this is making out with a cute girl or boy at a party, or meeting up with someone you’ve met on Tinder to go to their house and have a more romantic affair.
I personally have never had a Tinder profile, but I know many guys and girls that have/had an account. I decided to take a survey out of 10 different college students, (guys and girls). Eight out of the ten either currently have Tinder or have had it in the past. I asked all 10 of these individuals if they believed Tinder to be known for mainly hookups, they all stated that they believed the general consensus to be that Tinder is mainly for hookups, but a few added that that’s not their view of it, just society’s.
While interviewing Cassandra Waldron, a student at Grand Valley State University, I asked her how she would explain sex within the millennial generation.
“There’s no such thing as making love anymore, sex is normalized as a one-night stand,” Waldron said.
Terms like “friends with benefits,” “casual hookups,” “no strings attached,” and more, are all things that have developed in this generation. To many millennials it’s a way of not fully committing to someone, and being able to keep their options open to be able to make out with that cute individual at the party since you are not technically dating yet. All of these terms seem to be a cop-out to fully committing to a relationship, which is evident that this generation has had a hard time doing. The meaning of love is lost for many in this generation.
“In our generation, after a break the one thing that everyone always says will help is to go and hook up with someone else,” said Madeline Dougherty, a sophomore, in an interview. “Whether this is a guy or girl, you always hear people say, okay we are going to go out tonight and find you someone to hook up with.”
Hookups are part of the breakup recovery process for many young people.
“I have had a Tinder for the past six-ish months,” said sophomore Michael Fraula. “I don’t view it just for hookups even though a lot of people do…I’ve met some awesome girls that I wanna get to know, and if that doesn’t work out at least I’ve made some good friendships.“
A perfect example of the hookup culture would be the Netflix documentary called, “Liberated: The New Sexual Revolution.” This documentary follows a group of college guys from Wisconsin, heading down to Panama City, Florida for their college spring break. Throughout this documentary, you see the group of guys hooking up with many different girls, bragging about the number of girls they had slept with over the span of a week. They were beyond proud of the numbers of women they had hooked up with, with some even taking girls’ virginity. One of the guys in the documentary had sex with a girl and not even five minutes after admitted that he didn’t even know her name. While this video documents the extremes of the overall “hookup” culture, it also sums up many things that are happening in the college social scene.
In a phone interview with Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at University of Texas, who was one of the individuals that were interviewed for the Netflix documentary, “Liberated” talked how about how the abundance of pornography has affected today’s social scene.
“In the past three to four decades, there has been a traumatic expansion in the amount of pornagraphy in the culture, and also the easy accessibility of pornography,” Jensen said. “The central message of pornography is that women are basically sexual objects that exist for men’s pleasure or even sexual objects that enjoy being controlled, dominated, humiliated and in extreme cases even victims of violence. You now have several generations of boys and men who view this kind of pornography as a primary source of sexual education, or perhaps we should say miseducation.”
Hold down the the Tinder app, press the big ole X button, and delete that Tinder account. Millennials need to start socializing in classes, getting the guts to talk to that cute girl or boy at the library. Let’s put down our cell phones and make face-to-face communication the norm.
