A HYPOTHESIS BECOMES HARDER TO REJECT.

There's nearly forty years of accumulating evidence that the campus rabbit culture is not good for your health.

Badger Herald editorial writers Michael Warner and Dorothy Freiberg looked at the scene on 21 April 1987, with the following:

So why should men marry and start families? It must be said that we know a fair number of college-educated young men in their late twenties, making good salaries, who seem never to have thought about marriage. They remain in a state of suspended late-adolescence, living and acting as they did as seniors in college, only now they have plenty of money for dates and toys.

"This is an enormous waste, and a shame. So many young men never grow up, never taking the responsibility of supporting a family and never knowing that God made families to draw each of us out of the selfish squalor of our personal lives and devote us to loving and helping others.

"One has to wonder how different things would have been if feminism had demanded economic freedom for women and denounced the sexual revolution in the interest of preserving womens' traditional role as the guardians of chastity. This would have gained for women the equal pay and opportunity they deserved while at the same time ensuring that women who wanted to raise families would find willing husbands-to-be.

"Such a situation would also have spread the gains from feminism. Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed, and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families."

That's from the early days of Cold Spring Shops, and we have seen that passage invoked a few times since.  It's not surprising that Rod Dreher would have called attention to the waste, and the shame.

It's not that things are any better today, notes Rod Dreher.  "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags. The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."  He's basing his pessimism on a day chatting with people who work among the inner city poor, and on an essay by Mary Eberstadt.  "What the MeToo moment proves above all is that the time for magical thinking about the sexual revolution is over. Until now, many people simply accepted the realities of the post-Pill world as non-negotiable facts. It’s time to challenge that worldview as one that lacks moral and intellectual maturity."

That might be argumentation consistent with the priors of people running opinion shops such as American Conservative and Weekly Standard.

The more scholarly work was unlikely to provide evidence that Mr Dreher or Ms Eberstadt should revise their priors.

In a Gender and Society paper, "Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood," the book's authors anticipate one message of Paying for the Party.

The four-year university, however, also reflects a privileged path to adulthood. The authors show that it is characterized by a classed self-development imperative that discourages relationships but makes hooking up appealing. Experiences of this structural conflict vary. More privileged women struggle to meet gender and class guidelines for sexual behavior, placing them in double binds. Less privileged women find the class beliefs of the university foreign and hostile to their sexual and romantic logics.

We find in Paying for the Party that the "more privileged women" have trouble walking the line between "hot" and "slutty" and the "romantic logics" of the "less privileged women" include such impedimenta as Christian beliefs, or involvement with high school sweeties now well on the path to burnout-dom.  "Gendered Sexuality" offers an instructive profile of the modal resident of the dormitory the researchers visited.

Students reported that they requested these dormitories if they were interested in drinking, hooking up, and joining the Greek system.  This orientation places them in the thick of American youth culture.  Few identified as feminist, and all presented a traditionally feminine appearance (e.g., not one woman had hair shorter than chin length).  Most planned to marry and have children.

One day, the feminist movement will offer a coherent explanation for how the greatest beneficiaries of feminism reject feminism.

If anything, that benefit was transitory. "Peaked as Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," if you will.

Paying for the Party reports on the lives of the dorm residents for a few years beyond graduation, by which time there is modest evidence that even some of the more successful players on the collegiate party scene are floundering, or crashing, at establishing their careers, or being able to assortatively mate. But even the party girls ... check p. 201 ... aren't as into bad boys as the pickup artists might want you to believe.

Minding the Campus contributor Jared Gould offers a Valentines Day column suggesting the campus social scene is little better today.  "Statistics reveal a significant portion of college students engage in casual sexual encounters, affecting marriage and reproduction ages and posing physiological risks, particularly to women. Long-term commitments are jeopardized in the process."  His column relies on research by Tulane's Lisa Wade.

In colleges, “hookup culture” refers to the idea that casual sexual encounters are the best or only way to engage sexually; and the concept also refers to rules of social interaction that facilitate casual sexual encounters and organizational arrangements that support these encounters.

Today, almost all of America’s residential college campuses are characterized by a hookup culture – large and small, private and public, secular and religious, and left- and right-leaning campuses. Students must contend with this culture even if they are not especially sexually active. In fact, many students are not very active. The average graduating senior reports hooking up just eight times in four years; and a third do not hook up even a single time. Individual students can and do opt out of casual hookup sexual encounters, but few can escape dealing with that culture.

Hookup culture is simply the newest stage in the evolution of sexual norms and behavior in America. Its roots lie in the early city life of the 1920s, the first time in U.S. history that young people routinely socialized in mixed-sex groups beyond the supervision of chaperones. This created intense media interest in “youth culture,” as college attendance became accessible to large swaths of the American population. After a couple hundred years of conflict with higher education administrators, fraternity men starting setting the social tone. Their way of experiencing college life – irreverent, raucous, and fun-oriented – was suddenly the way to experience college. Attending college was linked to the idea of being young and carefree.

The Great Depression and World War II put the brakes on such revelry. Young women initiated “going steady” – monogamous, long-term dating – as a response to the loss of young men to war. Yet going steady, a kind of “premature monogamy,” was both new and short-lived as an ideal for young people. By the 1960s, young people wanted to remain unattached; and meanwhile gay men in urban enclaves were experimenting with a culture revolving around “hookups.” The dangers of AIDs infection slowed down the process by which casual sexual encounters spread into the mainstream for young people, but this process proceeded nonetheless.

That's the history.  Note that the rabbit culture isn't modal behavior.   Neither does it confer evolutionary advantage.

After hearing about hookup culture, many older Americans wonder whether today’s students actually enjoy it. The answer appears to be both yes and no, as I learned from years of fieldwork. About a quarter of students thrive in this culture, at least at first. They enjoy hooking up and adapt well to hookup culture’s rules calling for fun and casual, short-term encounters. At the same time, about a third of students opt out altogether; they find hookup culture unappealing and would rather not have sex at all than have it the way this culture mandates. The remaining students are ambivalent, dabbling in hookups with mixed results. Overall, about one in three students say that their intimate relationships have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle.” Many of them experience a persistent malaise, a deep, indefinable disappointment. And one in ten says that they have been sexually coerced or assaulted in the past year.

Notably, my research suggests that hookup culture is a problem not because it promotes casual sex, but because it makes a destructive form of casual sexual engagement feel compulsory. Students who don’t hook up can end up being socially isolated, while students who do engage in this way are forced to operate by a dysfunctional set of rules. Hookup culture encourages a punishing emotional landscape, where caring for others or even simple courtesy seem inappropriate, while carelessness and even cruelty are allowed. At its worst, it encourages young men and women to engage in sexual competitiveness and status-seeking while meeting impossible standards of attractiveness. It privileges immediate pleasure-seeking and heightens risks that students will become either perpetrators or victims of sexual crimes.

"Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment."  And even they have regrets.

Professor Wade draws on her American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus and, unsurprisingly, her priors as sociologist and professor of gender studies surfaces in her conclusion.

Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, many people need to work together to make changes happen. And they can. Especially because of the strong ties in student bodies, campuses can transform themselves faster than one might suspect.

Research shows that today’s young people are more open, permissive, earnest, hopeful for the future, and welcoming of diversity than any other generation in memory. They are well-positioned to usher in the next new sexual culture. But colleges as institutions must change, too. Institutions of higher education need to put substantial resources and time into shifting cultural norms in two ways: promoting casual sexual encounters that involve an ethic of care, and diversifying the kind of sexual encounters that are seen as possible and good. Colleges also need to change the institutional arrangements that give too much power to subsets of students who are most enthusiastic about hookup culture and who benefit from it at the expense of their peers. Doing this may mean disbanding fraternities and sororities as they have existed, because as long as these organizations and their ethics remain power bastions on U.S. campuses, hookup culture will persist.

Sorry, no.  Fifty to sixty years ago the second-wave feminists, seeing only the upside potential of the Pill with abortion-on-demand as the backstop plan were all about those "casual sexual encounters," with or without "an ethic of care," and the "alternative lifestyles" fetish offers quite the diversity of sexual encounters.  And cracking down on the Greek letter organizations?  Sometimes that's all the rage, sometimes it's not.

Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, it is an emergent phenomenon, and it might be simpler to bet on emergence, and let the evolutionary dead-ends, whether of the rabbit culture or the Consciousness Revolution or of privilege-shaming, collapse of their own inconsistencies.