The End of Men and the Rise of Women

by Hanna Rosin

  But it turns out that this is one of those cases where spotlight interviews can be misleading. An individual nineteen-year-old woman may give you an earful of girl trouble. But as her girlfriend might tell her after a teary night, you have to get some perspective. Zoom out and you see that for most women the hook-up culture is like an island they visit mostly during their college years, and even then only when they are bored or experimenting or don’t know any better. But it is not a place where they drown. The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike in earlier ages they have more important things going on, such as good grades and internships and job interviews and a financial future of their own to worry about. The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.

  To put it crudely, now feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture. To a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. Today’s college girl likens a serious suitor to an accidental pregnancy in the nineteenth century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it thwart a promising future.

  In 2004, Elizabeth Armstrong, then at the University of Indiana, and Laura Hamilton, a young graduate student, set out to do a study on sexual abuse in college students’ relationships. They applied for permission to interview women on a single floor of what was known as a “party dorm” at a state university in the Midwest. About two-thirds of the students came from what they called “more privileged” backgrounds, meaning they had financial support from their parents, who were probably college educated themselves. A third came from less privileged families; they supported themselves and were probably the first in their family to go to college. The researchers’ first day of interviewing proved so enlightening that they decided to ask the administration if they could camp out at the dorm for four years and track the fifty-three women’s romantic lives.

  Girls in the dorm complained about the double standard, about being called sluts, about not being treated with respect. But what emerges over the four years is the sense of hooking up as part of a larger romantic strategy, a phase of what Armstrong came to think of as a “sexual career.” Hook-ups functioned as a “delay tactic,” Armstrong writes, because the immediate priority, for the privileged women at least, was setting themselves up for a career. “If I want to maintain the lifestyle that I’ve grown up with,” one woman told Armstrong, “I have to work. I just don’t see myself being someone who marries young and lives off of some boy’s money.” Or from another woman: “I want to get secure in a city and in a job. . . . I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by thirty, I’m good.”

  The women still had to deal with the old-fashioned burden of protecting their personal reputations, but in the long view, what they really wanted to protect was their future professional reputations. “Rather than struggling to get into relationships,” Armstrong found, women “had to work to avoid them,” she reports. They often lied to interested guys, telling them they were “too conservative” to date or had a boyfriend back home, when the truth was that they did not want relationships to steal time away from studying.

  Armstrong and her researchers had come looking for sexual victims and instead found the opposite: women who were managing their romantic lives like savvy headhunters. “The ambitious women calculate that having a relationship would be like a four-credit class, and they don’t always have time for it so instead they opt for a lighter hook-up,” Armstrong told me.

  The women described relationships as “too greedy” or “too involved.” One woman “with no shortage of admirers” explained, “I know this sounds really pathetic and you probably think I am lying, but there are so many other things going on right now that it’s really not something high up on my list.” The women wanted to study or hang out with friends or just be “a hundred percent selfish,” as one said. “I have the rest of my life to devote to a husband or kids or my job.” Some even purposely had “fake boyfriends” whom they considered sub-marriage quality: “He fits my needs now because I don’t want to get married now. I don’t want anyone else to influence what I do after I graduate,” one said. Or: He “wants to have two kids by the time he’s thirty. I’m like, I guess we’re not getting married.”

  The most revealing portions of the study emerge from the interviews with the less privileged women. They came to college mostly with boyfriends back home and the expectation of living a life similar to their parents’: make it through school, start work immediately, and get married along the way. They were still fairly conservative and found hook-up culture initially alienating (“Those rich bitches are way slutty” is how Armstrong summarizes their attitude). They felt trapped between the choice of marrying a kind of hometown guy they called “the disaster”—a man who never gets off the couch and steals their credit card—or joining a sexual culture that made them uncomfortable. The ones who chose option A were considered the dorm tragedies, women who had succumbed to some Victorian-style delusion. “She would always talk about how she couldn’t wait to get married and have babies,” one woman said about her working-class friend. “It was just like, Whoa. I’m eighteen . . . . Slow down, you know? Then she just crazy dropped out of school and wouldn’t contact any of us . . . . The way I see it is that she’s from a really small town, and that’s what everyone in her town does . . . get married and have babies.”

  Success meant seeing the hook-up culture for what it is: a path out of a dead-end existence, free from a life yoked to the “disaster.” “Now I’m like, I don’t even need to be getting married yet [or] have kids,” one of the less privileged women told the researchers in her senior year. “All of [my brother’s] friends, seventeen- to twenty-year-old girls, have their . . . babies, and I’m like, Oh my God . . . . Now I’ll be able to do something else for a couple years before I settle down . . . before I worry about kids.” The hook-up culture opened her horizons. She could study and work and date and live off temporary intimacy for a few years before getting married.

  The broad, shallow research also confirms the idea that heartaches have been vastly exaggerated. Over the last decade, sociologist Paula England at New York University has been collecting data from an online survey about hook-ups. She is now up to about twenty thousand responses—making hers the largest sample to date. In her survey, seniors report a median of only 5 hook-ups over 4 years and an average of 7.9. This confirms what other surveys have found: Some people at either end of the scale are skewing the numbers. Researchers guess that about a quarter of college kids skip out of the hook-up culture altogether while a quarter participate with gusto—about ten hook-ups or more (the lacrosstitutes?). For the majority in the middle, hook-up culture is a place to visit freshman year, or whenever you feel like it, or when you’ve broken up with a boyfriend, says England. Most important, hook-ups haven’t wrecked the capacity for intimacy. In England’s survey, 74 percent of women and about an equal number of men report having had a relationship that lasted at least six months in college (which means Tali is very unlucky, or due to get lucky her senior year).

  When they do hook up, the weepy woman stereotype doesn’t exactly hold. Men are more likely to have an orgasm during a hook-up, maybe because men in college are not all that experienced yet and don’t know how to please their partners, or because women don’t always insist on having their sexual needs attended to. Still, equal numbers of men and women—about half—report to England that they enjoyed their last hook-up “very much,” implying that women are getting something out of their encounters—maybe pleasure (even without an orgasm), experience, the thrill of turning someone else on, or just a good story. About 66 pe
rcent of women say they wanted their last hook-up to turn into something more, and 58 percent of men say the same—not a vast difference considering the cultural panic about the demise of a chivalrous age and its consequences for women.

  Almost all of the women Armstrong and Hamilton interviewed in the dorm assumed they would get married, and looked forward to it. In England’s survey, 95 percent of the college kids, male and female, said they wanted to get married. The men picked an ideal marrying age that was two years older than the women, which is how marriages typically work out anyway. The whole picture suggests that for most of the young women, they could have their dalliance with the hook-up culture and life would eventually smile on them. They would have a few years of working and playing, and by thirty they would probably get married and eventually make their way to the happy ending.

  Of course, most of them still had a decade left in their “sexual career,” a decade in which the conflicting strains in the new sexual culture would get even more intense, when the women would gain even more sexual confidence and financial stability, but would feel a new kind of vulnerability as they approached marrying age.

  THE PORN PIC being passed around on the students’ cell phones at this Ivy League business school party was more prank than smut: a woman in a wool hat with a pom-pom giving a snowman with a snow penis a blow job. Snowblowing, it’s called, or snowman fellatio, terms everyone at this midweek happy hour seemed to know (except me). The men at the party flashed the snapshot at the women and the women barely bothered to roll their eyes, much less use words like “hostile sexual environment” or “Title IX.” These were not Yale women’s studies types for sure; they were already several years out of college and hook-up veterans.

  One of the women had already seen the photo five times by the time her boyfriend showed it to her, so she just moved her pitcher of beer in front of his phone and kept on talking. He’d already suggested twice that night they go to a strip club, and when their mutual friend had asked if the two of them were getting married, he had given the friend the finger and made sure his girlfriend could see the finger, so she didn’t get any ideas about any forthcoming ring. She was used to her boyfriend’s “juvenile thing,” she told me. She had three little brothers. It barely registered.

  I first saw the image when I moved out to the balcony, opting for cold instead of loud music. My viewing was interrupted by an ex-military guy who yelled, “Party like a rock star!” and then bent over so two women in tube tops could pat his ass. For these official school-sponsored parties held on campus, corporate sponsors paid for the minimal food and limitless beer, which flowed from kegs directly into handheld pitchers. (“Head, brought to you by Credit Suisse,” one bartender joked with every generous pour, high-fiving anyone who wasn’t too drunk to catch his double meaning.) The parties were not an illicit distraction from studying; quite the opposite. The students were supposed to pick up the official message: For their future success, networking, aided by social lubricants, was just as important as studying—maybe more important.

  At this party, the phrase “No means yes! Yes means anal!”—the phrase that prompted the lawsuit at Yale—also came up, only this time as a fond memory. Some students were recalling a game they had played when they went on a spring break trip together called “dirty rounds”—something like charades, except instead of acting out movie or book titles they acted out sex terms, like “pink sock” (what your anus looks like after too much anal sex) or “snow-blowing.”

  The ambiance was frat party, only a frat party for students several years out of college, who had already tasted the work world and were happy to regress for a couple of hours. They had the confidence and the money of almost-adults, and they flaunted it. Guys in expensive fitted jackets flirted with women in four-inch heels and negged one another about job offers and sexual conquests. Sometimes the two were mixed up in the same sentence: “Goldman plus HSBC,” one woman bragged. “Now will you do me those sexual favors?” In a corner, a beautiful Asian woman was entertaining the six guys around her with her best imitation of an Asian prostitute—“Oooo, you so big. Me love you long time”—winning the Tucker Max showdown before any of the guys had even tried to make a move on her. (She eventually chose the shortest guy in the group to go home with because, she later told me, he seemed like he’d be the best in bed.)

  I had gone to the Ivy League business school because a friend had described the women there as so sexually aggressive, they were scary. Many of them had been molded on trading floors or in investment banks with male-female ratios as terrifying as two hundred to one, so they learned to keep up with the boys. (At this business school, the ratio was a piece-of-cake seven to three.) Women told me stories of being hit on at work by “FDBs” (finance douche bags) who hadn’t even bothered to take off their wedding rings, sitting through Monday morning meetings that started with stories about who had banged whom (or what) that weekend. They’d been routinely hazed by male colleagues showing them ever more baroque porn downloaded on cell phones. Snowman fellatio was nothing to them. In general, their response was not to call in the lawyers, but to rise—or maybe stoop—to the occasion.

  In college, the average freshman might have been shell-shocked by the speed and crudeness of come-ons, but here I barely found anyone who even noticed the vulgarity anymore until I came across a new student. She had just arrived two weeks earlier from Argentina, and found herself stunned by the party scene around her. “Here in America, the girls, they give up their mouth, their ass, their tits,” she said, punctuating each with the appropriate hand motion, “before they even know the guy. It’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘You wanna hook up?’ ‘Sure.’ They are so aggressive! Do they have hearts of steel or something? In my country, a girl like this would be desperate. Or a prostitute.”

  But maybe these women consider a heart of steel a fair price to pay for their new high ranking in this social hierarchy. In eras past, the pretty women in such a corporate setting would have been imports brought in to liven up the party, secretaries maybe, or paid escorts, in the early Playboy Club days. But here the women floating around in their feather earrings, thigh-high boots, and knowing smiles were social equals, at least. These twenty-eight-year-old women halfway to an elite MBA, with five years of finance experience behind them and enough money to shop at Barneys, were using their sex appeal not just to catch the man or dazzle him with some girls-gone-wild striptease, but to challenge him in his most important domain, the workplace.

  When I watched the business school women flirt at the bar, it seemed to me they were testing themselves. If they could ignore the porn jokes, they could hold their own on the trading floor. If they could make the first move, then they could also beat the guys at a negotiation. This was their way of psyching the men out, by refusing to back down in any game where, in another era, they would have been assumed to be the weaker opponent.

  It’s even possible that women their age are using their sex appeal not just to keep up with the men, but to surpass them. If in college sex appeal is something you have to rein in to focus on your career, after college it might actually be a career-booster. For the last few years, economists have tried to measure the tangible marketplace value of various amorphous traits—social skills, for example, or cultural capital, or “soft power”—all of which refer to something other than concrete assets or skills. Recently British economist Catherine Hakim has identified a new potential asset she called “erotic capital.” The term refers not to beauty or sexiness, exactly, but more to charm and charisma. People who have it (Michelle Obama, Ségolène Royal) reap financial gains, because they can attract other people to them and be seen as potential leaders. “Properly understood, erotic capital is what economists call a ‘personal asset,’ ready to take its place alongside economic, cultural, human, and social capital. It is just (if not more) as important for social mobility and success,” Hakim writes.

  In Hakim’s view, erotic capital has always been an obvious asset, but not
considered to have any measurable value in the workplace. Men in charge trivialized it because it was something women had mastered. And feminists disdained the idea of claiming it as a real source of empowerment. But now those dynamics are changing, Hakim writes. Instead of being done in by a highly sexualized culture, women are learning to manipulate it to their advantage. In an economy that values social skills and a more charismatic style of leadership, attractiveness gives you a genuine edge. Economists have even begun to measure the “beauty premium,” or the idea that magnetism has a direct connection to earning power. In the United States, for example, a large national study showed that people labeled “attractive” earned 12 to 17 percent more than those labeled “plain.” The bump applies to both men and women, but women have been playing on this turf a lot longer.

  Men, by necessity, have been playing catch-up. The recent rise in plastic surgeries is fueled by men—especially middle-aged men—who have been lining up for face-lifts, Botox, and liposuction. In 1986, People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive was the actor Mark Harmon, who had so much back hair it was visible from the front. Now the new standards for male waxing and trimming are as stringent as they are for women. The new men’s magazines crib directly from Cosmopolitan: WHAT SEXY WOMEN LOVE! and SIX-PACK ABS calls the cover of Men’s Health in headlines recycled every few months. Designers are starting to peddle “mancessories,” feather bracelets and metal cuffs and even makeup for men.