Hookup Culture and Same-Sex Marriage

A fascinating book review appears in today's Wall Street Journal.  The review is by Emily Esfahani Smith of a new book by Donna Freitas called The End of Sex:  How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.

The review includes an interesting suggestion, which I had not seen before but makes perfect sense.  It is that there is a high positive correlation between the increased use of technological devices among youth -- which replaces, removes, or corrupts traditional human interaction (a la Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and many others) -- and the rise of hookup culture on college campuses. (Previous posts here and here provide a summary of Prof. Turkle's ideas.)

Something else worth pondering is a point that Prof. Freitas makes about the culture of sex on college campuses, here summarized by Ms. Smith:

In other words, many college students, who in philosophy class would surely recognize the ethical imperative not to use other people as means to an end, do so every night in their dorms. This selfishness is why, as Ms. Freitas argues, the hookup culture is intimately related to sexual assault. In both, one person uses another to satisfy a sexual or social desire without any regard for what that other person wants, needs or feels. 

Now, one might counter that the sex is consensual and so there is no assault. But the idea underlying the claim of selfish sexual use that disregards what another person "wants, needs, and feels" goes deeper than this.  It is more holistic.  The assumption seems to be that this sexual activity is done in the absence of thinking about what sex is, what it does relationally, and what it is part of holistically.   And absent these fundamental considerations, hookup sex is personally utilitarian to the extreme and, at bottom, immoral.

Professor Freitas may not go so far as I just put it (i.e., say that hookup sex is immoral), but that is apparently her instinct.  And there is something to that notion.

This discussion of campus sexuality is revealing, it seems to me, for the contours surrounding, and the connections to, the same-sex marriage debate that is now current.  Proponents of same-sex marriage tend to defend it on the basis of a "rights" argument, that it is an individual and civil right to be able to marry whomever one may wish.  But this line of argumentation, while it needs to be considered, may be similar to the hookup sex culture in this way:  it tends to assume something about the fundamental issue of what marriage is, and perhaps like hookup sex culture it misses the point.

Arguing for same-sex marriage may not always include explicitly a definition of what marriage is, but there is certainly an assumed definition, which is really a re-definition.  Redefining marriage from the conjugal view to include same-sex partners turns on the idea that marriage is simply a relationally satisfying forum, one that exists for the pursuit of the happiness, or the fulfillment of desires, of those persons involved.  One full expression of this revisionist view is given by S. Girgis, R. George, and R. Anderson:

Marriage is the union of two people (whether of the same sex or of opposite sexes) who commit to romantically loving and caring for each other and to sharing the burdens and benefits of domestic life. It is essentially a union of hearts and minds, enhanced by whatever forms of sexual intimacy both partners find agreeable. (my emphasis)

What if sexual intimacy according to whatever form that partners find agreeable turns out to be deleterious and misguided, as Prof. Freitas argues about hookup culture?  What if the potential form that sexual intimacy takes in marriage is in fact constitutive of marriage itself properly practiced?

I don't know Prof. Freitas's view of the same-sex marriage question, and I am not suggesting that she would support a conjugal view of it.  Based on the review, I doubt she would.

My main contention is simply that if one is going to discuss the merits or legitimacy of different forms of sexuality -- hookup culture on college campuses and marriage itself (because sexuality has been viewed as intrinsic to marriage) -- one needs to be candid about this:  the fact that the discussion is about, or should really be about, what sex or marriage is most basically.  And everyone in the conversation needs to be willing to engage substantively in that discussion.

The preoccupation with a supposed individual right of same-sex persons to marry obscures the logically prior and necessary question of the basic definition of marriage upon which the exercise of any right depends.  Moreover, if someone is confused about what something is and what it is a part of, as in the case of hookup culture, then the doing of that thing will have deleterious and misguided results.

To adapt the subtitle of Prof. Freitas's book, what if same-sex marriage ends up leaving a generation and its posterity confused about intimacy and what marriage really is?