The Hook-Up Divide

The rules of casual sex changed almost overnight, but Lauren Larson says you can still have a great time – you just have to commit to it

- Lauren Larson

One morning in University, a friend slapped down her cafeteria tray and looked around at the rest of us – all girls. “Do you guys have orgasms?” she asked. One by one, we blushingly recounted the rapturous pleasure we’d experienced at the tender, skillful hands of drunk guys we’d met at parties. Then we all started to make out, Froot Loop milk dripping into our heaving bosoms.

What really happened is that for a very long moment, nobody said a word. “I had them with my high school boyfriend, but not really since,” one friend said. “Yeah, not really,” another girl echoed. I’d recently hooked up with a guy who wore basketball shorts and thongs to parties “for easy access”. No orgasm. We were all having a lot of sex, but most of it was terrible.

I thought of that conversation almost a decade later when the blog Babe published that long, detailed account of one woman’s date with comedian Aziz Ansari. After the date, when Ansari texted the woman to say that he’d had fun, she texted back to say the encounter had made her uneasy. “You had to have noticed I was uncomfortable,” she wrote. I’d had variations of the same thought during and after many disappointing Tinder dates. My entire sexual career suddenly played before my eyes – a movie montage of discomfort and miscommunication set to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”. That the woman’s experience with Ansari felt universal to me was less an absolution of Ansari than it was a sign that the ways men and women think about hook-ups are fundamentally at odds. With all the stories that have poured out in the #MeToo era, in the news and over drinks between friends, it’s become impossible to ignore the reality that more often than not – whether or not alcohol is involved – men usually emerge from hookups feeling satisfied while women often emerge feeling scammed.