In the Brown Daily Herald last week, columnist Renata Sago objectively and unbiasedly wrote about “hooking up,” referring to it as “trite and tasteless.” She even mentioned the incredibly high possibility of getting oral herpes from making out with a stranger. (Luckily, no one in a relationship ever has oral herpes.) Fellow sophomore Sam Loomis responded yesterday with a defense of random hookups, citing arguments by John Stuart Mill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Only in the Ivies.

You might be unaware of this, but having done some investigatory research, I’ve discovered that Penn also has this “hookup culture”. Whether it’s making out at frat parties or the surprisingly complicated arrangement of friends with benefits, Penn students regularly show how little time and regard they have for actual “relationships.” It’s either long-term married bliss or casual, fun . . . mutual enjoyment.

While Loomis makes somewhat valid points with the quotes from Mill and Rousseau (amidst a healthy dose of satire), I’d like to invoke the ideas of a more contemporary philosopher: Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the use of classification and categorization to create identities into which individuals organize themselves, all attempting to obtain a goal which they themselves can only approach asymptotically. The farther away they are from this achievement, the lower they find themselves on a vertical social hierarchy. So the identity in question here is “ubercool college student,” and the bottom of the hierarchy is somewhere between “can’t get any” and “huge geek”.

I’m generally pro-hooking up, but anti-hooking if it’s to fit a certain identity, stereotype, or expectation. By the end of freshman year, I had Penn friends who were hooking up because, when they had an opportunity, they felt expected to take advantage of it. Bored or not, the other person involved was physically attractive enough or drunk enough that it just seemed like there wasn’t a good reason to turn him or her down. And hey, anything to socially cancel out that A in physics, right?

In deciding whether or not to hook up randomly, the best solution is to reconcile Mill’s utilitarianism and Foucault’s disciplines. Do that which creates “the greatest amount of happiness altogether” (that is, doesn’t just get you off, but also helps or at least doesn’t hurt anyone else in the process), but don’t give in to expectations or societal norms. You’re not cooler for hooking up with that hot Tri Delt chick, and everyone’s not always watching or monitoring your behavior.

Fortunately, if you listen to another modern philosopher, the great Jack Daniels, you won’t remember any of this, and you won’t remember what you do. It’s win-win!

Tags: Brown, Foucault, hooking up

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Ivy League, Penn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.