WHAT’S MY LINE?: On Friday I heard a talk by Elizabeth Marquardt, discussing her research into the “hookup culture” on college campuses. For those of us who graduated recently, there were few surprises: Nobody asks anybody on dates, nobody knows whether they’re dating or not, people either engage in sterile futureless hookups or embed themselves in “joined at the hip” relationships with a strong flavor of folie a deux. This much I knew (although it was interesting to note how much these facts surprised Marquardt, who is quite young–this stuff must be relatively recent).

But one thing she said was not something I’d heard before, and it really struck me. She pointed out that the hookup relationship is the only kind of erotic encounter that is actually “scripted”–where you know, going in, what you should do and how to get what you want. You’re not supposed to want to talk to the person afterwards (as a friend of a friend said in a slightly different context, “I $#@!’d you, I don’t want to see you!”). Afterward, if you long for the person or want some emotional intimacy to go with your physical intimacy, that means you’re “clingy” and needy and bad. (It doesn’t mean, say, that you are someone who has an integrated sense of her body and her mind; someone who knows that there is a language of the body and a meaning to our actions in the physical world.)

And there’s one other thing to note about the hookup script, Marquardt added. The script often includes getting drunk, and rarely includes any kind of communication about what the two people involved are doing. That sounds like a different script: the one for date rape.

In the sexual revolution, I’m unconvinced that sex won.