RUSH: There was something in the New York Times Magazine over the weekend. This has, within its own universe, created a firestorm. It’s about hooking up in college. I have the headline right here. Let me see the second page here. “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too.” This is a long piece. It’s like 4,000 words, this New York Times Magazine piece.
It’s a long piece on how there isn’t any dating anymore, as you and I understand it. It’s just no-emotion sexual hookups, and they are perfunctory at that. Not any attachment whatsoever. It’s written by… Well, I don’t know who wrote it. It’s a female, but I don’t have her name here. Strange, it never prints. But here’s how it starts: “At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time.
“She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep. Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls. ‘We don’t really like each other in person, sober,’ she said, adding that ‘we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.’ Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship…”
This is the University of Pennsylvania, by the way. It’s major, big time, powerful, quasi-Ivy League school. “Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about ‘cost-benefit’ analyses and the ‘low risk and low investment costs’ of hooking up. ‘I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,’ she said.
“‘And I know everyone says, ‘Make time, make time,’ said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. ‘But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.’ It is by now pretty well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by ‘hooking up’ — an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to [Lewinskys] to intercourse — without the emotional entanglement of a relationship.
“Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men,” and that’s what this long magazine piece ends up being about, that the hookup culture, in college, is driven by women today. It is women who are taking advantage of this new culture. It’s not men. Men aren’t running anything anymore. Men aren’t in charge of anything. They’re just the doormats of society, and women have become the alpha babes.
It’s obviously an outgrowth of feminism.
You know, what’s interesting?
One of the objectives of modern-era feminism was to take the presumed barbarian, brute nature out of men. It was to civilize men, make them more like women, make them more docile. Instead, what has happened is that women have sought to become like men. They want to do what men do, join the clubs that men do, have the attitudes that men do, while at the same time emasculating men. It did happen. It’s a long magazine article, not a story, and it goes on and on.
Kate Taylor is who wrote the piece. That’s her name, and she says that she is being overwhelmed with reaction to this. She cannot believe it. People are reacting.
Even in the New York Post today there’s a story from a guy who runs a hedge fund who has got a daughter in college and is just as ticked off at this as he can be. He doesn’t like it. He isn’t happy. He thinks this is horrible, and he’s sending out notes to people to try to do something about it.
Yeah, here it is: “College Sex Pushes Hedgie Dad’s Buttons.” It’s a hedge fund guy. His name is Whitney Tilson. “Prompted by a recent New York Times story about the campus ‘hookup’ culture at the University of Pennsylvania, the founder of Kase Capital caused a stir yesterday with a widely circulated email and blog posting offering some advice to his three daughters should a guy ever tell them to ‘get down on your knees.'”
Mr. Hedge fund guy, you’re missing the point of the story.
It’s not the guys doing this.
It’s your daughters.
The point of the story is that it’s the daughters, it’s the women at universities who are in charge, who are pushing the hookup culture. It is the women who are running around demanding and setting the terms and saying, “It’s now,” or, “It’s not now,” or what have you. Now, admittedly the guy’s advice is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But nevertheless this whole story — within its universe, folks — has created an incredible response. Now, you and I, we’ve talked about the hookup culture on this program.
It’s not new. It’s been around for a long, long time. The New York Times Magazine is just now hearing about it, but when they hear about it and write a long magazine piece about it, of course their readership runs across it and people who haven’t heard about it are freaking. But like anything else, in the midst of hookup culture, what do you see happening? There are still weddings. The New York Times still has its obituaries.
It still has its wedding page and engagement page. People in certain parts of the country are still getting married and traditional relationships are still happening and traditional dating still happens. But at the elite schools, apparently, all that’s just old school, not new school. All that’s just old-fashioned. The parents who sent their kids to these schools are just learning about this hookup culture.
We had another story from the University of Pennsylvania yesterday about that obnoxious professor of religion slamming Christians, claiming God’s a white racist with a problem. God is a white guy “carrying a gun and stalking young black men.” I mean, it’s no wonder the students at Penn are running around like zombies, seeking any kind of divorce or separation from the insanity that they’re presented with.
“‘God ain’t good all the time’? Okay. I’m gonna go find Zeke and we’ll hook up. Maybe I’ll find God in the hookup.” So that’s something that has the Northeastern liberal elites… I don’t know that they’re liberal elites. The Northeastern elites are sort of buzzing about this. Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz. But, again, folks, the thing about this is that it’s always been presumed that it would be men — the coarse, unfeeling, no-commitment, barbaric predators — who would be treating women this way, and then discarding them after haphazard use.
And it turns out it’s the women doing it, and it’s the guys who, when you call ’em at 11 o’clock, are sitting home. They’re doing nothing. They’re eating Wheaties and watching ESPN. The phone rings, and a little feminazi says, “Hey, I need to hookup. Are you home?” “Yeah, come on, over.” They don’t even like each other. It’s the women running this show. That’s what has some of the parents upset. They can’t believe their little girls would be doing this. I think this prints out to like nine or ten pages.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One thing I meant to mention about the writer Kate Taylor, who wrote the piece in the New York Times Magazine about hooking up. A little interesting side note about this. She says that she talked to hundreds of young women on college campi, and almost all of them wanted her to use a fake name or just a letter for their name such as “A” or “B.”
(interruption)
They didn’t want their parents to know they were doing it, that’s why. The women didn’t want their moms and dads to know what they were doing. Now, compare that to everybody vomiting everything that they’re doing on Twitter and Facebook. It’s confusing. And then here’s another way to look at this. Is all this hooking up and all that it means just something to do? There’s no attachment of any kind whatsoever.
When you look at the New York mayoral race you see Spitzer and Weiner.
In the two elections, you see them both with decent chances of winning. Does it make sense, in a way? For New Yorkers, it’s no big deal what Spitzer did at the end of the day. It’s no big deal what Weiner did, at the end of the day. Kids on college campuses are doing the same thing. They’re tweeting out things like that and hooking up, and there isn’t any attachment to it and nobody’s being betrayed because nobody’s making any commitments of any kind.
So Spitzer and Weiner, they’re not that much different from the behavior of people in college today and recent college graduates. I think it’s fascinating. You know, those of us who hold a traditional view of things, we look at all this, and we tried to make sense of it. And of course, logically, it doesn’t make sense. So then you try to find ways to explain it other than… (sees TV)
Good Lord, who is that? I take it back. Sorry. I was distracted by something I saw on TV. It’s incredibly risky to watch TV these days. You just never know what you’re gonna see. At any rate, with all this supposedly new types of getting together, hooking up, it’s right along the lines of what happens with Weiner and Spitzer and Clinton and all of these perpetrators of this kind of thing.
In the cases where these perpetrators like Spitzer and Weiner are Democrats, it really isn’t that much outside the mainstream of behavior. But I want to go back. I just wanted to make sure I reminded you of that. The women hooking up and bragging about it and thinking it’s new, don’t want their parents to know. I just find it fascinating, because they’re still vomiting all of it all over the social websites.