Sumita Chakraborty Unravels This Commitment Free Trend.
TRADITIONALLY, girls have been the gender who said ‘No’ to sex without strings. Traditionally, sex was considered a four-letter word. Traditionally, hooking up meant meeting up with friends, visiting people and getting together…
‘Tradition’ in today’s eclectic world is of the old order. With New Age music, fusion food, masala spirituality and pulsating lifestyles, traditional concepts have gone through a sea change, beginning with hooking up…
…How exactly is hooking up defined today? “Hooking up today is sexual interaction which is commitment free,” explains sociologist Vinita Shah. “In our fast paced lifestyles, there is no time for romance. So more and more girls, especially career women with high stress level jobs, believe in hooking up, which is sex without any strings attached.”
“Sex is a biological function,” explains 21-year-old Anita Sen, a Mumbaikar who is currently studying at Penn University in USA. “Love, when it happens, will happen. But we have sexual desires and for now, why should we deny ourselves sex?”
18-year-old Rhea Malik, who is a student at Mumbai’s Jai Hind College, agrees. “Our generation deserves to have as much fun with our sexuality as guys do. Hooking up gives us a sense of adventure and an adrenalin rush. It has nothing to do with love. Anyway, we are too young to get entangled in any emotional bondage,” says she.
25-year-old Vedika Mehra, an advertising professional, believes that though people believe that hooking up is catching on in the metros, in smaller towns and cities it is more rampant. “But, yes, in our advertising circles, hooking up has caught on. After a hard day’s work, texting or messaging gives easy access to late night trysts with potential hookup partners,” she admits.
…A fact reiterated by the statistics presented by the National Data Survey done by the Indian Survey Management, Ahmedabad, in 2007. According to their data, in metros like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore, nearly half of all 15 to19-year-olds have confessed to have had sexual intercourse at least once. 33 percent of these teens have had sex without getting into a relationship. 25 percent of females and 15 percent of males aged 15 to19 in 2007 have ‘hooked up’ or had sexual interactions.
Freedom!
Khursheed Kanga, Mumbai-based trans-personal psychotherapist, explains, “Hooking up is a cultural spill-over. This is the age of globalization and sex has truly come out of the closet. These days, girls have become more aware of their physicality and are becoming more and more sexually free. Mindsets too have changed, especially about sex. And sexual interactions do not raise eyebrows any more.”
Sex without any strings
“Hooking up is commitment free sexual interaction which is attracting young women all across the world these days. It varies from heavy petting to sexual intercourse. Oral sex, incidentally, is not even counted as sex these days,” says US-based author Laura Sessions Stepp, who has written ‘Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both’. This book is an account of three groups of (high achievers) young women in the USA during an academic year. It examines hooking up – the sexual culture that has replaced dating – and shows how it has affected the thoughts, behaviour, and aspirations of this generation of girls.
Explains Laura, “I wrote about it because I watched hooking up change to a cultural shift in the way this generation thinks about relationships. I also chose to focus on girls because I believe they are more aggressively into hooking up. The high achievers I interviewed for my book believed that hooking up gives the girls control over their emotions, their schedules, and freedom to focus on things like schoolwork and career.”
Easy Access
Actor Lillette Dubey says, “Hooking up, according to what I see around me, is when girls take the driver’s seat as far as sex is concerned. It should not be mixed with promiscuity or casual sex. Women - career women, academic oriented women, responsible women - are aware of their sexual choices and are willing to act on them. There is nothing judgmental about this. To each her own!”
Meeting Ground
According to sociologist Vinita Shah, “These days, it is extremely easy for anybody to hook up. You can do so through instant messaging, chat sites or text messaging. In the pre-internet era, dating men was a very formal affair and required a certain amount of planning. In the contemporary hook up culture, activity is much more a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
...Commitment free sex seems to be the current order. Whether young women will continue to swear by it or quickly move on to another unique trend in terms of their personal equations, remains to be seen...
