Quick heads up, this episode explores explicit themes.

If you're listening with small kids, you may want to save this for later.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Parties were huge, hookups were huge, everyone just seemed to be doing everything with each other,

and yet I always kind of felt like I wasn't doing it right.

There are certain ideas that send the media into a panic.

One of them is hookup culture.

College students are quote unquote hooking up.

Hookup, hookup, hookup culture.

Yeah, I wonder where people can just be sitting in a cafe and find someone to hook up with.

Are you buying this? Kids are more sexual than ever.

It might seem like hookups are rampant in college,

but students are actually not having more sex than their parents did a generation ago.

Something has changed though, not in what students do or what they don't do,

but in how they think.

Hookups are decidedly not about finding any sort of romantic connection,

and suggesting that it should be or that one is doing it for that reason

is tantamount to breaking a social rule.

In hookup culture, there's casual sex on the one hand,

an emotional intimacy on the other, and never the two shall meet.

So when you know you hook up with someone that you actually really liked,

and you really wanted to be with them, and then they don't text you back and so it's over.

...