In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World,” sex is nothing more than a conditioned, physical interaction between two consenting adults. People are pre-conditioned from a young age to believe that “everyone belongs to everyone else,” and concepts like commitment and monogamy are virtually nonexistent. Sex is completely divorced from procreation; babies are “decanted” in laboratories and are raised by the State. All of this is the result of an elaborate system of social conditioning that begins, in most cases, before the age of reason. Sex is so stripped of its inherent meaning that even desire for sex has to be cultivated through things like the drug soma, sex-hormone chewing gum, and the “feelies,” which are essentially pornographic films viewed in theaters.
Today, in 2016, it seems that social conditioning in our entertainment, academia, and even our government is putting our society on a path toward a brave new world all our own. Nowhere is this clearer than on our college campuses. The hook-up culture that is prominent on so many campuses has all but supplanted traditional dating mores. Fewer students are going on actual dates, and more are hooking up at parties, often with alcohol involved. Students are “conditioned” through music, movies, and television to think that hook-ups are fun, pleasurable, and free from consequences.
Women, in particular, have been indoctrinated to believe that, in order to be strong, successful, and independent, they should be able to sleep with anyone, even a random stranger, and not feel any longing for commitment afterward. Magazines like Cosmopolitan even publish guides to one night stands, such as this “One Night Stand Survival Guide.”
The need for a survival guide for something that promises pleasure and empowerment seems unnecessary. Yet, the article explains that advance preparation for a one-night stand is critical, since only 54 percent of women have positive feelings after a one-night stand and only 51 percent of women believe that one “can have great sex without being in love.” Preparation for a one-night stand includes the following advice: “don’t see it as a way to a boyfriend,” “protect your emotions,” and a paragraph warning that the attachment one feels after sex (due to the hormone oxytocin) is just the brain “tricking you.”
It is alarming to think that students are being asked to shut down these innate desires and to ignore complex biological responses in the name of a false sense of empowerment.
If something like sex with a stranger is so fulfilling and devoid of any negative feelings whatsoever, why do women need to prepare themselves for it?
Why are people asked to ignore their bodies’ physiological response to sex, to tamper their emotional expectations, and to experience sex as a purely physical act, devoid of any greater meaning?
Why, when a woman feels close to someone after sex, is she known as a “clinger”?
The young women whom I teach dream of something more than hook-ups. They share in class that they hope to possibly meet their future spouse in college, launch a career, get married in their late 20s, and have children. They want to experience intimacy and closeness with a significant other.
But they are constantly told that they shouldn’t feel these things, that this is their time to be independent, to be free. They are constantly being asked to turn off this part of themselves, this innate desire that many of them have because it is an integral part of who we are as humans — that desire for intimacy, for communion, to be part of something greater than ourselves. To ask these students to ignore or to explain away this side of themselves denies them the soul-searching, formative experience that college should be.
It seems to me that we have so painstakingly removed the cultural mores and boundaries around sex that we are now clamoring to put some type of guard rail back up. Like a kid who couldn’t wait to drop the bumpers at the bowling alley, we’re realizing that those guard rails really did help steer us in the right direction.
Coupled with the prominence of hook-up culture on our college campuses is the new push for “consent workshops” that claim to lower incidences of sexual assault on campus because they encourage communication between the two parties who are considering sexual intimacy.
We have so stripped sex of its meaning and the often (not always) natural protection that comes from a committed relationship or marriage that we now need a third party to decipher something that should be basic — communication and consent.
Students are encouraged to sign consent agreements and to ask one another a series of questions before engaging in any sexual encounter at all. So students are at once conditioned to ignore their gut feelings, to hook up with strangers, but please sign this consent form, just to be sure.
It would be one thing if these changes in sexual behavior were leading to what they promise: empowerment of women and men, or real-life intimacy and communication. But instead, we are seeing a rise in sexual assaults on campus, a rise in sexually transmitted diseases, and fewer young people choosing to marry and to start families.
A particularly salient example is a 2013 study which polled incoming freshmen at Boston College and later polled these same students at graduation that found that women leave Boston College with lower self-confidence than when they arrived.
This same study found that the male students at Boston College graduated with greater self-confidence than when they had arrived on campus freshman year. Surely many factors contribute to this bleak statistic, but the students themselves acknowledge the prominent hook-up culture as one of the possible reasons for the discrepancy in self-esteem.
What if the culture were different?
What if students were encouraged to express their desire for companionship, for family?
What if our culture returned to that old-fashioned notion that sex is something sacred to be shared with someone in the context of a loving relationship, like a marriage?
Or at the very least, that sex is something sacred, that our bodies and our hearts know something that sometimes our heads do not. What a brave new world it would be, indeed.
Jennifer Manning teaches Religious Studies at a Boston area private high school. Find her on Twitter at @jmfmanning.
(Adobe stock photo) 
