Another Guyland excerpt and thoughts on today’s sermon
From Michael Kimmel’s book (page 201):
“The Absence of Expectations
One of the key defining features of hooking up is that it is a strictly ‘no strings attached’ endeavor. Young people in college–and this seems to hold true for both women and men–seem generally wary of committed or monogamous relationships.”
The author goes on to tie this attitude to parental divorce reducing young people’s hope of long-term romance and the challenge of balancing romantic goals with career ones. There is a blog a while back on this site and in one of my books that is an essay about how art (particularly the Ibsen play A Doll’s House) may have contributed to the rise in divorce rates since the 19th century.
Two other thoughts. I have said before that I think the decline of formal dating late last century may have led to an increase in “hooking up,” which can sometimes lead to allegations of sexual assault, especially if the man is insensitive to the woman afterwards. Also on Kimmel’s point about balancing romance and career: one literary critic made the argument that English novels are often about romance, while French ones are often about mainly job careers.
On another topic, today’s sermon was about a pithy line from The Bible that the people told Jesus they would “turn to you.” Of course, many of them eventually turned against him. When a college teacher, I had a recalcitrant student who would turn away from me, I think as a sign of disrespect; and a police officer recently also turned away from me when I tried to reprimand him for unjustly torturing me. Maybe that is what higher authorities tell police officers with unhappy suspects to do. One literary critic called this type of thing “gestural discourse” in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov