“I Just… Hook Them Up?”
I’m kinky, yes. But I’m also old and boring, and my social origins are rural. I know — as an intellectual thing — that hookup culture has always existed (somewhere). It’s as old as people. But where it finds expression is somewhat variable, and it’s never been a practical sexual thing in my actual lived sexual life. You say “kinky hookup” to me and I am gonna start looking around for the pony gear, just like John Willie on The Magic Island:
“Kinky hookups” to me? That means, you find willing women and you just…hook them up, right? And then they pull the cart? While you sit on the seat, crack the whip, sniff the panties you took off them, and gloat like a proper beastly villain?
No, grandpa. Take your seat. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works! Now stop talking before we unfriend you.
It is fortunate indeed that people interested in finding kinky hookups — or in learning a little bit more about how hookup culture works in 2019 — don’t have to rely on me for their hookup information. In fact there are a half-dozen detailed blog posts at KinkyHookup.com that go into quite a bit of detail on 21st-century hookup culture, hookup etiquette, likely hookup partners, strategies for finding and arranging hookups, and even how to bail afterwards.
The authors of those pieces clearly know a lot more than I do about hookups as they are practiced these days, so I won’t bore you unduly with my superficial (and likely to be superfluous) thoughts on that same subject.
That said, I hope you’ll indulge me in some commentary on the remarkable way in which the whole hookup conversation has changed over about the last ten or fifteen years.
Mind you, remember that hookups themselves are nothing new. One of the articles at KinkyHookup.com points to a flourishing of American hookup culture in the Roaring Twenties, as wealthy young people took advantage of the privacy and autonomy created by the introduction of automobiles. I’ll bet with an hour’s searching I could find a text from ancient Rome bemoaning the loose morals of young people at casual dinner-party orgies.
No, hookups are not new. But years ago when various kinds of internet services first started hooking up congenial strangers who just wanted to fuck, the initial response from — pretty much everybody — was fucking panic. From old pundits in dying dead-tree newspapers to sharp young bloggers on trendy web outlets, everybody who wrote about “the new hookup culture” fretted about it. And inevitably, their fretting boiled down to worrying that the people “hooking up” were younger, prettier, and enjoying a lot more sex than the people doing the writing and the fretting.
Luckily, we’ve all gotten a fuck-ton more relaxed. Hookups are still happening. Yay for people having lots of sex! But if it’s not for you, it’s not mandatory. (Phew, that’s a relief!) And if it is for you, there’s now lots of sane-sounding articles and blog posts out there, stuff you can read that tells you how to go about it. Without judging you, or panicking. That, my friends, is what sexual progress looks like.
