The Rise of Hookup Culture and the Fall of Self Worth

Written Anonymously

About a year before I started college I was visiting the campus and matched with a cute boy on a dating app. We talked for a few months and eventually stopped. Fast forward to my first week of college and first ever frat party. I was swaying to the catchy music in the dirt-floor basement when I made eye contact with someone. We kept looking at each other for a few minutes until, very unlike me, I broke the staring contest and said: “You look really familiar.” He responded that it was because we matched with each other on an app a while back. We started talking and shortly thereafter we were making out. He got my number and texted me. We talked on and off for a few days. I was overly excited for next weekend, hoping I’d see him again to continue our fling. 

The naive freshman that I was could not stop smiling and gushing to my friends about how crazy it was that this guy that I had talked to a year before, and that I liked so much, just happened to be at the same party I ended up at. Not to mention – he was a senior and had actually transferred to a different school the year prior but was still friends with his past frat brothers and still went to their parties. And so, I thought it was absolute fate that we ended up in the same place at the same time. 

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was not special. I still thought about him all the time and we exchanged texts somewhat regularly, but he didn’t seem as interested as he had the first night. I would see him at parties and we would smile at each other but that was the extent of it. Three weeks after the night we made out, I saw him making out with another girl in the same spot in the grimey basement. My heart sunk and I needed to talk to someone about it so I chatted with one of my close guy friends who was in the same frat. He told me to forget about him - that he does this all the time. 

“What exactly does he do?” I asked.

It turns out that he was notorious for going to almost all of the frat parties that his old fraternity  threw. Even though he was no longer a brother and went to a school about an hour away, he made the weekly trek in exchange for a few hours of cheap liquor and a shitty Spotify playlist. He was a senior at a frat party filled with wishful freshman girls that were hoping to meet boys to kiss and swoon over. 

Just like many of my peers, I went to frat parties hoping to drink, have fun with friends, and get noticed by a cute boy. While there’s nothing wrong with this, girls tend to judge both their overall experience of the night and their self-worth by whether or not they can accomplish all three of those tasks. Hookup culture in this situation is fueled by the power that the boys in these fraternities have. They ensure that the ratio of girls to guys always favors the guys to have their “pick of the litter” – leaving a large number of vulnerable girls to feel like they aren’t attractive enough. 

The way I felt about myself on the nights that I hooked up with someone versus how I felt on the nights when I watched other girls get what I wanted differed drastically. Not only did it make me feel like I was ugly and lower my self-esteem, it made me lower my standards and force myself to do things I wouldn’t have normally done just so that I could feel better about myself. 

The boy that I hooked up with my first week of college was probably just like me in that he judged his self-worth by whether or not members of the opposite sex liked him. However, he used his position to take advantage of others: he had three years of preying on freshman girls to execute it to perfection, he knew that there would always be more options for him to choose from, and he knew he could get away with this behavior with no repercussions. 

If I could go back and tell my freshman self one thing, it would be this: college is about finding yourself, but it’s not about finding yourself in others. Do what makes you happy. Don’t let the pressures of others sway your decisions. Determine your self worth by the way you treat others and not by the way you are treated.