By Lauren Simenauer > Sex & Dating Blogger
This past weekend, my best friend came to visit me at my University. My goal for the weekend was to give her a taste of my college experience—my food, my bars, my friends, my typical Saturday night.
We got back from dinner and drinks and met some of my friends at my apartment, where from the evening unfolded. All seemed to be going according to plan. Everyone was getting along. Then, when my best friend got up to go to the bathroom, a disturbing conversation between my college friends ensued:
Guy 1: Hey man, are you going to hit that?
Guy 2: I uh—
Me: EXCUSE ME?!!
It was almost as if the guys had a mutual understanding that I had invited them to share my company for the sole purpose of getting with my friend. And—don’t get me wrong—she is pretty and smart and funny. The works. Otherwise she wouldn’t be my best friend! Call me naïve, but I’m appalled by the assumption that most guys seem to have regarding college visits: that your friend, your sister, even your mom, are all fair game, simply because you’ve paraded them in front of a few sex-starved, testosterone dispensers. You know, because it’s not like they serve any other purpose.
This all occurred in light of CNN’s recent report that, due to the modern hookup culture, women remain "unsatisfactorily single." Is our hookup culture so depraved that we now find it acceptable to sell our friends to our Saturday night social scenes? Said Emma Miller, third year at the University of Virginia, “I was once locked in a bathroom for thirty minutes with a friend of a friend who wanted us to hook up.”
“I would never do it, but I’m probably the only guy who hasn’t,” said John Murray, senior at UCLA.
If the events of this weekend have shown me anything, it’s that it’s time to re-evaluate our hookup culture insomuch as it pertains to devaluing friendship. I never thought I would say this, but there is a limit to how much college students should be allowed to act like chimpanzees in heat. And I’m drawing the line in the sand at “giving up your out-of-town friends as sacrificial sex offerings to the Weekend Gods.”
