Hookups are like french fries.
It’s time to break out the sex scale. It can tell you what is out of whack.
In many ways, your sex life is one of the most important parts of this diet. That’s because of all the emotions tangled up with it. It’s disappointing to have bad sex with a good person, confusing to have good sex with a bad person, and depressing to have bad sex with a bad person. Hookups are like french fries: delicious in the moment, but they often lead to remorse.
The goal is to have good sex with a good person. So let’s start by analyzing your own sexual history. Break out the journal and answer the following:
When was the last time you had good sex? Who was it with?
What were the circumstances?
Did you have an orgasm? Did you see that person again?
Now, think back over your history of sexual encounters.
Have you ever had casual sex? How often do you have it?
Do you have sex to figure out if you like someone?
Do you have sex drunk? How often?
Do you regularly have orgasms?
I realize that some of these questions are intense to start off, but for all the white noise and cultural analysis around hooking up, an illusion persists that sex is casual. That it is no big deal. That everyone is having it, all the time. None of that is true. In fact, a 2016 study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that millennials are more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive as Gen Xers.
Gail Dines, a Wheelock College academic who tours college campuses to talk about the impact of porn on relationships, says that her female students talk about the “emotional hangover” they have after hookup sex.
One reason stated in the study was a focus on education and career. Another is all the confusion and anxiety around consent. Gail Dines, a Wheelock College academic who tours college campuses to talk about the impact of porn on relationships, says that her female students talk about the “emotional hangover” they have after hookup sex. “The students I talk to say they rarely get orgasms through hookups,” Dines says. “So I ask, why even do it?”
Sex is so confusing for so many women, especially those who are in their sexual prime in their midtwenties, which as we have discussed earlier, coincides with the huge emotional effort of embarking on a career. “The pressure on women to be successful complicates things,” says New York–based sex therapist Logan Levkoff. “It makes it seem like having an emotionally intimate relationship takes so much time that we need to postpone it for the future—when we get our lives together.”
Relationships do take energy and time—but so does hooking up. “Casual sex isn’t always casual,” Helen Fisher says. “It can trigger a host of powerful feelings, as any genital stimulation can cause an increase in dopamine and any tactile stimulation can cause an increase in oxytocin.” Both lead to romance and emotional attachment, and Fisher wonders if people engage in “hooking up” to unconsciously trigger those feelings.
As with everything else in this diet, I am advocating acute consciousness when it comes to sex. Mindless munching leads to empty calories—and unwanted pounds. Likewise—to paraphrase Gwyneth Paltrow slightly—unconscious coupling can also weigh us down and get in the way of our love goals. So before you climb into bed with someone new, pause for a moment and reflect honestly about what your expectations are.
If you want to hook up just for the pure fun of it and it feels liberating and you don’t need it to go any further, then great.
If your goal is to see him again, and you think that that’s his goal, too, and having sex marks the beginning of a mutual relationship, that is exciting as well.
But if your hope is that sex may lead to the start of something but you’re not sure, then you should allow for the possibility that you may be disappointed if they don’t text you until the next time they want a hookup.
Before you climb into bed with someone new, pause for a moment and reflect honestly about what your expectations are.
Whatever your goals, once sex is involved, fasten your seat belt and prepare for emotional turbulence.
I don’t want to sound as if all hookups are bad. Of course they’re not, and they can lead to something bigger. “We often think of casual sex as being in the domain of what men want and women go along with it,” says Justin Garcia, the author of a study published in “Sexual Hookup Culture: A Review.” His research has found that 63 percent of men who engage in hooking up say they would prefer a romantic relationship. “Many men think that they’re supposed to hook up,” he says. “But they really want a relationship as well.” He also found, in a collaborative study he did with Helen Fisher for Match.com, that one in three people surveyed had a sexual hookup that turned into a romantic relationship. And to further debunk the myth that all men just want sex with no strings attached, Garcia cites another study he did on cuddling: “Over 50 percent of both men and women want to spend the night and cuddle after a hookup,” he says. “These are not the cultural rules of no-strings-attached casual sex.”
The data, he says, leads him to believe that some people are looking for—and actually getting—aspects of intimacy in their sexual hookups. And he argues that a hookup, or having sex early in a relationship, is a good way to gauge your sexual attraction to a person, which can actually change during sex.
“You’re invoking all senses when you have sex with someone,” says Ian Kerner, PhD, psychotherapist, sex counselor, and author of the wonderfully titled She Comes First and its companion He Comes Next. “So you’re getting all this biological information about this person and your own body is having a biological response. Do you like the smell? The taste? Do you like how it feels? Do you feel safe? Did you have an orgasm?” All this important information is explored during a sexual encounter. “You learn a whole lot about the person,” agrees Fisher. “You know instantly if it is going to go forward—if they don’t call you the next morning, you know it won’t work. And it’s better than spending eight months talking to the person and then having sex and then realizing it is not going to work.”
By “work,” Fisher means, is this person someone you can explore your sexuality with? Whom you can imagine being truly intimate with? That is what good sex is.
Intimacy is the key ingredient. It is the organic roasted sweet potato that takes time to find and prepare. “People crave intimacy,” says Kerner, who also uses the phrase “Pleasure is the measure” to define any healthy relationship. “Without it, you end up with a sex life that becomes somewhat dehydrated or desiccated,” he explains. “Pleasure is the fundamental calorie that you want to be consuming as much of as possible.”
By pleasure, he is talking about the warm, hopefully fabulous feeling of having good sex, which is one of several basic ingredients of any healthy and long-lasting relationship. Hookup sex can be a mixed bag. A study led by Paula England, PhD, a professor of sociology at New York University, called “Accounting for Women’s Orgasm and Sexual Enjoyment in College Hookups and Relationships,” found that 11 percent of women had an orgasm during first-encounter casual sex. That number grew to 16 percent for second or third hookups with the same partner.
When I arrived at Cosmo—already married with two kids—I was amazed at how many women depended on the magazine for basic sex ed. The number one question we got from readers, other than how to negotiate a pay raise, was, “How do I have an orgasm?” In the US, that lesson is not on any curriculum for sex education in either middle or high schools. It’s why we made it an entire episode of The Bold Type—the show inspired by my experiences at Cosmo—on Freeform, where a writer is commissioned to craft a piece on orgasms only to fess up she hasn’t ever experienced one. “The root of the problem is that no one teaches girls about pleasure in the context of sex education,” says Marina Khidekel, founder of the newsletter Undrrated and now senior deputy editor of Women’s Health, who edited Cosmo’s love and sex pages brilliantly for four years. “It’s really about mechanics. This is what goes where. You learn about sperm and egg and condoms. You learn, ‘Don’t get an STD.’ But then you are left on your own to figure out everything else.” So we dedicated a lot of pages to just that: how to masturbate, fantasize, orgasm, and more. And we did it for the benefit of both sexes. “Whenever there was a story about blow jobs,” Khidekel says, “there was another story about oral sex for women as well.”
The goal was to get women to understand their bodies, what turns them on, and what brings them pleasure. Yet the statistics, as well as too many readers’ experiences, suggest that sex is still often disappointing or alienating. There is a huge disconnect, and one that clear communication can bridge. “All of us want to be a really great lover, but we don’t have the language that allows people to be vulnerable and awkward and unsure of themselves,” Levkoff says. We strip naked, sometimes with total strangers, but don’t tell them what we are hoping for in bed. Of course it is awkward! And it can be humiliating and frightening as well as ecstatic and awesome. The only way to solve it is to talk with the other person, which is more awkward still when you don’t know them. “Instead of dealing with these uncomfortable spaces, we tend to rush to the end,” says Levkoff. From the women’s angle, that often ends with a faked orgasm—fast-forwarding to close a disappointing experience. But what is the point of pretending to have fun? No one wins at that game. “There is something really powerful about owning that awkward space, and saying, ‘Look, I’m a little bit uncomfortable saying this, but I like when you do this . . .’” Levkoff says. “If you don’t say what turns you on, then you don’t really have the opportunity to get what you want in the end.”
We also have to do away with what Khidekel calls the Disneyfication of the perfect partner: someone who will intuitively know what turns you on. “This feeling that when the right guy comes along, he will just know how to please me,” she explains. “To leave that in their partner’s hands—and not even know how to explore their own bodies and pleasure first—in this day and age, where women are so empowered in so many other areas of their life, shocked me.”
Before you begin instructing your partner what feels good, you have to know it yourself.
Men have their first orgasms between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Women run the gamut. “Some women may have had their first accidental orgasm at that age by rubbing up against a friend,” Kerner says. “But most say, ‘Oh, I didn’t really have my first orgasm until I was twenty, twenty-five, or even later in life.’”
Figuring out what turns you on and gets you off is basic nutrition for anyone. So instead of getting out your journal, run a bath or climb in bed or lie down on the couch and experiment with getting to know yourself. While Levkoff is a fan of vibrators and other sex toys, she thinks it is important to start with your own hand. “Ask yourself, ‘Are you comfortable enough with your own body to touch yourself?’” she says. “If not, then there are some bigger self-esteem body issues going on.”
Exploring your own body is the only way to figure out what brings you pleasure. And that is the key to climaxing. “Being able to experience pleasure is very important to being able to experience desire,” Kerner says. “Which is key to having meaningful sexual experiences that result hopefully in gratification and orgasm and leave you feeling connected and loved and tended to by your partner and also leave you wanting to have more sex.”
This is the exercise portion of your love diet, akin to doing squats, stomach crunches, and plank poses (but way more fun). Add to this workout “psychogenic arousal,” which Kerner defines as the ability to “fantasize and conjure up arousing, erotic scenarios, being open to erotic stimuli—which includes erotic literature or films.” Kerner and Levkoff are both fans of what they call “ethical porn” (see Rule #10). “Fantasy raises your levels of arousal, which can be louder than the anxiety that many women feel around sex,” Kerner explains. “So for a woman who is worried ‘How does my body look?’ or ‘Are my roommates going to walk through the door?’ being able to fantasize is going to be very helpful to generate the arousal and lower the volume on that noise.”
Knowing how to prime your own pump is the pathway to pleasure. “Unlike male desire, pleasure really precedes desire for women,” Kerner adds. “Whereas a guy can have a sexual thought, see or remember something sexy, and it can trigger the arousal platform. That’s called spontaneous desire.” Knowing that helps control the outcome as well because it is much easier for a guy to get off than a woman. This is not about how to please your guy in bed; it’s about how to make the most of the fact that he is more likely to get aroused more quickly than you. On that note, we don’t give men enough credit; most do want to please you in bed. But how will they know what that entails if you don’t tell them? “They have no interest in someone faking it,” Levkoff says. “They want to learn, and have as much trouble speaking up as we have trouble asking.”
If you are too embarrassed to say, “I would really love it if you did this,” then just show them. “Move his hand, or your body,” Levkoff says. The way he responds is a good litmus test for a quality partner. If someone doesn’t care, then they’re not worth having in the first place. Why waste your time?
And so, before committing to have sex with anyone, ask yourself a few questions:
Why are you sleeping with this particular person?
Do you just want to have sex?
Are you sleeping with him because you want him to like you and you think the act of sex will achieve that goal?
Do you think it will be a good experience?
Once you identify your expectations, I suggest another speed bump (and potential buzzkill) in the form of a few more questions:
What is the potential upside?
The downside?
Is the equation worth it?
If this person has passed these first hurdles—and you may already be undressed and making out—this is where you can look for important cues:
Does he make you feel comfortable and safe?
Is he sensitive to the boundaries of consent?
Can you talk about sexual protection?
PS: Protected sex is a prerequisite to experiencing pleasure. As Kerner says, “Very few women who have unprotected sex feel pleasure because they have some level of anxiety about the sex that they’re having.”
Once you feel safe, then you can take it further. Tell him what feels good or what you like. And do you care about making him feel good, too?
“I would look for the ability to be able to tell a partner, ‘Ooh, that hurts a little bit’ or ‘a little lighter’ or ‘a little softer please’ and feel that there was a feedback loop happening,” Kerner says. If it is not, and you are growing concerned, your body will ultimately switch from a pleasure-seeking mode to one that is on alert. “The body is always assessing the environment for feelings of safety and comfort,” according to Garcia. “If you feel safe or you’re having fun or you don’t have fear, you go down a different biological pathway. If you’re in a frozen state versus a mobilized, fun, safe-feeling state, you have a different biological response.”
The goal is always for sex to be glorious fun, but given the stats of foreplay morphing into sexual assault, you need to think ahead to how to extricate yourself if things get uncomfortable.
As Steve Kardian suggested in Rule #5, it’s okay to arm yourself with excuses. Pretend that you suddenly feel sick to your stomach (few people relish being vomited on) or that you have to go to the bathroom. Don’t hesitate to say you have an STD. Especially if you never want to see him again. Say your period just started. Say whatever you need to say to get out of the situation safely.
Unfortunately, we know that it may not be enough to stop certain men. I wish there were a surefire way to spot those who mean to harm you. Or the ones who won’t respect you. Think of the world of pain we could all avoid if such a test existed. There are signs (and we detail them in Rule #11), but there is no better place than in bed to know if a partner is worth keeping. Does he truly care about you? Can you trust him? Only then can he or she bring you pleasure.
TO DO
“It’s so hard for women to know their sexual selves,” says Wednesday Martin, PhD, the author of a forthcoming book on female infidelity called Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free. “There’s so much white noise and clutter and interference. Empower yourself.”
In short, figure out what turns you on. Use your hand, a vibrator, the dryer on mega spin, whatever works. Once you know what gets you going, then practice having that conversation with yourself—so you can be articulate with any potential partner. While we are at it, let’s also dismantle the myth that women are not as sexual as men. A 2014 study published in Current Sexual Health Reports found that women crave sex as much as men do. Martin describes women as “omnivorous” when it comes to sex. “Women crave variety and novelty,” Martin says. “Our sexuality is the place where we have most been conditioned to believe that we have to be a certain way, and it is the place where we most need to assert our autonomy.”
Knowing that you are a truly sexual being then exploring what that means specifically for you is the first step toward finding true pleasure. Then being able to share that self-knowledge with a partner means he or she can be an integral part of the experience. That is what we are going for here!
CASE STUDIES
Sara*, 21, on dating mostly men but learning about true pleasure from a woman.
Sara identifies as queer. “I date mostly men but have had girlfriends, too,” the college senior says. “I like the openness of that label.” She’s also the daughter of four mothers—her biological mother was in a committed relationship with a woman when Sara was born. They split two years after her brother was born and have since each found new partners, so she has two mothers and two stepmothers as well. “Growing up in such a gay-friendly family allowed me to accept sexual fluidity as a norm,” she explains. “Although it took me until college to really delve into my queerness, I was lucky to never feel confined by heteronormative pressures.”
She grew up in Brooklyn, where being the black daughter of four mothers did not stand out quite as much as it did when she started at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. At the time, Sara was still involved with her high school boyfriend. “I was considered off-limits freshman year,” she says. “It was a long-distance relationship, so I would not hook up with guys, but I did wind up making out with my best friend.” She says it happened consistently, and alcohol was always involved, but it never went beyond kissing. Her boyfriend knew, she adds, but did not care “because she was a girl.”
Still, Sara felt a certain amount of curiosity watching all her friends use Tinder to hook up. So when she and her boyfriend split, she downloaded the app to see what she had been missing. “When I got matches, it was a confidence boost,” she says. “But then I did not feel safe meeting these people, or I’d do some social media research and they did not look anything like their Tinder photo.” She did hook up with one guy, whom she really liked. She was about to text him the next day to say so, until her friend advised against it. “I learned that there are rules to navigating hookup culture,” she says. “If you text your feelings too early, then you are seen as being too clingy. My friend said it is better to distance yourself, which is hard for me. I’m a straightforward, touchy-feely person. That was frustrating.”
In the end, she decided she had not missed out on anything. “The whole process felt dehumanizing to me,” she says. Then she saw a video online that claimed black women have the lowest success rate “digi” dating. She was not surprised: “There’s a lot of fetishizing going on, with Asian women, too.” But in the end, she was simply turned off by how transactional online dating seemed. “It really feels like people are just interested in sex,” she says.
Sara wanted the sex to be good if she was going to have it. “The sex with my boyfriend was great, but he had to learn my body,” she says. “That takes time.” The few hookups she had were more like “a lot of fumbling around,” she adds. Oral sex with random guys, she maintains, is the worst. “Why do they need to stick their penis in my mouth?” she asks. “Especially if they won’t go down on me?”
Then she started hanging out with a female friend who had also been in a long-term relationship with a guy. “I thought we were just becoming good friends—and then she kissed me one night,” Sara recalls. “I was like, ‘Hmm. What is this?’” What started slowly turned into a full-blown romance. “The relationship started with our really getting to know each other before we even started kissing,” she says. “The opposite of hookup culture!”
The other thrill of this relationship was that she learned about what gave her pleasure. “I believe that girls should orgasm every time they have sex. When I had a boyfriend, sex was over when he was finished.” Sara’s orgasms were not the priority. But then she started sleeping with other women—and now makes them one. “Every single time I would get with a girl, I would orgasm,” she says.
As a result, she has figured out what makes sex great for her. “It boils down to intimacy and trust,” she says. “So I feel safe with you, and you care about my needs.” To achieve that, Sara adds, she needs what she calls “the two C’s”: communication and consistency. “I want to be able to say, I’m just as horny as you are!” she adds. “But let’s talk about it so we are on the same page.”
Leah, 24, on why she wrote her college thesis on how much hookup culture sucks.
Leah was tired of reading all the hype around hookup culture. “A lot of people who write about it haven’t experienced it,” she explains. “I couldn’t find one piece where someone was being honest about what was going on.”
Leah herself felt awful after consistent “pseudo relationships” at Middlebury College, where she’d hook up with the same guy for weeks, but he’d refuse to admit feelings, commit to something more, or show affection in public. However, it was one experience, with a guy who cut her off to explore other options after they had been hooking up for months, that made her think critically about it. “Months later, we wound up on a summer trip together and became really good friends,” she says. After that trip, he asked her to be in a relationship with him, which utterly surprised her. She wondered what had changed and asked him. His response? He told her that he didn’t think of her as a “human being” when they were hooking up.
That admission rattled her and inspired her to focus her senior thesis on hookup culture because she couldn’t believe that people would actively participate in an experience where “people were not treating one another like human beings.”
She was not alone: Of the seventy-five men and women she interviewed, she found only a few students who genuinely wanted a noncommittal hookup and nothing more.
Leah finished her thesis in 2015 and wrote a hugely popular essay for Quartz in 2016 based on her findings, called “A Lot of Women Don’t Enjoy Hookup Culture—So Why Do We Force Ourselves to Participate?”
Since then, Leah has thought a lot about the pressure to join in on something that makes so many women, as well as men, feel bad. “There’s less cultural pressure to be in a monogamous relationship like there was twenty to thirty years ago,” she says. “The postcollege narrative is to be independent and feminist, which is inconsistent with ‘I want to find a stable, committed partner who is also a man.’” This lays the groundwork for a culture that publicizes sex with no strings attached. The problem, she adds, is that “especially in college, few people are thinking critically about whether or not it works for her. It comes down to this consciousness.”
Leah is still astonished by the number of messages she gets from women and men who have read her Quartz essay and related deeply to it. “Many say, ‘I wish I could be as honest with myself as you are in this piece. I wish I could admit that I’m not having orgasms or admit that I just want somebody to love me,’” she says. “These are such basic things.”
“Emotional attachment makes for better sex, so even if all you’re in it for is sex, then at least have good sex.”
So is being honest and vulnerable—two key ingredients to any serious relationship, yet almost impossible to be when hooking up. “Pretending that you’re not going to have feelings about the person you are having sex with is just not realistic,” she adds. “Emotional attachment makes for better sex, so even if all you’re in it for is sex, then at least have good sex.”
Now twenty-four and a journalist, Leah has been in a committed relationship since her senior year with a guy who was at first apprehensive about what that meant, exactly. “He struggled with ‘If I commit to you, then what if I want to hook up with other people?’” Leah says. “Other avoidance versions I heard were ‘If I commit to this person, what happens when we go to different places for internships? Or graduate and move to different cities?’” Leah had an answer for her now boyfriend—and for everyone else who worries about these things: Who cares? Live and love in the moment. “I told him that I had feelings for him and did not have time to wait for him to figure out how he felt about me,” she says.
Then she laid it out for him. “I said, ‘Best-case scenario, we stay in a relationship and we’re really happy,’” she says. “‘Worst-case scenario, we break up and maybe we dislike each other and that’s okay, too.’” Her point being that “there are plenty of people who dislike their exes—but you learn something from the experience, so just take the chance.”