The recent rape at Stanford University has once again ignited the nationwide discourse about sexual misconduct on college campuses and what it does to students. Anne Maloney with Crisis magazine shares what her experiences with victims of the hook-up culture have revealed about the holes in society at large:The young woman who was raped behind the dumpster has an advantage over most young women today: she knows she was raped. She is angry, and rightly so. She realizes that she has been violated, and she can try to find a way to heal. The young women I encounter every day on the campus of the university where I teach are worse off than this victim, because they do not know what has gone wrong in their lives. Nonetheless, something has gone terribly wrong, and on some level, they know it.
As a result of the hook-up culture, young women have turned to false solutions like anti-depressants and birth control for help. All of these are symptoms of a generation unaware of what it means to love properly.
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The woman who got drunk and got raped behind the dumpster is the victim of a toxic culture. But my students are also the victims of a toxic culture. Small wonder that the number of women suffering from eating disorders, addiction, anxiety and depression is at an all-time high.
We need to change our culture by teaching young women that the hook-up culture leads to emotional suffering. In the long term, the sexual “liberation” most women in the college environment experience today is actually an enslavement to a life filled with despair and regret.
There is, indeed, an “unconscious despair” behind their “games and amusements.” They “hook up,” feel awful and have no idea why. It’s hard to heal when you don’t know you’ve been damaged. And the despair and shame that these women who hook up feel is real. Contemporary sexual culture is toxic for young women, and until women stand up and acknowledge that fact, despair, sadness and regret are going to be the underlying chord structure of their very lives. We fail an entire generation when we withhold from them the “wisdom not to do desperate things.”
