A quick note on this passage:

[The author of the book Shalit’s reviewing] next makes the preposterous claim that the dating era “left many students sitting at home while . . . the hookup scene promotes a form of interaction where at least theoretically, anyone can join the party.” And some party it is. When the festivities include sleeping with someone who doesn’t care about you, being “left” at home surely has its appeal. Moreover, the hookup era hardly launched the concept of group socializing. Many social activities, mixers, and volunteer opportunities existed long before the hookup era; they just didn’t involve the exchange of bodily fluids.

I think Shalit might give up too much ground here: She only tepidly counters the assertion that dating “left out” more people than the campus “hookup” system does. I think the opposite might be the case. Dating enforced monogamy, at least once people started “going steady.” Because there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in the world, monogamy ensures that most people who want partners can find them, even if some may have to settle.

By contrast, I’ve heard it asserted that the hookup culture is a form of polygamy — that is, a select group of alpha-type males get all the girls (at least, all the girls participating in the hookup scene), while without the structure dating once provided, beta-type males have it rough (unless they go to great lengths to learn how to “game” girls). If this is true, these situations would follow from it: (A) Women would have an easier time becoming involved with the men they want, but would not have exclusive (that is, monogamous) claim to those men; (B) a select group of men would accumulate vast numbers of sexual partners, far more than they would in a traditional monogamous system; and (C) men outside this group, though they may be able to secure “hookups” from time to time, would not get nearly as much female attention on the whole as they would in a traditional dating market.

(A) is almost certainly the case on campuses today, and my own observations in college make me sympathetic to (B) and (C). Has anyone taken an empirical approach to this question? I’m not aware of such a study.

I’d also be interested in knowing how/if the “hookup scene participation rate” (I just coined that, according to Google) differs between the genders. There are, of course, plenty of college students who opt out of that scene to pursue traditional dating or long-term relationships.