By Elise Viebeck
As DC lunch conferences go, Monday's two-hour discussion with Dr. Drew Pinsky was an anomaly. A sex talk in the Rayburn House Office Building? Those don't happen often, do they?
Then again, maybe not. IWF's annual Campus Sex and Dating Conference acknowledges an undercurrent present not only on the Hill, but around the water-cooler in most DC offices, one that is only intensified by the mass influx of college-aged interns.
This is the gossip that greases every work environment, and is now inextricably connected with the practice of "hooking up." The hook-up culture is a development that affects even the most high-achieving college students, like the 60 or so present at the conference, and is essential to understanding college social dynamics.
Having built a career on ignoring taboos ("It was my deepest instinct that someone needed to sit down and talk about these things"), Pinsky advocates for openness and careful consideration of these topics. He himself is most famous for his role as host of the radio program and former MTV segment, Loveline, where he answers callers' questions about sex, drugs and relationships. The popular show is heard in over 70 markets and began in 1983 with then-medical student Pinsky joining for the "Ask a Surgeon" segment in 1984. Outside of his radio personality, he is also the Program Medical Director of Chemical Dependency at Las Encinas Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at USC.
His premise for discussion was a study commissioned by IWF which examined the "attitudes and values of today's college women regarding sexuality, dating, courtship and marriage" (see Hooking Up below.) Results of over 1,000 interviews show that college women still prioritize marriage as a life goal and usually hope to find their spouse during college.
These interviews also yielded the admission that the college social scene tends to undermine the realization of this goal. Today's college students perceive three major options as a stand-in for a more traditional, monogamous relationship. Most common are the hook-up, an "intoxicated physical encounter with no commitment," the "friends with benefits" arrangement, and a "joined at the hip" relationship, where a commitment happens quickly and with "no real evaluative process."
A college campus is an "unnaturally intense social environment," Pinsky noted, where drugs and alcohol act as "medication" for these choices. Hooking-up, the most common solution, requires that men "medicate the anxiety associated with closeness and rejection," which are both inherent components of the experience. Women, on the other hand, find that their instinctive desire for commitment runs counter to the entire practice, so they "medicate them away."
In the past, women's spontaneous sexual behavior would have frequently led to pregnancy, disease and even death. Women are now literally "unhinged from previous biological constrictions," said Pinsky-- though this has not made their fundamental neurological reactions to sex the same as men's.
Addressing the emotion women instinctively attach to sex, Pinsky noted that "intimate dialogue is healthy for the human being, it's verifiable brain activity" as the right brain reacts to facial expressions during a conversation. Current cultural norms instead promote electronic interaction-- the "pseudo intimacy" of text messaging and online chatting.
Though Pinsky took care not to moralize the discussion, he did encourage students to create their own solutions and to keep in mind the emotional tension and attrition inherent in the hook-up culture. "We all have an internal voice that does not lead us wrong," he said, and that it is easier to hear "if you live with integrity."
For more accounts of the conference, see:
-Dana Milbank at the Washington Post
-Michael O'Brien at National Review Online
-John McCaslin at the Washington Times
-The Washington Examiner
-The Hill Newspaper
-Allison Kasic at Human Events Online
