You're Doing It Wrong

Seriously, New York Times? "Hooking up"?

The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.

Paradigm shifts? Was this article trapped underneath something for the last decade? Was it found in a time capsule? Encased in amber?

The whole "oh my god, the kids are doing this thing called 'hooking up' and it's a total catastrophe" story was lame when an already over-the-hill Tom Wolfe did it in 2001, and it's downright embarrassing now. For the last time, "hooking up" means anything from kissing to groping to the kind of awesome contortionist sex that would make a Japanese porno enthusiast blush. The term is purposefully vague and designed to flummox older outsiders. Congratulations, kids! It works!

Two final notes to Mr. Blow (!), "Kids" director Larry Clark, the decomposing corpse of Tom Wolfe, whoever the hell wrote/directed "Thirteen", professional feminist concern troll Caitlin Flanagan, and the 432 other people who have written/are going to write the "Why Young People Having Sex Is Very Wrong" article:

1) When Mr. Darcy saves Lydia Bennet from ruin at the hands of Mr. Wickham, it is not because it is a good thing for Lydia's heart, or her psychological health, or her long-term economic prospects, or her spiritual well-being. It was solely to preserve her reputation, which was seen as a value in itself. This Victorian obsession with the ruination of girls (see also every single vampire story ever) is entirely unrelated to women as women, women as individuals with rights and desires, or women as people, full stop. The scolds then were merely using the consequences of their anti-sexual idiosyncracies to justify the existence of their anti-sexual idiosyncracies, and so are you.

2) Please stop laboring under the pretense that the "Is Very Wrong" part of your article/movie/comic strip somehow transforms a voyeuristic descent into adolescent sexuality into a dispassionate act of journalistic documentation. The difference between your work and the come-ons in my spam folder is that yours was probably spell-checked.

p.s. Do articles like these qualify as "hand-wringing" if they are clearly written with one hand?