As an old guy, when did the “hookup” generation begin?

36 comments

1. The 60s and 70s had plenty of hookups. Just, now there’s an app (or 30) for that. My dad almost certainly had more random sex than I have.

2. Millennia ago. It’s older than the concept of monogamy. *It’s only become common to talk openly about it in the last decade or so. And like a lot of things, that leads people to believe that it’s new when it’s not.

3. Difficult to get real info on this. I mean the 60s were supposedly the summer of love, and there have been studies suggesting this generation has less casual sex than the previous gen.

   If you mean internet hookups then, whenever year tinder came out.

4. About 2012 when Tinder entered the world.

5. Honestly probably from the very beginning hook up here and there.

   For me I didn’t notice it until I was 7 or 8 years old, I wasn’t in the market of course but I was trying to observe for my future sake. Man I feel bad for all the guys who got married and etc…

6. I remember hearing the term “hookup bar” long before the internet ever existed. The place I used to go to in the 90s, we’d joke about randomly pairing up at 10 minutes to 2 am.

7. About 2 billion years ago when life first emerged on planet Earth.

8. Not sure there’s such a thing as the “hookup” generation, I just think that in the past folks had the decency to not talk about their conquests so much.

9. You can go right next to it and not notice. I (born in 1970s, not in US but pretty liberal place) have not hooked with anybody during my youth, and none of my friends have ever told me about they did anything. But if I tried to say there were not hookups in my time I would be laughed at very much.

10. It’s always been around for the players

11. As an older guy too, 56, think of it like one-night stands. The only difference between now and the 80’s it is more acceptable, and women are not shamed for it like they used to be. No more walk of shame, now it is empowering for some reason.

12. From the stories I’ve heard, my dad got laid more in the 90s than I could’ve ever imagined. I was in college when the apps started and let me tell you, it’s not as simple as it seems. I had more luck at the bars than I ever did from an app

13. It’s definitely older than the current generation.

    What people often don’t notice and which might help better contextualize things is that the current generation doesn’t even have sex.

14. back when the Romans hosted orgies

15. It started as soon as boomers got obsessed with media and started wagging their digital fingers.

16. Current generations (Milennials and younger) are averaging fewer sexual partners than the older generations.

    Our grandmothers were riding dick at the drive-in. Hook-ups have always been a thing, it’s just not as publicly shamed anymore.

17. When the contraceptive pill was invented, it slowly but surely unleashed the hookup culture. Dating apps only sped things up.

18. Women.

19. Lol it never “began”. People have always hooked up, they just don’t see the point of hiding it anymore. Folks became less prudish and stopped sneaking off to hotels to have their adventures.

20. I don’t know, but it’s been around longer then I’ve been alive at least. And it sucks how sex isn’t valued in society, rather it’s equated to a cup of coffee.

    I’ll never understand how something capable of creating and destroying lives could ever be called casual, but what do I know. People say my generation has less casual sex and I honestly doubt it. I think the definition of casual sex has changed and the amount of sex outside of marriage has increased quite a bit…

21. It started with the hippies and “free love”. So it would have started in the 60s. You were there for it, you should know that.

    I was born in 70 and it was going strong by the time I was a teen. Then there was the whole AIDS thing, which put a bit of a damper on it for a bit, but it never stopped.

    It’s just more out in the open because of the internet. Before it was just a local thing and anybody who spent any time at the bars knew who the players were and that’s where you went to get laid with no strings attached. The internet has just made it much more accessible and has given it a much wider reach.

22. Hookup culture started in the 60s, your generation starter this.

23. Hookup culture is kind of a myth. It’s basically just women who want to hooking up with the same small group of guys while pretending that it doesn’t make them feel bad.

24. 60s and the hippies

    80s and coke

    2000s and online dating

    1920 speak easys

    1185. Genghis khan.

    Pretty much all the times

25. Depends on what exactly you would view as a “hookup culture”. Amongst men in general, there is no such thing. There is a tiny club at “the top” of all the different hierarchies which get conflated as the representative image of men in general (“apex fallacy”) and a 80-90% group of ignored men below that. Amongst men younger than 30 years 28% are completely sexually inactive, amongst women in the same age range its 18%, both number trending higher, though faster for men. So what is the hookup culture really? A bunch of 20-40 year old women claiming that any sexual activity is of no relevant consequence to their reputation, mental health and body until proven otherwise? Sounds more like a responsibility crisis. Is it the higher percentage of mothers compared to fathers? Thats nothing new, always has been the case, men reproduce at a lower rate than women.

    If anything its the acceptance of behavior we know to be risky for long term goals of people in general (or “disinterest in people” if you want to be doom and gloom about it), manifesting also in the way we “consume” relationships.

26. I’d say the hookup *generation* began with people born in the 70’s. Because the 90’s is when it starting becoming “normal” for people to have sex with random people they barely knew without any intention of having a relationship.

27. The 60s

28. Early to mid teens.

29. Reagan

30. I’m sure hooking up was all the rage at the start of the sexual revolution.

    In the 80 and 90s during the British Rave scene that was almost standard.

    Today? I think post financial crash of 2008 or during the smartphone era things became a bit more wide spread because now everyone could be in contact with everyone. I remember this one dude who had a BlackBerry specifically for women (we Nicknamed him Radioactive Man because no way he didn’t have sn STI.😄)

31. It was where you sought it out, and it is where you seek it out.

    My buddy who is now 72 regales me
    with tales of his youth – working a drink stand at all day concerts in California in the mid & late 1960’s… pour some drinks and flirt with every woman who listened until he’d meet a cutie who wanted to hop in the back of the booth for a quickie. Give her a hug and a kiss and send her in her way… and the next and the next.

    He’s a slut type of guy and though he’s married now his wife still sometimes grumbles about his 3 “bitches” he had in rotation when they met when they were in their mid-50’s.

    Mind you he was a trashy drunk at that time and it sounds like they were too, but that’s part of the hook up culture. His wife’s retired from a technical career at NASA, and was a hot tamale herself with former boyfriends such as a pair of Air Force pilots that would fly her and her sister “blonde Lebanese hash” direct from the source back in the 1970’s.

    People live all kinds of lives, but they may not talk about it over potato salad at your neighborhood bbq (unless you tell your crazy stories first)!

32. I started dating in the 90s.

    There were always frequent hookups…. Even in civilizations where everything was punished by death. The 60s might have started the ball rolling for it being socially acceptable.

    In the 90s… People were having fun but the expectation was still that most people were going for relationships. As the internet developed… These people just added it to their normal life as an accessory.

    Millennials kinda-sorta-technically remember that life existed before the internet…. But they developed with it as a core component. They also internalized a lot more the propaganda of “no personal accountability” that is still prevalent. That culture is really what most people are talking about when they say “hookup” culture.

    Hooking up has always happened. Now we just have a culture of everyone doing what feels good with no foresight… Then blaming everyone else when they end up with nothing. Anyone with actual foresight is swimming in a sea of unaccountible people they can’t… And don’t want to try to make things work with.

    Just hooking up is probably all that I would want to do in this environment anyway… So it sounds like a self-increasing problem. Think I wanna to try to make something work with a woman who thinks she gets to unilaterally decide through public shaming how I should respond to everything while she chases me around with a camera phone like a wounded dog to post ok Tik Tok? Hell no. Better to just never share a house with one in the environment where that is supported and encouraged.

33. Before I was born.

34. With the invention of effective birth control.

35. As many others said, there was plenty of hooking up in the 1960s and 1970’s. I think the current iteration of hookup culture combined with female hypergamy (with 80% of women chasing the top 20% of guys and accepting nothing less) got its start in Southern California. When I was in my twenties and early thirties, and decidedly average in both looks and income, SoCal was a sexual desert for me – but whenever I’d take a trip to to my hometown in the Midwest, I *never* had trouble finding a date. With the advent of the smartphone and the dating apps, the entire country now mirrors Southern California’s dating market. A woman whose mom or aunt might have met her hubby at work or at the local TGI Friday’s 30 or so years ago now has her pick of thousands of men, some of whom might be thirsty enough to send her a plane ticket for the first date.

36. I’m about 20 years behind you and I was 21 in 1994. Pretty much everyone I knew growing up had parents that were divorced. That was a pretty good indication that hooking up was better than settling down with someone you didn’t love.