That the Rise of "Hook-up" culture is regrettable.

I'd like to thank my opponent for sending me this challenge.

Ladies and Gentlemen, hook-up culture is pervasive and damaging to both the moral and the social fabric of our culture. We have an obligation to fight such wrongs where they are found.

In this round I will briefly explain hook-up culture, then launch into my three arguments. First I'll explain why it's bad for families, then I'll discuss The Bachelor, and finally I'll consider the effects of the culture on public health.

There was once a time when sex outside of marriage was frowned upon. Put simply, hook-up culture is the general rejection of that principle in modern liberal democracies. People more often engage in casual, very short-term relationships - even relationships lasting only a few hours, the infamous "one-night stands" - and are more eager to jump right into having sex.

My onus in this debate is to show that this has been, overall, a bad thing.

We consider families important as the basic building block of any society. While we appreciate that modern families can come in many shapes and sizes, there are a few behaviours that are certainly unhealthy in this context. I'd like to highlight three.

First, families need support, including economic and interpersonal support. A world of single moms with babies from one night stands doesn't provide much of it. With a cultural disincentive to creating lasting bonds, what replaces them is an absence of these ties that have historically kept families together "until death do us part". Families are already under significant pressure from the changing face of employment, and the increasing demands of the modern age. Many find even finding work sufficiently difficult. Hook-up culture does not protect against that, it complements it.

And without such protection, the harm is clear. Kids right now are going to school without lunches in their bags. It's a shame of the modern age that humans can do so much, except our capacity to care for each other seems to have become culturally irrelevant. This becomes so much of a burden, many women would rather refuse to give birth to the child by means of an abortion, than watch that child go through an agonizing existence because they know their hook-up-cultured families would not be able to give that child the attention they deserve.

Second, families need honesty. It's no use having security if that security breaks up a few months down the line. Furthermore, a broader culture of non-commitment encourages many couples to break apart in a more subtle way, as interdependency is reduced and partners feel they can engage in activities therefore that might not be in the family's best interest at the time. The risk of losing the family is not so great a threat, because in a hook-up culture, family is a replaceable concept. Such behaviours can extend to broadly socially condemned actions that also harm the ability to support the family, like drugs or gambling, and can even form longer-term addictions to those activities.

Thirdly, families need love. Moral values that are shared in one respect can have a ripple effect that extends to unrelated other values. If mommy's never around in the family, for example, a kid may start to become insecure. They may start to feel they need to play up to get attention. That may impact on the child's schoolwork, and so on. These narratives are particularly difficult to control, and that is why they are so hard to dispel. As a particularly egregious example, an organization I volunteer at had a client who was violent - as a direct consequence of him being raped by his mother as a child. If people don't understand this distinction between the lust promoted by hook-up culture and the love required by a healthy society, then there is a broader lack of congruence between that culture and the values we think are good in this debate. We don't choose these values on a whim, either. We choose them because to deny them is antisocial.

The point is this: if we want to build a positive, healthy society, we have to start with building positive, healthy families.

The Bachelor
The fact this hit show exists speaks to another disincentive that's somewhat less talked about: that it's actually harder to make families in the first place as a result of this cultural shift.

Society naturally depends on families for its continued survival, but the fact is, not everyone does well in a hook-up culture. Sure, cocky, highly extroverted types might, and then only for a limited time... but that personality accounts for a highly specific subgroup within society. The rest of people get desperate, and that's what gets them into trouble. That's why so many people - especially young people - run into trouble with things like unplanned pregnancies. And hook-up culture encourages that, too.

The net effect of all of that is that true love becomes harder to find. Even if you meet your soulmate, the cultural expectation is that they are discarded after 15 minutes. A quick Google search for websites that facilitate that sort of thing will show you many thousands of largely NSFW results, because of how pervasive this has become. An entire industry has been literally built out of the supposed virtues of infidelity.

There's a solid reason why this kind of thing has never historically been widely accepted - it means less lasting families are built. People retire lonely and sad. Divorce rates are up across the western world. It affects youth too. It's no secret that young people suffer from more mental illnesses than before, and many of them are brought on by loneliness. It's exacerbated by the isolating effect of having a culture that touts the virtues of casual sex, and a personal experience which either cannot engage in it, rationally disagrees with it for any of the reasons I've brought up in this debate, or despite finding casual sex cool and all, wants to have a relationship too.

We take evidence for this from the development of companies like Tinder, whose innovation was to make dating an entirely visual medium of communication. In limiting such communication, they reflect a social standard that only very limited communication is necessary for love. The reality, however, is that this only works in the context of a hook-up culture, where commitment is not expected, let alone required.

I remember, not too long ago, having an argument on a certain forum, with a guy utterly convinced that gay people were super promiscuous compared to the general population, this being the core reason they had a higher prevalence of STDs. While the reasoning was statistically not correct, the logic was nonetheless sound - diseases spread more readily when infected individuals are in close physical contact with many others.

Hook up culture does nothing to protect society from this rather obvious harm. But for hook-up culture, and in general, the glorification of promiscuity, it would not be the case that a small number of diseased individuals could readily spread their illnesses to a larger population. The harm of that is that people get hurt, which is super not cool.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this debate is about ensuring we build a society we can be proud of. With that in mind, I am proud to support families, their continued existence, and their creation, as well as the public health of society at large.

The resolution is affirmed.

I will give a realistic conceptualisation of what hook up culture can achieve and show how all the problems my opponent has brought up are actually the result of other things not hook-up culture. 

In this round I will discuss families, sex education and sexual liberation.

My opponent begins this point with the assertion that "families important as the basic building block of any society". I am assuming from later analysis that he means the creation, adoption and raising of the next generation. Yes, the next generation is important but his idea of a successful family bizarre. 

He says that families need interpersonal and economic support and states that single parents are unable to provide this and the only thing holding a family together is the vow the parents took. 

There has been a change in culture surrounding relationships in general from which hook up culture has risen and that is the idea of sexual liberation and the rejection of marriage as necessary. This has really changed and developed over the last three generations and the result? Divorce rates are decreasing because co-habitation is more accepted. The idea that marriage vows were the only thing to hold a family together was disputed by the fact that in 1993 the divorce rates were at high of 14%. The social attitude change leading to a decrease in the number of divorces shows that the vows themselves are not enough to keep a family together but actually the freedom that each partner has felt from a more sexually free society is making a difference on the stability of marriages. I don't understand what my opponent is claiming with "absence of these ties that have historically kept families together" because historically families divorced.

My opponent tries to claim that hook-up culture leads to child poverty because it is only single parents with "hook-up-cultured families" cannot provide for their children and then he asserts that women would rather have an abortion than watch their child suffer this much. This is border-line offensive. First of all I want to deny the idea that hook-up culture is the source of most pregnancies out of marriage. It can and should be practiced safely as with all things, which means proper sex education and the availability of contraception. Second of all the idea of hook-up culture feeding into poverty and making children suffer is ludicrous. Yes single parents can struggle more than most but the biggest cause of child poverty (which happens even in families with two parents who have married) is poverty, low wages and lack of employment. These are all things that governments should be solving irrespective of the sexual culture of the country. Hook-up culture when practiced safely does not lead to this becoming a worse problem it just highlights that other areas of governmental policy are failing but this does not mean that the culture in and of itself should be regretted. 

Next is the idea that hook-up culture must lead to less honesty. This is ridiculous and conflates the ideas hook-up culture and infidelity as does his argumentation on "The Batchelor". Infidelity is a separate issue and has been around long before hook-up culture was a thing. Hook-up culture is simply the acceptance of short term sexual relations with the sole purpose of pleasure. This does not mean that it is acceptable for someone who is in a monogamous relationship to then cheat. The only reason websites and apps developed for infidelity is because the technology developed with the economic demand for it matched. There is no direct correlation between hook-up culture and infidelity they are entirely separate. Cheating is still wrong. So the idea that hook-up culture leads to less honesty overall is silly. It actually leads to more because it makes sexual encounters for pleasure and exploration an acceptable thing. This means that people are more likely to take about their feelings, desires and previous encounters because it is less marred in the shame and taboo previously hanging over sex. 

Families need love is the last assertion on families that my opponent presents. The idea of children being affected by bad parenting happens no matter what the parenting situation and is nothing to do with how the child was conceived. Children in families where the parents are married have god jobs and are living easy middle class lifestyles can still and often do feel ignored by their parents. 

Then we get this:

This I feel is actually offensive. To conflate the horrible instinct of a mother raping her child to a hook-up culture is terrible. Even ignoring the horrendous and offensive example and only taking the analysis that when lust is explored people forget what love is is ridiculous. When sex outside marriage was shamed and when lust was denied in favour of "Stable marriages" people were massively unhappy and those marriages did not last as I showed above. When lust is accepted and sex is explored for pleasure as hook-up culture develops marriages are more stable because the idea of casual relationships is acceptable. This means that co-habbitation is also more accepted which as shown then leads to stronger marriages. Lust and love are not points on a moral compass they are feeling that exist simultaneously and actually strengthen each other. This does not lead to cases of child rape.

My opponent highlights that pregnancies and STDs are problems and says that hook-up culture makes these problems worse because more people are effected by them. This is independent of hook-up culture and the problem is much more tied to terrible sex education policies.

Terrible sex education policies means that people do not know what contraception is, where is is available or how to use it. This is what puts people in harms way not the acceptance of sex for pleasure. 

Sex education is fundamental and highly important and I will always advocate for the best type of sex education there is to keep people safe. This can be done and is more likely to be done with the rise of hook-up culture because this means that more people are willing to talk about sex and the taboo and shame around sex slowly disappears. When this goes away the ability for governments to openly discuss these policies becomes much easier and we can then have healthier debates on which policies actually help people rather than the American response which has been to shovel on more shame and only promote abstinence.

People are going to have sex no matter what therefore it must be both a physically and emotionally healthy experience. Most places have covered the basics on the physical safety side but were are all still terrified of teaching pleasure as part of sex education. It is an important part of our well being and important for the stability of long term sexual relationships that these intimate and invasive experiences are pleasurable. We are now more open to the idea that pleasure is important within sex education to make sure it is a psychologically happy experience as well as a physically safe one. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10828079/Sex-education-must-focus-on-pleasurable-side-to-sex.html, http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/69987960/Pleasure-could-be-taught-in-New-Zealand-sexual-education-classes) This is only possible due to the rise in hook-up culture and the general liberation of sex for pleasure. 

This is particularly important for young women because nervousness and fear lead to painful situations during sex and this leads to it becoming harder in the future to properly relax and enjoy sex. It is also much harder to bring a woman to orgasm than a man particularly when their partners are not taught what clitoral stimulation is or why it is important. Sex education for pleasure is important for the physiological well being of sexually active individuals and is just as important as physical safety. This type of education is only being considered due to hook-up culture diminishing the shame and taboo around sex.

Hook-up culture has allowed the sexual liberation and acceptance of woman and the LGBT+ community. Let's start with women. 

Historically women have been shamed and oppressed by institutions like the catholic church for having sex out of marriage and getting pregnant (see the Magdalene sisters) while those same institutions denied women contraception and abortions. This is still happening today and is a massive problem for catholic south american countries. In the cases where there has ben some liberalisation in terms of sexual health policies women then faced the word slut. The radically different responses to men and women having short term sexual relations (or even longer term committed relationships) was startling. Men had "scored" and were hailed as heroes while women were slut shamed and were "used". This was because of unbalanced power structures an the lack of people communicating that women pleasure during sex was important. Because of the history of sexual oppression of women sexual liberation is a much harder fight than the sexual liberation of men (in heteronormative relationships). How has the rise of hook-up culture managed to tackle that? 

Well first of all it opened up the conversation about sex and took away some of the taboo as explained above. It then allowed for the conversation on sexual pleasure to take place. This gave women for the first time ever the platform to stand up and say we are not sex objects sex can be a good thing for both participants. It then allowed women to begin exploring their sexuality without feeling the constraints of waiting for marriage or having to be in a monogamous relationship with that person. Yes there was an immediate imbalance in the response (i.e. slut shaming) but the fact that the option has remained and the culture has grown has made it more and more acceptable for women to focus on their own sexual pleasure. Having many different types of sexual partners also allows you to understand exactly what pleasures you during sex and women are more confident in asking for things during sex when they are not in a long term relationship. This is because the feeling of dependency on the relationship does not exist for short term hook-ups and therefore the fear of rejection plays less as a factor. There is still a long way to go with this but the rise of hook-up culture has allowed women to option for sexual exploration like never before and the pressure of being married in order to have a family is becoming less. My opponent says that hook-up culture makes it harder to start a family and this is a bad thing. I disagree whole heartedly. Even if it did make it harder to start a family that is not a bad thing. Overpopulation of the planet is already a problem and the fact that many women are forced out of jobs or are less likely to get a job because of the expectation that they should start a family is actually more harmful. He then says that only confident people benefit from hook-up culture but this is a misunderstanding of how cultures affect people. I have already shown how women in general can benefit from hook-up culture because even if they do not engage with any hook-ups the fact that it has allowed for a greater female sexual liberation means that they are likely to benefit in their own relationships because female pleasure is more likely to be discussed.

I'll briefly cover the LGBT+ community and will extend on it in the next round. When sexual exploration acceptance grows with the rise in hook-up culture it becomes much easier for people to explore what their sexuality is. In a heteronormative society having a different sexuality can be a terrifying and money thing to first discover. With the rise of hook-up culture and tinder etc exploring your sexuality has become much easier. This means that you are likely going to accept what your sexuality is a bit quicker when you understand what makes you happy. Also the fact that hook-up culture is more accepted means that it is easier for people to understand the desire to figure out who you are before settling down (if you ever want to). It is a life that is much more accepted and gives people the chance to explore their sexuality without social stigma.

I have shown how the problems my opponent presented are actually more to do with bad sex education and bad economies. I have then shown how hook-up culture has allowed for and will continue to allow for the sexual liberation of women and the LGBT+ community. 

I look forward to the rest of the debate.

I thank my opponent for their rebuttals.

Con's view of hook-up culture appears to be the liberalization of sexual dialogue, in the sense that (for example) Foucault was able to consider sex and sexuality in a way that Wollstonecraft could not (no idea if she would have wanted to, but the culture of her day had a hard enough time accepting women were people at all lol). That's quite a far cry from my view of hook-up culture, which is more to do with actually being more open to, and indeed entitled to, sex even outside of marriage - in a nutshell, I summarised it in the previous round as a culture of "casual, very short-term relationships" instead of the long-term commitment that marriage implies.

This has meant that large portions of my opponent's case are non-comparative, and I'm sure that this should be clear to you as judges. Let me give an illustrative example anyway, and then continue with my substantive analysis. Con argued that, and I quote here "First of all I want to deny the idea that hook-up culture is the source of most pregnancies out of marriage." A careful reading of my interpretation of the topic reveals that this rebuttal makes no sense at all - unless con is trying to claim most babies born out of wedlock are modern-day immaculate conceptions, those babies probably came about because of some sort of sexual encounter outside of marriage, which is an example of hook-up culture. I'd even go so far as to argue that hook-up culture is the source of 100% of pregnancies outside of marriage because, newsflash: - and I don't know if this is part of the curriculum of sex education con was talking about or not - babies come from sex, not storks.

I would ask judges to therefore read my opponent's rebuttals in the context of what I was actually arguing against, not what my opponent might have wanted me to argue against.

You know, I actually agree with con on much of their analysis. I totally think it's cool that, for example, we live in a culture where we can be having this debate right now. Where issues of sex and sexuality, including historically deviant identities like LBGTQ persons, can be freely discussed, tolerated, and best of all, generally openly accepted. Where people need not fear reproach for love in all its forms. We agree totally on those issues. This debate, however, has absolutely nothing at all to do with that. I won't go through and list each individual instance of such non-comparative argumentation, but I am sure you get the point.

What is this debate about then? Simply put, it is about whether the broad acceptance of sleeping around with many partners has been positive for society. My view is that it has not, and let us now turn to the arguments.

I agree with con that when people marry less, people also divorce less (though only as a net percentage, not necessarily as a rate per marriage). I also agree that divorce is a bad thing. It does not logically follow, however, that hook-up culture is not a bad thing. That's a non-sequitur. The fact is, people should be marrying and creating happy little families, especially if we accept that abstinence doesn't work (which I'm happy to do), since that's superior to people not marrying and creating distraught single moms and troubled children.

I also think things should be done to reduce the divorce rate, for much the same reasons as I outlined in my previous round under the family point. Hook-up culture does not solve for these problems, but rather compounds them. Just as divorce means less stable families are around, so too does hook-up culture mean less stable families are created in the first place.

Personal anecdote here. My parents divorced when I was young, and by the time I was almost a teenager, my mother was at her wit's end. She was on medication for stress and constantly felt like she was failing my brother and I as a parent, because she struggled to both provide for us and have the time to be with us. She has often confided that she doesn't know what she would have done had a church-based boarding school not taken me in at that moment, but it wouldn't have been pretty.

My mother's experience is not an exceptional outcome of a divorce. If that's what a divorce can do, consider that the effect of hook-up culture is the same. What made my mom's experience so hard was that she was a single parent who was really struggling, and guess what? The product of hook up culture is single parents - predominantly women (for various reasons) - forced to look after children, often just the kids of some dude they met in the bar one night and never saw again - and who are really struggling as well! To the extent that, if they don't look after these children and care for them properly, the state can prosecute them.

I mentioned divorce as a rate per marriage and I think we should examine that also. Con agrees that infidelity is totally immoral. Great. But part of what makes hook-up culture so dangerous is that it is a cultural norm - as such, it applies to everyone (con several times doesn't seem to get this). That includes those in marriage. Hook-up culture normalizes sex outside of marriage even for married couples, and thus normalizes infidelity. Of course lots of people see that as immoral, both of us in this debate included. And many such people would not want to continue their marriages with a cheater! That's the sort of catalyst that increases the divorce rate, and that's problematic for both the institution of marriage and families more generally because they don't last as much.

Let me explain how.

If you're a girl sleeping around with lots of partners, and then you get pregnant, you pretty much have to take leave from your job (assuming you have one). In many countries, this leave need not be paid. If you can afford a child minder during the day, that's a big drain on your pocket, and if you can't, you might be forced to resign to go for a job with more flexible hours etc - if you can find such an arrangement! Often it entails a large pay cut. Many women take out loans to cover these costs, further indebting them in the longer term. So by having a child, without support from a partner, a woman can jeopardize her job security, her financial security, her capital security, and that's not to mention her sanity! It's no wonder many such women turn to things like drugs or prostitution to find some sort of a release from what is really a poverty cycle, doubly so if it generates a second income.

Con even admits this causal connection later in their case, stating women... "are forced out of jobs or are less likely to get a job because of the expectation that they should start a family".

The poverty trap is, once you get into the lower class, it's relatively difficult to get out. All your spare disposable income is going to childcare, nappies, baby food, toys, and all those other things moms need to worry about buying. The few moments of respite between your job and having to play with, educate or help your toddler, you're busy worrying if you're being a good enough mom, because you're constantly bombarded by socially-defined standards of what you should be doing and what things should be like. And you know what hook-up culture would have women like that do? Have more sex! It just makes no sense because it makes the situation worse by compounding the costs women face. But in the heat of the moment, you're lonely, you're overwhelmed, you're frustrated, it's easy to find yourself wishing some fantasy that some dude will walk in and take care of you and your family. Often single moms will beg for that, and they're prime targets for people like abusers.

At the heart of all this is the hook-up culture. Let's review that claim. Con says it is poverty that causes hardship for single moms. The question is, then, why are single moms so often in poverty, or unemployed, or on low wages? The fact is that there is a very simple explanation - because they're single. Married couples can share the burden of raising a child, single people cannot. Why are they single? Hook-up culture, often, made them so.

Con argues further that this can be solved through government policy. Perhaps con has forgotten that this is not a model/policy debate. I am simply saying that hook-up culture has caused some of (not even all of) the poverty that has led to women struggling to provide for their children.

It's true that children from many backgrounds can be unloved, but I identified two reasons why this might be specifically true in the context of a hook-up culture, that is not true without that sort of a culture.

First, I discussed how putting parents under increased stress - be that because they are single, or constantly suspicious their partner is cheating in a hook-up dominated world, or whatever - actually means that parents are less able to focus on their kids. People whose own well-being is in jeopardy are inherently less able to help others, let alone love others. And hook-up culture certainly puts a huge drain on the wellbeing of both individuals and families, as I have extensively justified!

Second, I discussed how hook-up culture creates a sense of sexual entitlement. Incest, rape and other morally reproachable behaviours are all frequently consequences of a belief, that being the belief in the right to have sex with any given person (as opposed to the privilege of being allowed to have sex with that person). Hook-up culture creates this belief because it encourages having many relationships. Con took offence to this line of reasoning, and I apologize for any caused, but they also didn't really do a lot to answer it. I'll give another example for con - in New Zealand, the so-called "Roast Busters" were a gang of boys some time ago who bragged about all the underage girls they slept with. It's telling that these young men believed sleeping with as many girls as possible was a status symbol of sorts, and that's exactly the sort of behaviour that hook-up culture incentivises. In effect, the Roast Busters were the living embodiments of all that is wrong with hook-up culture.

Con thinks that's great because people are happy, and marriages don't last long anyways. That's not the point. The point is that this kind of behaviour is morally disgusting. A love based relationship - which both of us support! - does not mean a one night fling, but a serious commitment to another person.

I also talked about finding love, and how it's now harder for the less confident - con claimed that it's easier because people talk about sex more now. This misses the point, because not everyone is equally comfortable, and that's not a social issue, but an individual personality preference.

First of all - broadly - I agree that sexual education is great. There's no denying that teaching how to stay safe in a relationship makes sense. Where we differ, however, is in my opponent's claim that not hooking up means abstinence.

The reason for this should be clear - of course I fully support sex, but with your boyfriend or girlfriend, not with whoever you meet/feel like having sex with that night. In other words, sex should be practiced in serious, long-term relationships, not flimsy short-term ones. Just because there isn't a culture where dumping your partner every other day and hooking up with somebody new the next morning, does not mean that people don't have relationships. It simply means they make more commitments to the relationships they have, ultimately to the point of marriage (or the equivalent in whatever culture they practice, for that matter).

Ignore STDs for a moment. Let's say we're talking about the common cold. Is that more likely to spread when lots of infected people are rubbing their naked bodies right up to some uninfected people? You bet it will. Even not sneezing properly spreads that stuff, so close physical contact definitely does. The same is true of most non-sexually transmitted (but infectious) diseases. As for STDs, the ONLY way they can spread is generally through sex, so of course having more sex will increase the odds of transmission. Promiscuity is a public health nightmare. It's true, sex education does reduce the harm somewhat, particularly of the STDs. But the problem is not with having sex, nor with having diseases - the problem is with having sex while diseased! That means you actually need to know who you're sleeping with ("know who you're sleeping with" is probably a good life lesson anyway), and that's not exactly something hook-up culture encourages.

How exactly maximizing a women's sexual pleasure is relevant to the motion is probably the most beyond me thing I've seen in a debate in a while, but I just want to point out also that maybe if lovers didn't hook up earlier that day on the internet, they'd have a bit more time to communicate what would actually make them feel comfortable and satisfied personally.

By the way, con starts by saying families raising the next generation are important, and ends by saying that there's too many families anyway so they don't mind it being hard to have them. It's an inconsistent position. I think both of us need to recognize that families are important, kids are important, and family planning is important. I think an important element of family planning, too, is that you plan your family with somebody you love who will care for you long-term.

As far as I could tell this was con's only point of constructive material. Most of it was fairly irrelevant.

If hook-up culture is not good, then shaming is absolutely appropriate. This applies to both men and women, and gender inequality is certainly not related to hook-up culture (though of course, my previous analysis should make clear where I think the celebration of male promiscuity comes from!). Think of it like stealing. If stealing is not good, then shaming somebody for stealing is absolutely appropriate. It's true, not all stealing is equally unjust. But in general, shame is a fair outcome of theft. Likewise, if we agree that hook-up culture is bad, then shame is typically a fair outcome of hooking up.

It's con's burden to prove that it's a good thing, just as it is mine to prove that it's a good thing. Therefore the only constructive material con could show is in fact moot.

The resolution is negated.