I Was a Sorority Girl Deep in Hookup Culture. Nobody Told Me What Consent Actually Meant.

Recently, consent has been a topic taking over much more of my mind than I'd prefer. I've been under international emergency legal counsel over rental contracts for the business I run with my husband. This has me thinking about things I have agreed to, things I thought I agreed to, things I didn't agree to but the fine print tries to imply I agreed to, and so on. All of the alleged agreeing does not take away a gnawing feeling of violation that felt all too familiar. A feeling of: this is not really what I understood I was giving you permission to do. This entire situation has me thinking about gray areas. How these gray areas can be exploited. How nuance and implication are not well defended, and what people, especially people with predatory tendencies, can get away with in gray areas. What happens when something feels violating even though the law permits it? Boundaries have been on my mind. What I can say is appropriate, what is mine, what someone is allowed to do, or not do. What happens when they are not listened to? What happens when something feels violating even though the law permits it? At what point does a person stop considering what another person wants and start thinking about what they can get away with? Before the current situation with contracts, lawyers, and landlords, I felt this feeling in college. At that time there were no contracts; there were red plastic cups. Jungle juice, fraternity houses, short skirts in Wisconsin winters. There were blurry lines of implication, nuance, and what you might have wanted went out the window. You would go to parties. Drink, flirt, make out. Maybe stay the night because it was cold. All of those actions didn't feel like an agreement or contract to do something, but the terms were never fully stated or formalized in the negotiating phase. In my situation I didn't have to scream that a boundary was violated; it was more that someone was willing to push the boundary while my ability to place one was impaired. I remember the shower Standing in the shower washing someone off of me after a party is a scene that is ingrained deep in my memory. Interchangeably in the dorm, the sorority house, my apartment, wherever. It's like a bad movie scene that's stuck on repeat. Only the person or party changed, but the actions and feelings remained the same. The shower. Trying to piece together what happened the previous night. My memory hazy. A dull headache. Bad beer in cheap cups, even cheaper conversation. Drinking more because the conversation was so shallow. Then the questions. Did we? Did we not? Why him? Who was that? I remember mostly trying to feel clean again and think about the story I could tell my friends at brunch about what happened that night after we split up. It was kind of just what happened with us. You would go out, flirt with some boys, drink too much, then think it was fun to go home with someone. I was told that this was supposedly the best time of my life, and I needed to do this for the complete American college experience. Okay, maybe no one put that on the welcome brochure, but it was implied and it seemed like it was what everyone else was doing. I still had a lot to learn, such as learning the difference between wanting a man to like me and actually wanting that man. My initiation into hookup culture When I first wound up on campus, I still had my boarding school boyfriend. He was at another Big Ten school in another state. We thought we were deeply in love, although looking back I think I was more in love with his abs than his personality. With that solid relationship foundation, we attempted long distance. One weekend I decided to visit him in Indiana. I remember taking a Greyhound bus for more than 10 hours to visit him. I got to witness his new college life there and was genuinely happy for him about that, even though I also felt like a relic of his former life that he was throwing aside. One night he went out for a fraternity mixer with another sorority, which I was obviously not invited to, so he left me to sit in his dorm room with his laptop for entertainment. This boyfriend was always hyper-possessive of me. At the time, I thought that was romantic and that it meant he really loved me. He demanded to know all my passwords for social media, which I had given him, and he regularly checked. What I didn't think to do at that time was to also ask for his. A few summers earlier, he got angry at me while I was on a summer art study-abroad program in Italy. I had made local friends and one of them invited my friends and me to go get a gelato. This gelato incident almost needed a UN delegation to calm down the fallout from the message. That incident flashed to mind along with an intuitive hunch about him. He would love to check my messages. I had never done that to him. "Now I am sitting here alone, his Facebook is open, what else should I do?" So I checked his messages. At first it all seemed like normal conversations, so I was relieved and feeling really loved. That, okay, maybe I was being overly suspicious. Then I saw the deleted messages section. Oh, that was a treasure trove. I found not just one, but multiple messages with other women about their plans to hook up. One that was particularly interesting was one that was being arranged over my high school graduation weekend, when he was staying with me and my family in a hotel. He must have been very optimistic about his logistical planning to fit in that side quest. By this time I was getting visibly upset. His roommate picked up on it and texted him to come back. Oh, I forgot to mention he left me in his dorm with his roommate. Whom I already knew from our boarding school as well. He returned. We fought. He denied what he did. He somehow convinced me, in the midst of our passionate disagreement, that he still loved me, and that we were destined to be together forever, and that he would change. He wanted us to still make it work and stay together. So I took the long bus ride back, with my relationship status still the same. The status may have still been official, but my heart already knew our fate. Later, around Thanksgiving break, he texted me that he had contracted an STD. Then, of course, I was the one blamed. He was furious at me. I then had to go and get tested. I tested negative and told him. He did not believe me and blocked me completely. I felt rejected, hurt, disposable, that I lost the true love of my life. I thought I would never find abs as beautiful as his. I felt foolish for doing the cliché long-distance relationship in my freshman year of college. I didn't want to feel that way again. I wanted to feel wanted, not replaceable. I thought that if there wasn't really a connection, there couldn't be the same devastating feeling of rejection. I did not want that agony of feeling tossed aside, so I thought numbing myself to sexual connection would prevent that from ever happening again. Surrounded by sex, starved of sexual wisdom Before college, I had a strange and complicated relationship to sex. I grew up in a Midwestern household where sexuality was not spoken about. I attended a small Christian school in rural Wisconsin. We didn't have any form of formal sexual education. So sex for me became an unspoken topic that was occulted by the people surrounding me, and there was no one to answer my questions. I was curious, but there was a silence around it that I think could be described as shame. I do believe this did me a great disservice, because I lacked any proper guidance or grounded advice to help me navigate it. When I later attended boarding school, there was definitely sex occurring on campus, but I learned more about the community aspect surrounding sexuality. I learned about gossip, reputation, betrayal, consequences within the community; essentially I learned that people loved to talk about who was hooking up with whom. I learned that there is an added weight to being a woman. The sexual choices I made carried more social weight and consequences than those of my male peers. What I did not learn was about pleasure, attachment, boundaries, consent, the creative force of sexuality, or how to recognize what I actually wanted. Instead, I learned fear and shame. Fear about sexual assault on college campuses. Fear of unwanted pregnancy. Fear of disease. Shame for experiencing desire. Nothing positive was taught to me about sex, which is strange looking back because sex is such a beautiful human experience. At that time, lacking any decent teachings about sexuality, I derived that if I actively chose to "hook up" that way I could not be assaulted because I had "chosen it." That was about the extent of what I knew about consent. I thought consent meant arranging the situation myself. I did not really understand that you can willingly enter a situation and then stop wanting what is happening once it is already happening. I didn't understand that uncertainty matters. I didn't understand that your body can send a signal that it does not want something, and that ignoring it, or drinking more to drown it out, was overriding your own instincts. American culture surrounded me with profound sexual imagery while simultaneously starving me of sexual wisdom. We were flooded with Victoria's Secret ads. Spring break gone wild videos. Magazines. Television. Music videos. Pornography watched by those around me. I learned how a sexually desirable woman was supposed to look and behave. We learned how to please and perform. We were taught how to be pleasing to men and give a perfect blow job before we even learned how to be pleased with ourselves. When I look back at this now, I find it to be a very sad inversion. The stockyards When I arrived at university, the scale of everything suddenly became huge. There were thousands of students. So many fraternities, sororities. Parties every night throughout the entire city. We were a cohort of students from around the nation and the world, suddenly unleashed and tasting our first experience with adult freedom, or so we thought. Before going out to frat parties, my sorority sisters and I would spend hours giggling and getting ready for the night out. We would primp, pluck, prime, perfect. We would pick the cute top to highlight our cleavage. Choose the cute skirt. We would talk about which boys might be there and tease each other about who would make it home alone or with someone. When we arrived at the party, I remember it feeling like we were cattle lining up at the stockyards. When we arrived at the party, I remember it feeling like we were cattle lining up at the stockyards. Lined in front of the keg of stale beer. Heels on a sticky floor. A basement with poor acoustics, music blaring way too loud, and a cheap party strobe light in the corner. We were there waiting to see which boy would talk to us. Who would select us and say hi. That was often all it took. Just because we were allowed in or invited to the party, it felt like there was an almost invisible sense of entitlement and obligation. You were there at the party. You showed up, presented yourself. He chose you. You talked. Therefore it was implied that because you were speaking to them and drinking their drinks, that somehow meant you were on the fast track to consenting to sleep together. It was like a conveyor belt at the airport. You would roll around waiting for a guy to pick you as his bag, and hope that you were not the last one left abandoned, headed toward the lost and found. We called it fun. At times it genuinely was fun. That's an important distinction. I liked the social aspect of the parties, the music, meeting people, flirting, friendship, the curiosity of the experience. The thrill of talking to new boys. I wanted the adventure, I wanted to go to the parties, I wanted connection. That's why this topic is so nuanced. The gray area My American college experience took place in Madison, Wisconsin. The winters there are brutal. When we went out, we would wear an oversized coat over heels, tights, and a short skirt. I thought all my going-out outfits were brilliant fashion choices, until it was two in the morning and I needed to get home, and I would look out the window at 5 more inches of freshly fallen snow. At that moment there's the slight panic. The party is winding down, you lost track of where your friends went, there was snow everywhere, it was dark, you had maybe a little more to drink than you would have liked to numb out the cold and bad conversations about your major. Then suddenly the options became: Stay in the warm frat house with the guy you had been having the bad conversations with. Or walk home alone through the frozen streets, not knowing what you would encounter on the journey home. Staying would often win, even if staying came with an implication. If I tried to sleep, I would potentially have to spend over an hour swatting someone away from me. Or I could just hook up with them. It would become a debate if the hookup or resisting seemed like more effort. Sometimes there was a curious desire. Was it a deep passion or love? No. Maybe just a curiosity that it could be interesting or satisfying. From my memory that hypothesis never seemed to come true. Mostly consent to me was not wanting to go outside in the cold. I look back and yes I wanted to go to the party, yes I wanted a fabulous outfit, yes I wanted to drink, yes I wanted to flirt and be seen as cute, yes I decided to stay. Did I necessarily want to have sex with them? If the situation were daytime in Miami in a library, the answer would probably be no. Again, that is where the topic of consent and nuance is so very important. That brings up the concept of boundaries. Which I just thought meant becoming strong enough to say no. Now I think boundaries begin earlier. They begin when you start listening to your body and your internal answer, before you override it. They begin when you ask yourself, what is okay with me? What is not okay for me? When did the situation change? When did I stop wanting what I thought I wanted 10 minutes earlier? When am I agreeing because I genuinely desire something or someone, and when am I agreeing because disagreeing seems to be too exhausting? I realized there are different types of people: those who encounter uncertainty and become more careful. Then there are people who encounter uncertainty and see opportunity. These layered distinctions are important. The question is not just whether someone is seeking opportunity. It is what kind of opportunity their character teaches them to seek. Gray areas reveal character. A caring person does not ask: How much can I get before she finally stops? They ask: Is she actually comfortable with this? Uncertainty should slow down an encounter. Not speed it up. There are men who prey on confusion, intoxication, insecurity, loneliness, fear, or difficulty saying no. Again there is nuance and discernment involved. Not every uncomfortable sexual experience is equal. Not every bad hookup is assault. Not every woman experiences these situations like I did, but predators and opportunists do exist. Learning your boundaries is part of learning how to recognize when somebody else is trying to benefit from the fact that you have not yet clearly formed them. When another person's boundary is unclear, do you clarify what they actually intended, or do you use and exploit that gray area to take more? Looking back at these times, I don't think that these gray areas are harmless. I feel that we as a society have normalized something that was and is not okay. The biggest concern that I have is: what do people do with uncertainty? Uncertainty in the direction of your life is one thing; uncertainty around consent and a boundary is another. Some people become more cautious when they are not sure if someone wants their boundary to be crossed. Some see this uncertainty as an opportunity. If someone is drunk, confused, inexperienced, incoherent, afraid of disappointing someone, or simply unsure, there are people out there who will recognize that vulnerability and test how far they can go. I thought that I would leave that dynamic behind when I left the Greek scene. I thought the frat parties and mystery punch would be an adolescent phase and that people would grow up and take personal responsibility. Little did I know that it was just the training grounds. Now I realize in adulthood there is a similar version of the same theme of boundaries and consent. I recognize the same pattern in business, contracts, lawyers, money, the environment, and people discussing what they are technically allowed to do. Obviously, sex and a commercial contract are not the same deed, but the moral question feels eerily similar. When another person's boundary is unclear, do you clarify what they actually intended, or do you use and exploit that gray area to take more? I do not believe that ambiguity is permission. I think ambiguity should create more personal responsibility. A person's character is often revealed long before someone even has to utter their hard no. Performing confidence The morning after a night out I would often meet with my friends for brunch. We would laugh, share stories, compare what had happened, and piece together the story of our nights out. We never really asked if we were scared, confused, if we even enjoyed it, if we were embarrassed, or feeling empty. We converted it all into confidence and fun. It was a way we bonded and built our connections. Yet underneath the fun conversations and confidence there was still jealousy, gossip, and competition. We had an unspoken competition for male attention. At that time I had convinced myself that being desired would make me feel complete. I didn't really want to admit that I had given someone temporary access to my body just to fill the void in me that wanted to feel chosen. Leaving the script Eventually it was too much. I could not keep up with the hookup culture and party scene and post-party chats anymore. I was exhausted. I had the experience and the experience had me. The more I hooked up, the more the feeling inside of me grew that I would never find a man who actually cared about who I truly was. It made me more cynical. I was performing what I thought men wanted from me while also searching for any semblance of connection. That led me to start a relationship with a man I met online who was Swedish. I visited Sweden, I fell in love with Sweden, and him. We attempted long distance. In that relationship, it hit me that most of my life had been happening according to scripts that I had never consciously chosen. The more I hooked up, the more the feeling inside of me grew that I would never find a man who actually cared about who I truly was. I went to university because that is what you did. I went to Wisconsin because I had a scholarship there. I went to parties because I felt like there weren't really other options to have fun and connect with people. I hooked up with people because it seemed like a fun idea at the time and I told myself that it was empowering. Eventually I did something that shocked everyone around me. I dropped out halfway through my junior year. It was lonely, uncertain, and I lost most of the social world that I had believed that the parties and hookup culture had provided me. Yet, I was happy that I had interrupted the script of my life. This decision later led me to restart university in Stockholm, Sweden. Europe showed me another possibility Studying in Sweden and later in the Netherlands gave me a beautiful opportunity: perspective. I had experienced a large American party school and all its dramas, then I got to experience two European capital-city universities. Madison in particular was extremely interesting to compare to Amsterdam. Both cities are known for their party culture, but the two could not be more different. By having such a range of extended, in-depth experiences with unique college cultures, I could track patterns and see what was unusual to each location and culture. It is not completely black or white. Men cross boundaries in Europe as well. One is not explicitly better or worse. Again, it is nuanced. While single again, I did have classmates on both sides of the Atlantic who tried to push too hard even after I had said no. Bad behavior doesn't just go away when you go to a new location. However, there were enough differences for me to realize that what I had grown up thinking was normal was not necessarily normal somewhere else. In Europe, I would meet men for coffee dates in the daytime. We would walk and talk. We would go for pizza. We would go out dancing with mixed-gender friend groups and actually look out for each other to get home safely. Male friends would genuinely care that I got home safely and not just care about hooking up. I would go out with female friends and we would all return home together. The women in general seemed to have stronger boundaries. They were not waiting around to be selected. That contrast was so helpful to learn that sometimes leaving your culture makes you realize that what you thought was your inevitable reality was actually a broken system you were participating in. The man who refused to consume me One night in Stockholm I was on a date with one of the hottest men I had ever seen. We met at the House of Sweden in DC and he was training to be a judge. He invited me over to his apartment to assemble IKEA furniture. I figured it was a type of booty call. It wasn't; we were actually assembling a Malm. We had some wine. I was still under the impression that the Malm was a guise for a booty call and that we were going to sleep together since that was how I had learned dating worked. He said no. He told me that we had been drinking and he did not want to take advantage of the situation. I burst immediately into tears. At that time I experienced his restraint as a rejection. I didn't know that he was showing me respect. For me, male desire and appetite were reliable forms of affirmation that I had known. His responsibility was humiliating for me. For me, male desire and appetite were reliable forms of affirmation that I had known. Looking back at it now, he did not reject me. He refused to take advantage of me in a vulnerable state. That moment revealed how distorted my measurement of feeling and being desirable had become. Someone respecting a boundary that even I didn't recognize made me feel unwanted. Soon afterward I made myself a promise that I would no longer have one-night stands. It wasn't out of some newfound purity or disdain for sex. It became a two-step verification for myself. If someone was only suitable for one night, they were no longer suitable for me. That promise gave me newfound trust in my boundaries, more discernment over my body, and ultimately more trust and love for myself. Sexual energy is creative energy I have now come to look at sexual energy as life force energy. Sex in its most literal form can create another human being. That fact makes it hard to pass off the power of sex as something trivial or casual. I do not believe reproduction is the only form of creation sexual energy can be used for. From my own experience and understanding, sexual energy can be cultivated, exchanged, redirected, fragmented, wasted, or consciously harnessed. It can be intimacy. Art. Confidence. Devotion. Pleasure. Courage. Marriage. Children. Words. Beauty. Sexual energy can be the force through which we co-create our lives. Sex is not merely something that two bodies do, but it does occur with our bodies. Sex can contain such a range of emotions and energies: attention, fantasy, surrender, vulnerability, attachment, power, pleasure, consequence, and longing. Looking back at my college years and my participation in hookup culture, it made me feel like my creative force had become scattered. Most of that enormous creative energy was being directed toward being desired and little was being directed toward asking what I actually wanted to create, be, or do. It wasn't until I changed my relationship to the sexual force that my life started turning around favorably in ways that I wanted. I began to understand why the words "creative" and "sexuality" fit so naturally together since they tap into the same force. Both begin with something invisible. Desire, imagination, longing, and then the attempt to bring something to form. The limits of what you choose to create with that magical sexual force are only the limits of your own imagination. When I finally sat down and contemplated what kind of life I actually desired, the answer was not to become some side chick to a finance major named Chip so he could feel good about himself and brag to the lads the next morning. I wanted a beautiful, challenging, happy, creative life. My desire was too strong to be used up and not appreciated by a Chip. My sexual force was too creative for that. My creative force was too valuable for that. I did not want to extinguish or give away any more of my sexual fire. I just needed to learn how to tend it. A tribute to the forgotten men To the men who once had the momentary pleasure of penetrating me, whose names I can no longer recall, perhaps some trace of my creative force still blesses your life. I have severed the energetic ties and called back what was mine. Upon writing this and reflecting, I imagine that somewhere beneath the finance jobs, group chats, and carefully maintained indifference, a few of you remain quietly haunted. Shame had once made these men and their opinions of me feel enormous, while simultaneously making me feel smaller than I actually was. I lowered a part of myself and my standards in order to play the college hookup game. Being selected by them in the frat-party stockyards gave their opinions the power to determine my desirability, memorability, respectability, or disposability. It was me who allowed their opinions to hold that much power over me because I did not yet know better. Looking back now, many of them are barely formed characters in the story of the woman I have now become. I am no longer a random sorority girl picked and tossed aside for the next one who came along in their college story. I will not abandon the woman I was I can cope with the history of who I was. I will not disown her or what she did. That was a version of myself dealing with the culture I grew up in and navigating without a road map. I will not push that version of me into the shadows. I learned from these experiences and grew. She was me. She wanted to find love, passion, validation, adventure, intimacy, and pleasure. That past version of me made decisions that I would definitely not make now. Integration does not mean that I need to pretend every decision was wise. It means refusing to make an earlier version of yourself evidence of permanent unworthiness. In those times, I was neither completely liberated nor completely powerless. I had personal agency, but I was also conditioned. I desired men, but oftentimes I desired their desire even more. Some of the experiences were fun, but few, if any, were deeply pleasurable. Some left me feeling more empty. Some left me feeling frightened. Some pressured. Some further disconnected me from myself. I participated in a culture that sometimes harmed me while it was sold to me as being fun and freeing. All of these truths can live together. Consent starts with knowing yourself This is where my later adult experiences with boundaries have brought me back to the beginning. You cannot protect a boundary you have never learned how to recognize. You cannot clearly communicate what is okay and not okay if you have been trained to distrust your internal feeling that something is wrong. Just because something is technically permitted does not necessarily mean that it is respectful. This rings true for many things in life, not just sex. Be it relationships, contracts, business, or the scope of life in general. Learning boundaries for me has meant learning to notice the internal voice before someone else needs to explain why I should ignore it. Some people encounter a boundary and respect it. Some will test it. Some will search for weaknesses around it. Some will use uncertainty as permission. Some will rely upon your politeness, exhaustion, fear of conflict, desire to be liked, or your reluctance to make a scene. Learning boundaries for me has meant learning to notice the internal voice before someone else needs to explain why I should ignore it. Sometimes all I know is: This does not feel okay. Then that feeling deserves investigation. It doesn't automatically prove intent. It might not even explain what has happened yet, but it is information. Returning to the shower I still remember those showers washing off whoever he was from the night before. I can't go back and fortify boundaries I was never taught to have. I needed to gain that wisdom and gain that discernment. It means one thing to speak about a topic as an onlooker. It is a different kind of wisdom when you have gone fully in and immersed yourself internationally in the college hookup scene. It is funny how, when I went out seeking connection with people, I lost the connection to myself. Only with time and stronger self-respect and boundaries was I able to make a mosaic of the fragmented pieces of myself I had all too easily given away. I now direct my creative sexual life-force toward my marriage, creating my children, my work, my body, my pleasure, and the life I consciously create. American college hookup culture put me through the wringer, and I fully participated. Later on I lived internationally and faced similar lessons in consent that extended beyond frat rooms. I learned that consent is not merely the absence of saying an audible no. I learned that boundaries are not just walls you build up against other people. They are self-knowledge: knowing what belongs to you, what unique things you offer. Knowledge of what you are not and what you do not want. I learned to trust the moment something inside said: Enough. No more. My experiences taught me the power of female sexuality. How to own and embrace desire. How to consciously and carefully select what I wanted to create from that sexual force. I am no longer the girl waiting to be chosen in a fraternity basement. I am a woman choosing and creating my life.