In the 19th century, girls were forced to marry and were told with whom they should get married. Nowadays girls are forced to hook up and are told with whom they must do it. Very often, this happens with someone who despises them. Scientific literature has already shown this reality, and we can also see it all around us if we take off the opaque lenses that prevent us from seeing it. One only needs to check on social media what womanizers say about the girls they have hooked up with, or just listen to one of the conversations they have on the train. Of course, the opaque lenses will “protect” us, making us think that the girls we know have never hooked up with one of those guys. It can be discussed whether that protects us or not, but scientific evidence clearly states that, this way, we are not supporting their freedom to hook-up or not and with whom.
In the 50s, a sector of the capital generalized nightlife. They achieved that a part of the salary that young people would give home (while they lived with their families) was spent in that leisure consumption. The business needed to create a motivation to make them pay for things like alcohol at a much higher price than its cost, multiplying even by more than 10 times the price of cheap gin. Advertising used the shabbiest sexism to make boys with a traditional dominant masculinity appear as the kings of the night. Since then, and more and more every day, the sexist demand has changed. Before, it was required that girls arrived “immaculate” to the marriage, while later, girls started being imposed to have hook-ups with those dominant men in nightlife. Needless to say, boys were also coerced into becoming like those men or they would be left out of the market categorized as “friendzone” boys.
Soon enough, the imposed hook-up model in nightlife passed on to youth organizations, schools and gyms. Nowadays, the majority of girls explain in scientific research how they were forced to have those hook-ups with boys who despised them. Moreover, they narrate hoe they were also coerced into talking about them as if it had been fun and exciting, and even into omitting the disgust they felt and how compulsively they showered after them. Naturally, there are many women who have never been subdued to that, but they also explain in the interviews how hard it was to confront those coercions that usually came from their own environment.
Let us defend their freedom, but truly. Freedom, apart from being a feminist value itself, is a guarantee not to end up in situations of sexist violence and not to damage one’s own health and life. Let us uncover the coercive discourse and its imposition techniques. Let us transform the context to avoid coercion, so every girl is free to choose the relationships (stable or hook-ups) and the partners they want to have or not to have, at school or at the nightclub. In order to collaborate in this essential task, we must change current dominant discourses that, following the orders of the shabby capital sector, show hook-ups as the reign of freedom.
We will do it, ever more people are doing it. There is enough scientific evidence on the topic. We are only lacking discourses to incorporate such scientific evidence.
