This isn’t an argument against pleasure, attraction, sexuality, or desire. It’s an argument against placing appetite where meaning, discipline, and loyalty belong. Nor is this about pretending every monogamous person is healthy or every non-monogamous person is broken; it’s about what happens when appetite replaces meaning and access replaces reverence at scale.
Hookup culture is a lie. Not because pleasure is evil, or that desire is shameful. Not because attraction should be denied, buried, or treated like some moral failure. Desire is human; attraction is human. Pleasure has its place. But pleasure makes a terrible god.
There’s no gratification to be found in the pursuit of gratification for its own sake. No lasting pleasure in seeking pleasure for its own sake. Pleasure itself – like any other sensation – is fleeting, and when it is severed from meaning, commitment, restraint, and genuine connection, the emptiness that follows only makes the entire experience feel hollow. The hunger returns. The novelty must escalate. Then the chase becomes the point. Then what began as freedom quietly becomes dependence. That’s the bait. Hookup culture sells itself as liberation. No rules. No shame. No attachment. No expectations. No old-fashioned restrictions. Just choice, autonomy, experimentation, and pleasure without consequence.
But the truth is far less glamorous.
Hookup culture is appetite dressed as liberation, loneliness dressed as abundance, and emptiness taught to call itself empowerment. Because if you have to keep feeding the same hunger over and over again, ask yourself honestly: are you free, or are you trained? Novelty can become a drug. So can attention and validation. The rush of being wanted can become a drug. The body may get what it came for, but the soul still goes home hungry. And over time, the person caught in that loop may not even know what else to do, because the rhythm has become familiar. The chase becomes normal. The emptiness becomes normal. The performance becomes normal. The inability to bond, trust, commit, or remain still becomes normal.
And once dysfunction becomes normal, people stop calling it damage, and start calling it identity.
Examples abound across the internet. Men selling the image of abundance. Women orbiting that image. Influencers performing luxury, access, and endless desirability as if being surrounded by bodies means being surrounded by love. Dan Bilzerian became one of the most recognizable symbols of that fantasy: the endless party, endless women, endless stimulation, endless proof that a man had “won.” But even that fantasy has limits (1). At some point, excess becomes repetition. Repetition becomes boredom. Boredom reveals emptiness, and even Bilzerian himself admits to this. That’s the part nobody wants to admit: the fantasy of endless access doesn’t make a person more capable of love. It often makes them less capable of it.
The same pattern appears in other forms. Performative playboy personas. Men turning women into props for status. Women turning attention into proof of worth. People collecting bodies, admirers, options, and situations as if quantity can substitute for depth. Nick Cannon (2) having twelve children with multiple women is another example of the larger cultural confusion: the ability to create life is not the same thing as modeling love. Leaving aside moral outrage, the real question is simple: what does this teach people to normalize? How does pleasure-seeking self-indulgence build societies? How does it heal wounds? How does it teach children what loyalty, sacrifice, trust, and family are supposed to look like? How does it make anyone more whole?
And while the notion of kings with harems may appeal to many men, it is a pipe dream for the overwhelming majority of them. Chasing that fantasy is exhausting. Worse, it trains men to confuse conquest with competence, access with value, and being desired with being loved. It also trains women to confuse attention with devotion. That is the signal problem. You train people how to read you. Then you live with the audience you attracted.
The rush is real. The hollowness that follows repetition is real, too.
If you signal that intimacy means nothing, don’t be surprised when people treat access to you as meaningless. If you train others to see you as entertainment, distraction, validation, or conquest, don’t act shocked when they fail to see you as sacred. If you reward shallow attention, you attract shallow pursuit. If you make desirability the main language of your worth, many people will never learn to speak to anything deeper. That’s not cruelty; that’s incentive behavior. And what gets rewarded gets repeated. What gets repeated becomes expectation. What becomes expectation eventually becomes culture.
This is where sex positivity, like so many good ideas, becomes dangerous when stripped of limits. At its best, sex positivity means rejecting shame, ignorance, coercion, hypocrisy, and the idea that desire itself is dirty. Good. Desire is human. Sexuality is part of life, bonding, intimacy, and the continuation of the species. But when sex positivity becomes a banner for unrestrained appetite, public self-objectification, transactional attention, and pleasure divorced from accountability, it stops liberating people and starts training them. Flaunting yourself for stimulation, selling access cheaply, or treating intimacy as casual entertainment may feel empowering in the moment, but incentives still work. What gets rewarded gets repeated. What gets repeated becomes habit. What becomes habit eventually shapes identity, expectation, and the kind of people drawn toward you, which affects the greater culture of the society it takes place in.
The issue isn’t sexuality; it’s abandoning oneself and dressing it up as confidence. Freedom doesn’t mean every appetite deserves expression. Empowerment doesn’t mean turning yourself into a product and then wondering why people behave like consumers. Sexual dignity requires more than permission. It requires discernment, restraint, reverence, and the wisdom to understand that not everything desirable or feels good in the moment is good for the soul.
Pleasure without discipline becomes hunger. Hunger without meaning becomes addiction. Addiction without interruption becomes ideology. Ideology, unquestioned, becomes identity. And identity, once defended loudly enough, calcifies at the cultural level as normal even when it is quietly destroying people. That is why hookup culture is not harmless. It doesn’t merely affect private choices – it reshapes what people expect from each other. It teaches people to keep options open, to avoid vulnerability and commitment, to mistake boredom for incompatibility, to confuse anxiety with passion, and to treat loyalty like a negotiable accessory instead of the floor. But loyalty is the floor of any relationship. Not a prize or bonus feature given for earning it. Not something granted only after enough entertainment, enough performance, enough emotional stimulation, or enough proof has been provided. It’s the foundation a relationship is built on.
Without loyalty, there’s no trust. Without trust, there’s no safety. Without safety, there’s only the facsimile of intimacy. And without intimacy, all that remains is access, appetite, performance, and transaction. And trust takes time to grow, and isn’t something that can be bought. Merely built.
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1851 about sexual honor and social norms in a way that sounds almost impossible to defend in the modern world. Fair enough. Some of his assumptions belong to another age. But buried beneath the old language is a point modern people shouldn’t dismiss too quickly: stable societies require norms that protect long-term trust between men and women.
Destroy trust, and you don’t get freedom. You get suspicion. You get loneliness. You get people performing desirability while becoming less capable of connection. You get men who no longer believe women can be trusted with their peace, and women who no longer believe men can be trusted with their vulnerability. You get children raised inside confusion. Adults who know how to attract but not how to keep. Bodies close together and souls miles apart. And then people wonder why everything feels so empty.
The way out isn’t shame. Shame alone doesn’t build character, it often just drives the same behavior underground. The way out is reordering: Discipline. Honest self-assessment. Healthier rhythms. Meaningful work. Real connection. Spiritual or philosophical grounding. Strong friendships. Self-command. The patience to build what cannot be rushed. The humility to admit when pleasure has become avoidance. The courage to stop calling self-abandonment freedom just because the culture applauds it. Pleasure, desire, sexuality all have their place, but they can’t drive the bus. When intimacy is stripped of meaning, loyalty, dignity, and care, people shouldn’t be surprised when they feel used, hollow, restless, and unseen.
Hookup culture promised freedom. What it often delivered was appetite without peace, abundance without belonging, and empowerment without roots. And no society, no family, no relationship, and no human soul can build anything lasting on that.
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