User:Illuminato/s2

Gender
Students tend overestimate their peers comfort level with hookups. One study found that students overestimated both sexes' comfort level with various activities during a hookup; men reported higher levels of comfort than women. This misperception of sexual norms is another reason why students continue to hookup, even when they do not personally endorse the behavior.

Beyond just the degrading gender implications that are an inherent part of hookup culture, taking part in it, or even just existing around it, can be debilitating to students. It can diminish their sexual decision making skills and even their sexual identities themselves.

Particularly for women, hookup culture exposes students to high rates of emotional trauma and physical assault. Those with the most regret about their hookups also reported more symptoms of depression. Furthermore, women's depression worsened with each new sex partner she had within the previous year.

However, many men are just as stressed out by hookup culture as their female counterparts. Students who engaged in penetrative sex hookups are more likely to report being depressed and lonely than those who do not. Additionally, students of both genders who had ever engaged in an uncommitted sexual encounter reported lower levels of self-esteem compared to those who had not.

Some studies show that men "like hookup culture more than women do, or at least they say they do." Despite liking it more than women, only a quarter of men reported having a positive reaction after hooking up, while half had a negative reaction and the final quarter were ambivalent. In interviews, college men "expressed distinct discomfort" with the hookup culture paradigm.

Hookup culture requires that men "grin and bear [it] expressing dissent, even it they, too, hope for more from their encounters and feel disappointed with the lack of meaning in their relationships." It is socially acceptable for women, on the other hand, to at least complain about it, at least to their close friends.

The stereotype that young men are hypersexual, sex-crazed, and reckless is largely false. However, as many men feel pressured to live up to it, especially while in college, it is a destructive stereotype to maintain. This view of men and masculinity is "not only deeply flawed and misleading, but disastrous for the psyches of young men."

While they do it less so than women, many men will tell researchers that they not only regret their hookups, but also about how hooking up makes them feel taken advantage of. Only 15% of college men speak of hookups in terms that one would assume the typical "sex crazed" college man would use, and their responses tended to be much shorter than those who expressed regret. For these reasons and more, one researcher has said that "within hookup culture, no one really wins, but perhaps men lose most of all."

Hooking up is also a way for guys to establish homosocial bonds with one another, and to establish a social pecking order.

There is a "creeping anxiety that continually haunts guys sexual activities." They worry that they are not good enough, or not big enough, or hard enough for the women with whom they are hooking up.

Guys feel great pressure to be good in bed.