Society’s sexual culture has changed

The closing scene of this season’s finale of “Gilmore Girls” – the WB’s hit show about the crazy antics and unusually warm relationship of a hip single mom and her studious daughter – telegraphed a message about sex rarely hinted at in popular culture these days: Regret.

Back home after her first year at Yale, the daughter impetuously lost her virginity with her former boyfriend. Which might not be so bad, since he was handsome and kind and they obviously cared for each other. Except that he happened to be married to someone else.

Stung by her mother’s swift condemnation (“You’re the other woman!”), the daughter is last seen sobbing on the front porch.

“Gilmore Girls” is the first series to make it to the air supported by the Family Friendly Forum’s Script Development Fund, an initiative between some of the nation’s top advertisers and the WB, and that may explain this rare lesson in sex and consequences. Whatever the reason, it stands in stark contrast to the growing pervasiveness of an alienating hookup culture that is substituting for teen romance these days.

Once again, it seems, girls are getting screwed – literally and figuratively.

The rigid dating scene that mercifully fell into oblivion decades ago carried its own set of emotional abuses that too often left girls manipulated or embarrassingly alone. Every night was prom night, and the restrictive courtship rituals were particularly hard on anyone who didn’t fit the prescribed mold.

You might have thought that decades of progress in women’s rights would have translated into a more equitable, compassionate system for meeting and mating. Instead, there’s a freewheeling tendency toward random sex that seems more intent on pleasing boys than satisfying girls.

“There’s a firm belief among many experts on teenage sex that girls, however much they protest to the contrary, are not getting as much pleasure out of hookups as they claim,” wrote Benoit Denizet-Lewis in last week’s New York Times Magazine. Certainly that is true of many of the girls in Denizet-Lewis’ piece, who clearly desire more than the opportunity to perform oral sex on a little-known “friend.”

Marline Pearson, who teaches at a two-year technical college in Madison, Wis., said that conversations with her students have led her to conclude that a crass, low-level male model of sex without commitment is being thrust on young women today. That model may have been around for quite a while, but society once imposed restraints on male behavior that now have largely been abandoned. So insistent is this new sexual culture that young women may feel powerless to refuse. And they may consent to it, even if their needs are not being met.

“Two things are important to women: Quality, sustainable relationships and meaningful sex,” said Pearson, author of a new high school curriculum called Love U2. “I poll my students every year, and 99.9 percent of the women say they want sex to mean something. Yet what do we have today? Sex without meaning and relationships without commitment.”

A powerful combination of peer pressure and personal vulnerability leaves many girls unable to resist participation in a hookup culture that essentially expects them to act and feel like boys.

And while it is true that young men experience regret about having sex too soon, they don’t feel it as deeply as young women. A 2003 survey by the well-respected National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy found that 60 percent of teenage boys who had sex had wished they had waited longer. Among girls, it was 77 percent.

Somehow, this news isn’t getting out. The national Youth Risk Behavior Survey released in May found – for the first time – more high school girls reporting they had sexual intercourse than high school boys. The difference was slight, the trend lines disturbing. More sex, more regrets.

“I’m a feminist,” said Pearson, “but I think we’ve put girls back in the dark ages, with very little power and now they are becoming accomplices in their own oppression.”

This is about empowerment – the power to look not only for pleasure and social acceptance, but also for commitment, stability and love. We’ve created a society in which young people are left virtually on their own to navigate the fretful path toward adulthood and marriage. In that vacuum it should come as no surprise that the more vulnerable gender is too often hurt.

The new catchphrase is to have “friends with benefits,” but there’s nothing truly friendly or beneficial about a hookup culture that simulates intimacy and trivializes sex. This sure doesn’t look like progress to me.

Defending a woman’s right to hook up is not part of my feminism, and it’s not something I’m eager to bequeath to my daughters.