For the young and the single in New York, dating has always been a numbers game, whether it is tabulating the guy-to-girl ratio at a bar or guessing at the bank balance of the quarry across the dance floor. Still, it is not every night that a group of unattached young women in low-slung jeans sit around pondering questions that might stump a mathematician at Caltech, questions like can one plus nine ever equal just nine?
"I know a lot of people who will go home with the same guy they have had before just because it's not going to raise their number," explained Jennifer Babbit, 26, a publicist.
"A lot of my friends will say: `I started having sex with this guy, but it only lasted a minute. I don't know if it counted,"' offered Beth Whiffen, a former associate editor at Cosmopolitan.
The number in question is the total number of men that a woman has slept with, and the question is on their minds because they were among two dozen or so young Manhattanites who dropped by One Little West 12, a restaurant and club in the meatpacking district of Manhattan, last week, to discuss The Hookup Handbook: A Single Girl's Guide to Living It Up by Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler, published last month (Simon Spotlight
Entertainment).
The book's title and many of its guidelines ("Getting a room isn't just polite, it's a necessity") suggest that a new sexual revolution is afoot among a fast-and-loose generation nurtured on the wisdom of Sex and the City, who see boyfriends as passe, dating as dated and the idea of commitment as laughable.
But an evening spent in the company of Lavinthal, Rozler and their friends suggests that mating rituals of the much-celebrated hookup culture, at least as practiced by young professional women, seems to owe as much to Doris Day as to Samantha Jones.
Yes, they take pride in having thrown off the shackles of earlier generations of single women. They are not waiting on Friday night hoping "he" will call. They make the first move.
They happily see two or three guys simultaneously. Spontaneity is crucial, but even more is a good clean exit strategy from any guy who turns out to be Mr Not Exactly.
"It's not that people aren't dating," explained Rozler, an editorial assistant at Allworth Press when she is not practicing nightclub anthropology. "It's that there's this weird gray area. People still want to be in relationships, but they don't want to be settling."
But even as they raise pink drinks in the air and roll their eyes at the absurdity of
commitment, these are not women embracing sexual abandon.
The courtship rites of this generation of urban singles seem to borrow from the mores of their grandmothers in the 1950s (date lots of boys; smooch, spoon, nuzzle or neck to your heart's content, but hold out for that pledge pin from Mr Right) as much as from those of their mothers' love-the-one-you're-with 1970s.
"Most girls don't have one-night stands," Whiffen said. "They might have one or two in their life."
Take the number discussion, for example. Yes, there are conquests, but there should not be too many of them. So among this group of women with long heels tipping out of their US$200 jeans what is the right number, that is, the last number before you hit the wrong one? Few women would want to go over 20, or even 15, Babbit said, because they would "think of themselves as big sluts."
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