This is not BH and her mother, although we imagine this ride could have been just as awkward. (Wikimedia Commons)

Happy post-Family Weekend week from hell — if you’re not getting fucked by someone you consider marginally attractive, at least you’re getting fucked by your work! Ha ha! I’m here to (maybe sorta) help you out with the “getting fucked by someone marginally attractive” problem. Since none of you delinquents asked me sexy time questions I’m just gonna keep sharing hopefully relevant stories:

This weekend my Mom (Hi Mom! Miss you, Dad!) asked me what I defined as hooking up. We were confined in a moving vehicle and Tigermilk had just started playing and I wanted to listen all the way through to “My Wandering Days Are Over” and leaping out of the car didn’t quite seem appropriate, so I decided to indulge this little inquiry.

Apparently, my little sister had recently alerted my mother to the fact that she had been “de-pruded” (kissed with tongue for the first time) when she made out with the boy playing opposite her in the school musical. (Quick aside: My current slam-piece (Heyyyyy babe!) had never heard this term before I used it. Was this really only slang at my middle school and JAPy all girls sleep away camp? Also, JAPy means Jewish American Princess-y, you non-coastal gentiles. Learn how to use Urban Dictionary and stop calling me a racist. I’m a motherfucking sociology major, assholes.) In describing the de-pruding, my sister employed the term “hooked up” which evidently confused my mother, who assumed it meant having sex, forcing her to turn to me for clarification.

Read on after the jump.

It took me a minute to gain my composure and respond for two reasons:

1.She was asking a fucking enormous and complicated question.

2. I was horrified that my sister had Frenched (old school, my friends) the school play’s leading man because I too have, um, connected with this boy before. SHUTUPSHUTUP I was a slutty senior and he was a hot mysteriously tall sophomore and I’m pro-sex and we’re potentially in the fourth wave of feminism and I love my body and I’m pretty sure I was drunk (On fun! And post-show adrenaline! And cheap vodka!). Also, not that I need group validation or anything, but my best friend who is in my grade has also been, um, intimate with this individual so fuck the haters.

I let my Mom know that “hooking up” has a whole spectrum of definitions that different people use differently to describe different situations. For example, when my first-year roommate and I tallied our hookups on our white board on our hallway door (We’re class acts, we know. Also, for the record, I beat her, though we were tally for tally for the first 3 weeks of school. Equal opportunity always wins, suckers!) I defined hooking up as a particularly extended DFMO (Dance Floor Make Out and a severely under utilized acronym, amirite?).  Typically, however, I define “hooking up” as anything that progresses beyond kissing that should probably occur behind closed doors and/or in a private place (Related: did you hear they locked the Mather Sex Cave? Fucking room inspections, man. No pun intended).

As I had already explained to her that no one but the olds assumes that hooking up has a standard definition, I moved on to the more complicated hooking-up-as-not-just-sex explanation: When she asserted that hooking up meant having sex, she meant that hooking up meant having heterosexual-penis-in-vagina-penetrative sex. As she very well knows (via my being an out ‘n’ proud queer lady), this is not how all people fuck. Alllll kinds of sexual acts can “count” as sex! (See this handy info-graphic, which is literally the best quick definition of sex I’ve ever seen.) Her conception of hooking up was limited and weirdly heterosexist (I guess we all slip up sometimes! Love you, Mom! Thanks for listening to me! Keep fighting the good fight!).

So, even though I’m still grossed out that my sister is handling my sloppy seconds, I’m glad her terminology facilitated this highly academic discussion of hooking up. I hope this shit is useful. If it’s not, I hope you learn your lesson and plan on submitting some goddamn questions for me to answer, punks. Leave them anonymously in the comments or email them to me at hafterr at Kenyon dot edu (except use the actual punctuation, etc., etc…).

Also, for the record, I hate hooking up in cars. Bring back the bench seat (!) and then maybe I’ll kiss you after we hotbox the Volvo.

BH is a sophomore sociology major from Narberth, PA. She is a co-leader of the Queer Women’s Collective, but is totally into the straights too. She considers herself one of Kenyon’s top concept people.