​​We’d been peer-pressured into a date neither of us wanted. Sitting across from each other at a Kinokuniya in Midtown Manhattan, my Tinder match and I had just admitted the truth: We were there because it was the first week of university, and we perceived that our peers were doing the same. When I told my friends about it the next day, reactions varied. The women in my life were unsurprised to learn my date wasn’t enthused to be there. The men were disappointed. It had been a failure, as it didn’t result in sex. But, still, the men insisted: What did her body look like? Did she look good in bed? Perhaps I’d failed to hook up with her, but I felt as though I gained a friend instead. Was that not enough to make it a success?

When I spoke with James Lee, a senior biochemistry major at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), he recounted a similar experience to the uncomfortable post-date scene with my peers over the phone. He told me that he feels that for men, the “default” societal expectation is to objectify women’s bodies.

“There was the pressure to be the straight guy who sees a hot girl with his boys and they hype each other up,” Lee said of an experience where he felt out of place for not adopting this disposition while amongst his male peers at UT. “But I’ve been noticing more and more recently that girls also hold those kinds of goals. [It’s] kind of almost reinforcing that power structure.”

Lucia Ridlen, a senior philosophy and economics double-major at Trinity, has a similar perspective to Lee with her own peers. However, she had concerns about the extent to which women feel it’s imposed upon them.

“It’s a nice conversation that’s been opened up recently about women, their pleasure and their sex lives,” Ridlen said. “I do think, though, sometimes it is pushed onto women who don’t want casual sex because they think that’s what men want.”

We talk endlessly about consent in dating culture, but there’s one type we refuse to examine: the consent to participate in hookup culture itself. There’s a bitter irony in the fact that the same generation that invented and embraced the concept of “enthusiastic consent” either can’t recognize or refuses to reckon with coerced participation in the broader system we’ve created.

“A dilemma presented to a lot of women is that if you’re not participating in hookup culture, you’re not getting anything at all,” Ridlen said. “The only way that you’re going to have some type of connection with someone is if you do it ‘our way.’ And ‘our way’ as in hookup culture, and the casual type of relationship that maybe a lot of women aren’t looking for.”

With the hegemony of dating apps in the modern sexual economy, many people feel as if there is no alternative to participation in hookup culture. But while we are rightly fastidious over consent as it pertains to individual encounters, we routinely fail to consider the unique social pressures that women feel the need to say “yes” to hookup culture itself.

I’m a cisgender man, and even I can see the problems this power structure poses. Presenting participation in hookup culture to women as a primary form of sexual liberation, while at the same time its construction encourages overtly misogynistic behaviour in men, presents an obvious structural disadvantage for one group.

Don’t say this too loudly, of course. You can expect to quickly be accused of being “prudish” for questioning the extent to which hookup culture actually centers women’s pleasure, “sex-negative” for questioning its liberatory qualities or “anti-feminist” for questioning the extent to which women feel they are actually invoking their own agency to participate in it. We all see the contradictions. We’ve just learned to pretend we don’t.

In a moment where too many women across the nation have either already lost access to reproductive health services or fear such a plausible scenario in the current post-Roe v. Wade atmosphere, we must be more mindful of the unique societal pressures women feel to give their consent to such a problematic framework. A fuller and more nuanced understanding of consent requires it.

The fruits of coerced participation in hookup culture are hardly desirable for anybody. The costs are severe: Women perform roles that make them unhappy, and men learn to mistake objectification for liberation. We need to admit that true sexual liberation must include both the freedom to participate without fear of social repercussions, as well as the freedom to refuse participation without fear of exile.