Beirut, Lebanon #GrecoRoman Ruins #khazen

New York City, N.Y., Nov 10, 2016 / 03:02 am (CNA).- Leah Fessler considers herself a feminist.

And the standard feminist narrative is that women can have, and indeed enjoy, casual sex without consequences – physical, emotional, or otherwise.

But when her experience with hookup culture (and that of her friends') in college failed to live up to its empowering promises and left her emotionally empty, Fessler decided to look a little deeper.

In an article written for Quartz, Fessler explains her quest to examine what it was about the prominent hookup culture, and the ill-defined, non-committal “pseudo-relationships,” at her Middlebury college campus that were making her miserable.

“Far more frequent, however, were pseudo-relationships, the mutant children of meaningless sex and loving partnerships. Two students consistently hook up with one another – and typically, only each other – for weeks, months, even years,” Fessler wrote.

“Yet per unspoken social code, neither party is permitted emotional involvement, commitment, or vulnerability. To call them exclusive would be 'clingy,' or even 'crazy.'”

These pseudo-relationships would typically follow the same cycle, she notes. She’d meet a guy she was interested in, they’d start texting, meet up in their dorms late at night to discuss their mutual interests and hobbies and families, and have sex. This would happen off and on over the course of a few months with the same guy, then the relationship of sorts would just fizzle and die. Wash, rinse repeat with the next. Fessler wrote that she experienced this with at least five men by her senior year.

By CatholicHerald

Media coverage in the run-up to the US election made much of Donald Trump’s “Catholic problem” – but exit polls revealed that Catholics voted 52 per cent for the president-elect and only 45 per cent for Hillary Clinton. The election continued a trend of Catholics voting for the winning presidential candidate.

Within Catholic voters there was a sharp divide. White Catholics supported Trump by a clear margin – 60 per cent to 37 per cent – while Hispanic Catholics preferred Clinton 67 per cent to 26 per cent.

Dr Mark Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University told the Catholic News Agency: “Catholics continue to be the only major religious voting block that can shift from one election to the next.