Lyssa Mall, Staff Writer

 

The Spanish Jesuit Pedro Arrupe said, “Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

The love for God described by Arrupe is all-encompassing. While our “little” sins, our tipsy nights, our hookups and our immodesty in dress will not prevent us from loving at all, in the long run they will certainly prevent us from attaining to such love. In the short term, they will make us more lost, cold and empty than we otherwise would have been. In settling for the emptiness of shallow sexual relationships, we turn our backs on the far greater possibility of what we are called to, consigning ourselves to disillusionment. Christopher West asks, “Are men and women willing to pay the price of renunciation, sacrifice, and discipline required to find and live the love that does satisfy? The answer to this question will determine the entire course of a life.”

The prevalence of the hookup culture at Notre Dame is disturbing. Not just because one might hope that, at a professedly Catholic school, administrators and students would strive to practice the ethics of our faith, but also because of the ways that the hookup culture directly and indirectly harms women. (Of course, this culture hurts men too, in myriad ways.)

Let’s start with the standard dorm party/clubbing attire. What do Forever 21’s mini skirts/shirts have to do with anything? Well, they encourage guys to look, but not into “the windows of the soul.” Such dress is hardly evidence of self-confidence and liberation, as it has so frequently been misrepresented. The deeper issue is that dressing like this is self-objectification. And, as becomes painfully obvious when we finally get to Cosmo and Playboy, to objectify oneself is to dehumanize oneself. Dehumanization, in any form, is always antithetical to the recognition and practice of human dignity.

Oftentimes, in the club setting, the more a woman reveals her body, the more she hides her true self. She’ll get his attention, but it will be based on lust, and thus this attention will typically last only a short while. After a few such experiences, a woman will begin to numb herself to the pain, and forget that she had ever dreamt of something more. Jason Evert comments, “Pretty women endure this abuse all the time. They are pursued, but not really; they are wanted, but only superficially. They learn to offer their bodies but never, ever their souls.” This cyclical pattern, inherent in the hookup culture, is the very antithesis of our deepest longings. The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes, “What we all want most of all is to hear these words: ‘You are simply the most precious thing in the world to me. In all possible worlds, I would love you. I would wait a thousand lifetimes for you. I would give up the whole world for you. You are the center of my life, my heart, and my mind, and there could never be any possible rival.’ This is every lover’s dream, and we are all lovers. We are designed by love for love.”

Fulton Sheen wrote, “The higher the love, the more demands will be made on us to conform to that idea…When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, and goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.” Our world so desperately needs women who refuse to conform to the pressures of the hookup culture. Notre Dame so desperately needs more women who refuse to conform to the pressure to use their bodies as commodities. My sisters on this campus deserve so much more.

 

 

 

 

Lyssa Mall is a senior English and psychology major. She has considered grad school, but is seriously leaning towards moving to Hawaii to sell flowers next year. Contact her at amall@nd.edu.