"I don't understand what happened to dating!" exclaims your ancient and slightly racist great-aunt at Thanksgiving dinner. "You young people just take things too quickly; it's not right."

"Oh I agree!" pipes up your 16-year old cousin, doing her best to get written into the will. "I wish boys still took girls to drive-in movies and held hands and danced all night. I was born in the wrong generation!"

I don't exactly see the problem. I mean, we still have milkshakes and institutionalized sexism.

Hookup culture is, as your elderly family members and local church would have you believe, a new and irresponsible phenomenon. Keeping in mind that this is the generation responsible for the recession, at least four wars, and bellbottoms, let's explore why they might think that. In the past twenty years, it has become more common for young people of all genders and sexualities to "hook up," or have sexual contact with others outside of a committed relationship.

Most of the time it isn't with Mila Kunis, so that's a downside, but a huge amount of young adults, particularly college students, have engaged in some form of hookup culture, whether it be a one-night stand, friends with benefits, or the more accurately named and less subtle "fuckbuddy".

Now the reason that this tends to freak out your grandparents and pastors is that, aside from the fact that they themselves were taught that God watches you masturbate and premarital coitus earns you a one-way ticket to Hell, is that they worry about accidental pregnancies.

What they don't realize is that contraceptives have come a looooong way from cutting the thumb off of a rubber glove and praying really hard. The introduction of post-sex contraceptives, like Plan B, have contributed to decreased teen pregnancy rates, along with semi-permanent solutions such as implants and IUDs.

When logic fails, they try to guilt you. "But what about love!?" they cry, "what about going steady? What about the old ways?"

"What about the time you casually referred to my friend Kaito as a 'chinaman', grandma?" you mutter under your breath. 'Old ways' don't equate to 'best ways'. And it's not like dating doesn't exist anymore. It's just that young people are realizing that lust and love are two separate feelings--sure, they can exist at the same time, but they don't have to go together.

Of course, not everyone is into the idea. And they don't have to be; the only thing as annoying as being shamed for engaging in hookup culture is being shamed for not engaging in hookup culture. There are plenty of young people who abstain, and newsflash--it's not anyone's business than their own. They aren't prudes, they aren't lame, and they're not your problem.

The bottom line is that young people today are experiencing sexuality more freely and liberally than any other generation (Yes, this includes the whole "free love" sixties thing--after all, that was a counterculture thing, and not very mainstream). And while old people tend to freak out about new and unusual trends, remind them that their grandparents probably had the same freak out about electricity. And the 14th amendment. Personally, I'm not going to take any sort of sexual advice from a generation that didn't know the clitoris existed.

So the next time your great-aunt Linda has a little too much communion wine and starts ranting about the 'good old days' when 'love was still alive', remind her that A) the economy isn't, thanks to her, and B) People can bang whoever, whatever, and however they'd like. And as long as they stay safe, it's no one's business to judge.