Stock Characters for Trend Stories

Inspired by last weekend’s “Girls Have Sex, Too” story in the NYT, The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel breaks down “The Seven Women You Meet in ‘Hookup Culture’ Trend Stories”:

The One Who Might Have Been Raped
The trend story martyr, she reveals hookup culture’s dark underbelly. She gets drunk and can’t remember some of her hookups. (She takes sick pride in the resulting bruises.) Others end in exit-fellatio: “By the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore; giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.” She is the tenuous link between the trio of campus plagues — binge-drinking, hookup culture, sexual assault — not the guy who is into sex with half-conscious women.

Elsewhere, Anna North calls for an end to so-called “women’s stories.”