Free Republic

A Virginia Tech football player allegedly beat a man to death after he pretended to be a woman online to seek a sexual relationship with the player. 40-year-old restaurant worker Paul Smith was found beaten to death in his apartment on June 1. Police later arrested 18-year-old Isimemen Etute and charged him with second degree murder. Prosecutors say that Etute had met up with Smith one time for oral sex after meeting him on the dating app Tinder. They allege that the second time the two met on May 31, Etute discovered Smith was a man and not a woman...

A new survey released by researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education shows that loneliness is on the rise in the United States and depicts how it can lead to a wide range of other health problems. “Making Caring Common” is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The group conducted the survey in October and published it this month in a project report. The survey results suggest that 36% of all Americans feel “serious loneliness.” This grouping includes 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children. The report was done based on an online...

Chicago police told Fox News they've reviewed hundreds of hours of footage from downtown surveillance cameras but haven't found footage yet of the alleged attack on "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett. The department said Tuesday night that detectives reviewed footage from privately-owned cameras near where Smollett says he was attacked and will broaden their search by reviewing footage from traffic cameras and public bus cameras. "We are taking this investigation very seriously," the police statement said. Smollett told police he was walking downtown near the Chicago River at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday when two masked men hurled racial and homophobic...

"I know lots of single men," Cara, 26, a resident of Brooklyn, New York, told Mic. "It's just... most are of little or no interest to me as anything other than a hookup." Tired of old ways: The somewhat revolutionary notion that women are actually deciding not to marry is something that wouldn't be possible if the value of marriage itself hadn't changed drastically over the years. "When women's life choices were highly constrained, they had little negotiating power," Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington, wrote for CNN. "They had to marry or were seen as...

Olympic-gold snowboarder Jamie Anderson confesses she and the other female athletes are checking out “a lot of cuties” in Sochi with the dating app Tinder, according to US magazine. The 23-year-old from Lake Tahoe, Calif., said matchmaking has reached new levels in the Olympic Village. “Tinder in the Olympic Village is next level,” she told US. “It’s all athletes! In the mountain village it’s all athletes. It’s hilarious. There are some cuties on there.” But, she warns, the preoccupation with Tinder can be “way too distracting,” so she deleted her account. And it seems to have paid off. Anderson clinched...

NEW YORK (AP) - Jay Lassiter is no longer "in a relationship." Let's clarify that: Lassiter, a media adviser for political campaigns who lives in Cherry Hill, N.J., is still with his partner of nearly eight years, Greg Lehmkuho. But since Thursday, when Facebook expanded its romantic-status options, Lassiter's profile there echoes his relationship's legal status: "Domestic partnership." It may not be a life-altering change. After all, you can call yourself anything you want on a social network. And Facebook is merely that.

In its own Jesuitical way, Boston College is trying to be Catholic in more than name only. For example, courtesy of Andy Rota at the The Observer at Boston College, we have learned that BC Law took down the link to Planned Parenthood which had appeared on its website guide for students. Similarly, Kerry Cronin, a philosophy professor at BC recently satirized and tried to offer an alternative to the hookup culture prevalent on many campuses, including the Jesuit preserved where she works, in a speech there. “She listed ten rules of the hookup culture—among them the requirements to be...

Thomas Frazier, father of 14 children, jailed for owing more than half-million in child support by Bryn Mickle | The Flint Journal Saturday April 11, 2009, 8:00 AM FLINT, Michigan -- Fourteen children by 13 different women in Genesee County and more than $530,000 in unpaid child support. Even in a county with $700 million in uncollected child support, Thomas Frazier may hold the unenviable title of biggest deadbeat dad. After years of dodging support payments, Frazier was thrown in jail this week and given the choice of doing 90 days or coming up with about $28,000. "This guy gives...

[...] Princeton, where we teach, is a wonderful university; but like other colleges and universities there is a dark side to its social life. Our students are bright, enthusiastic, and eager to learn. Most did not come to college bent on boozing and hooking up. Many feel deeply ambivalent about these aspects of campus life. Yet, they find little support on campus for the “alternative lifestyle” of living by traditional moral virtues. More than a few freshmen of both sexes arrive believing that romantic relationships are properly oriented toward marriage and that sex belongs in marriage, not outside it. They...

SAN FRANCISCO — Steve, a health care worker in his 30s, had been told more than once that he had been exposed to a sexually transmitted infection. So when it happened again, he was not upset — even though this time he learned about it through an anonymous online postcard, e-mailed by a man with whom he had had sex. “What was important was that I was being notified that there was a possibility that I may have been exposed to syphilis,” said Steve, who asked that his last name be withheld to protect his privacy. The Internet has made...

The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay. ... To help me understand this phenomenon, I called Kathleen Bogle, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia who has studied hooking up among college students and is the author of the 2008 book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus.” It turns out that everything is the opposite of what I remember. Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and,...

However high-minded their courses may sound – "Mirror of Princes," say, or "The Political Philosophy of Aristotle" – college students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom. In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after. And it's free. The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women – as long as the man is a fellow student and...

College Confidential by: Deborah Lambert, February 19, 2008 Remember the days when movies like “Love Story” recounted the joys of campus courtships? Things have changed, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Sue Shellenbarger, who says that today’s pragmatic students are more focused on grades and careers than on moonlight serenades. One survey found that nearly 20 percent of young marrieds or those in serious committed relationships were more likely to have met at the office than at school. This all makes sense. After all, since today’s competitive work environment requires post-graduate degrees and flexible re-location plans, it could take years...

During a class discussion on adolescence, a high school teacher recently asked her students whether they go on dates. We don't "date," the 12th graders reported. We "hook up." If you're in your 40s, "hooking up" might mean catching a friend downtown for lunch. But to people in their teens or 20s, the phrase often means a casual sexual encounter _ anything from kissing onwards _ with no strings attached. Now a new book on this not-so-new subject is drawing fire in some quarters for its conclusion: That hookups can be damaging to young women, denying their emotional needs, putting...