Girls in Bar/Nightclub having fun
'Commitment-free, alcohol-fuelled sex really gets a bad rep, especially in America (and especially, as their feminists are wont to point out, when it’s women doing it)' Photograph: Chris Rout / Alamy/Alamy

Given that I'd just broken up with my live-in boyfriend for being poor, the New York Times heralding "the end of courtship" was not a welcome discovery. I won't lie, it's been a pretty rough time for me romantically, and I was hoping to maybe, y'know, get back out there and see what my own fine city had to offer me in terms of eligible hedge-funders.

Somewhat unfortunately for a mercenary whore such as myself, it's looking unlikely that I am ever to be wined and dined again. According to the New York Times, this is because of this new thing called a "hook-up culture" that all the "young people" are involved in. Apparently people in their 20s (or "millenials" as we are termed, with no sense of irony), are refusing to engage in the appropriate social rituals traditional for homo sapiens, and instead of choosing to exchange tedious platitudes over sub-standard Italian food, are skipping straight to the part where they smush their genitals together to their mutual satisfaction.

This, apparently, is a tragedy for women everywhere. Indeed, the article describes a typical New York urbanite's disappointing non-date thus:

"After an evening when she exchanged flirtatious glances with a bouncer at a Williamsburg nightclub, the bouncer invited her and her friends back to his apartment for whiskey and boxed macaroni and cheese. When she agreed, he gamely hoisted her over his shoulders, and, she recalled, 'carried me home, my girlfriends and his bros in tow, where we danced around a tiny apartment to some MGMT and Ratatat remixes.'"

I include the quote in full because, rather than being the harbinger of moral collapse that the article implies, it sounds like the perfect evening, although obviously homemade is always better. And yes, readers, she "spent the night".

Somewhat counter-intuitively, all this dancing and no-commitment screwing has led to what some are perceiving as a kind of sexocalypse, or in other words, the End of Sex. At least that's what one of the article's contributors seems to think, having written a book saying as much. The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy not only makes scintillating reading but also looks nice and tidy on your bedside table, next to your diaphragm and that tingly lube you're not too sure about. Although I haven't read it, I can kind of guess from the title that it isn't exactly going to be pro-me having sex with strangers. Commitment-free, alcohol-fuelled sex really gets a bad rep, especially in the US (and especially, as their feminists are wont to point out, when it's women doing it). Hence the nostalgia for simpler times: oh, if only things could be how they were back in the 1950s, when people behaved exactly the same way, except more covertly!

From the sounds of the New York Times article, you'd think that my generation had somehow invented casual sex and drinking. Yes, we use texting and Facebook to arrange our liaisons, but the actual mechanics of the act itself haven't changed all that much. The innocent picture we have of our elders, sitting sedately in floral-wallpapered dining rooms eating prawn cocktail and discussing last night's testcard isn't exactly true. They were just as capable of raising hell. My grandma once told me that she got so drunk at a dance that she took a bite out of her champagne glass before falling down the stairs, something which, to be fair, is the sort of thing I envisage myself doing on a date too, but with what would probably amount to much less decorum.

The idea that my generation are unhappy and sexually unfulfilled because, thanks to the dwindling of traditional gender roles, we've been able to have sex on our own terms, makes absolutely no sense to me. Especially as in Britain, we never really had a dating culture to begin with. Americans are complaining because "dinner and a movie" has been replaced with "hanging out", when on this side of the Atlantic people have been flinging themselves at one another outside the pub following last orders since time immemorial, and it's worked fine. Likewise, while the Americans see the classic "are u out?" fishing text as evidence of shallow promiscuity, we see it as a convenient way of minimising social embarrassment by ensuring both parties are too drunk to attempt a conversation capable of, let's face it, shattering the illusion whose maintenance is so essential for successful coitus.

The New York Times partly attributes this "new" casual attitude to dating to the "mancession", which, on consultation of my made-up-media-buzzword dictionary, means that blokes are now too poor to take women out on dates, opting instead for more casual drinks, a tactic European men have been using for decades ("my mum gave me a tenner so I could take you out" remains my favourite opening date gambit of all time). This is why I'd suggest that, rather then heralding "the end of courtship", this new hook-up culture simply indicates that the US is finally starting to catch up with Europe.

Romance hasn't so much died as changed its trousers, and just because young women are doing things on a more equal basis rather than relying on men to take us to fancy French restaurants, doesn't mean we're not falling in love as much as ever. My boyfriend, who of course I didn't break up with at all, "courted" me at my kitchen table, over a succession of weeks, using a dashing combo of charm and two-for-a-fiver Italian Soave. I knew he was the one when he drunkenly stood on a chair and declared himself more of a feminist than me.

There's no greater aphrodisiac than gender equality, boys and girls. And if that's a sign of a sexocalypse, then you can lead me to my bunker, because I'm done.