Although the silly season is well under way in Britain, we must spare a thought for our American friends, who this summer have been bombarded with a succession of fatuous trend pieces regarding college "hookup culture". Most of them (take, for example, the New York Times article headlined Sex on Campus – She Can Play That Game, Too) have been underpinned by the puritan and scaremongery subtext of "look at all these rampantly screwing college women. Isn't it weird?" To ramp up just how damaging no-strings-attached sex is for women, the trend-piece writer will often roll out an anonymous heartbroken source who really, secretly, just wants a boyfriend and doesn't understand what all this humping business is about. And, suddenly, something that in Britain is nothing more than using someone for sex without undergoing the charade of having dinner with them first is graced with the label of a cultural phenomenon.

I was reminded of this late on Friday evening as my long-term boyfriend held back my hair while I vomited into one of those cardboard NHS potties and my phone buzzed and buzzed with what I suspected was a booty call (destined to go unanswered). Like many women I know, I get these from time to time, and, stomach bug or not, I never answer them. I should add that the calls are never from British men, who understand that implicit in the whole casual-sex arrangement is the caveat that they do not contact you three years down the line when you are in a happy relationship, or indeed ever. No, it's always Italians who get in touch. Italians are rubbish at casual sex; they always want to go to dinner.

Meanwhile, America is grappling with a different aspect of "hookup culture". The moral panic over sluttish young women engaging in no-strings-attached dalliances had been simmering for some time, but it was exacerbated last summer with the release of a book that was apocalyptically titled The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy (speak for yourself, mate). The myth that women are unable to cope with sexual liaisons in which deep emotion is absent, that we crave love and tenderness in all encounters, is a deeply rooted one. I'd suggest that the religious right, with its strange notions regarding purity, has more than a passing interest in perpetuating it. Now, though, science is chipping away at its supposed justifications by finding that women's sexual appetites could actually be more voracious and more varied than men's. Indeed, a study quoted by US author Daniel Bergner apparently showed that, unlike heterosexual men (who were aroused only by images of women), women got the horn no matter who they were watching going at it. And that includes monkeys.

However, the very existence of the summer's dubious "sex trend" is now being undermined. Sociologists have inconveniently found that today's college students aren't actually having any more sex than their predecessors, with only 32% saying that they had had more than one partner in the last year. Professor Monto of the University of Portland, Oregon said: "I was alive during the 1980s, and it doesn't seem all that different."

Indeed, in this austerity era of drainpipe jeans and royalist hagiography, the only real difference to be perceived between now and the 80s is that we have texting. We know the presence of a mobile phone to be catnip to trend-piece journalists, and indeed, the glut of coverage that new app Tinder has received bears this out. Tinder is a straight person's Grindr, allowing one to peruse local hotties for the purposes of meeting up and bonking. Just what the uptake will be, or the impact, if any, on British sexual mores, is anyone's guess, but it is one of many pieces of software that now claim to be able to mediate your sex life (another, entitled Spreadsheets, hilariously claims that it can measure your sexual prowess by monitoring "thrusts per minute"). Even Guardian Soulmates, this newspaper's own dating service, which ranks users' profiles by their fluctuating popularity, can serve as a marketplace for those sexually rather than romantically inclined (a friend recently boasted me that she had "bedded the guy who was No 3").

Ignoring for a moment the presence of this technology, we have to ask ourselves whether, as a society, reaching our sexual peak in the 1980s is really such a good thing. Did our progress halt a mere 20 years after the sexual revolution? If so, our stalling seems to have taken place around the same time that pornography, that great liberator of women, exploded into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, an explicit picture showing a young woman administering oral sex to a man at a festival went viral on Twitter this week, with users condemning in depressingly predictable terms the girl as a "slut" and the young man, you guessed it, a "lad". It is perhaps stating the obvious to say reactions such as these do little to recommend us as a forward-thinking, sexually progressive society.

There's always been a presumption that subsequent generations will be wilder and more promiscuous than their predecessors (and quite right too), and in this we're failing. Given the choice between a society where women are publicly shamed for expressing their sexuality, and a permissive "hookup culture", I'll take the latter. I'm starting to wish it really did exist. Because if we've reached the zenith of sexual liberation right now, then, quite frankly, we're screwed.