I Didn’t Sleep With Her. But I May As Well Have.

Last night, the first season of Gossip Girl came to a close, or, a kind of fizzle. But if Georgina’s comeuppance was a tad disappointing and all the promising relationships (Lily & Rufus, Blair & Chuck) somehow relapsed, the show might have had one of its most telling and honest moments yet.

After much misunderstanding, Serena and Dan reach what might be the point of no return. The previous episode ended with Dan, manipulated, confused, and believing that Serena just drunkenly cheated on him, canoodling with Georgina on a stoop. The big question was, would they have sex or wouldn’t they? You’d be forgiven for optimistically thinking, as Serena and I did, that Dan and Serena “were forever,” and that the writers would never pull something so cruel. Turns out they’re even crueler than we could have expected.

The next morning Serena finds Georgina coming out of Dan’s bedroom: she assumes the worst but really doesn’t want to know the details. Dan, however, insists on sharing them: “I didn’t sleep with her,” he tells Serena. Relief! “But I may as well have.” Yikes.

Grown-ups usually get pretty nervous over the idea of hooking up. They put the phrase in quotes, they ask each other what it means, and then they declare that kids themselves don’t know what it means. That’s the inherent danger in hooking up: the ambiguity. No doubt many of young people’s romantic and sexual interactions are ambiguous, and I’d like to return to this topic later–exactly how much uncertainty can our delicate frames withstand, I wonder–but in this particular case, it seems that hooking up is scary not because it’s vague but because it’s heartbreakingly explicit.

The bloggers at New York know just what I mean: in their weekly tally of Gossip Girl‘s “reality points,” they declared “Plus 8 for the fact that Dan offers an awkward, horrifyingly evocative confession of said visit for the purposes of clearing his own conscience: ‘I didn’t sleep with her. But I may as well have.'” They go on to allot “Plus 2 for the fact that that totally means oral.” Whatever interpretation you choose, what’s so awful about this moment is that it requires you to wonder: if they didn’t have sex, what EXACTLY did they do instead?

Gossip Girl: All’s Fair on the Upper East Side

Dear Gossip Girl,

In the first episode of this admittedly fascinating show, Chuck attempts to rape Jenny on a rooftop. He’s mildly punished by the valiant brother Dan, but faces no consequences from his own social group. In almost every episode, he pays fleets of women to service him and his friends, not to mention making sexist and classist remarks at any moment—-but his friends seem to brush it off. “That’s Chuck,” they justify, or, more likely, “That’s what this world is like.” As Chuck says himself that first night: “It’s a party–things happen.”