Does hooking up??� really hurt anyone?
New book draws fire for claiming casual sex encounters damage women
Jonathan Ernst / AP
In the new book "Unhooked," Laura Sessions Stepp,?�a journalist?�with?�the Washington Post,?�frets that casual sexual hookups do damage to young women's bodies and psyches.
NEW YORK - 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 group 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 them at risk of depression and even sexually transmitted illness, and making them ill-equipped for real relationships later on.
For that, Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked, and a writer for The Washington Post, has been criticized as a throwback to an earlier, restrictive moral climate, an anti-feminist and a tut-tutting motherness telling girls not to give the milk away when nobody??�s bought the cow.
The author imagines the female body as a thing that can be tarnished by too much use, wrote reviewer Kathy Dobie in Stepp??�s own paper, the Post, and suggested that Stepp was, in one part, trying to instill sexual shame. For Meghan O??�Rourke, literary editor at Slate.com, Stepp is buying into alarmism about women, and making sex a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous thing than it already is.
Stepp argues these critics have misconstrued her ideas.
True, she regrets that dating has gone completely by the boards, replaced by group outings that lead to casual encounters. True, she regrets that oral sex isn??�t even considered sex anymore. But she isn??�t saying girls should not have sex; just that they should have it in the context of a meaningful connection: I am saying that girls should have choices.
Too often, Stepp argues, girls and young women say proudly that they like the control hookups give them ??" control over their emotions, their schedules, and freedom to focus on things like schoolwork and career (the students she profiles in her book are high achievers).
Being as bad as the boys
But she says they frequently mistake that freedom for empowerment. I often hear girls say things like, ??�We can be as bad as guys now, ??� she says. But I don??�t think that??�s what liberation is all about.
Stepp says her book stems from an experience she had almost 10 years ago. She and otherness parents were summoned to her son??�s middle school. The principal informed them that all year long, a dozen girls ??" ages 13 or 14 ??" had been performing oral sex on several boys in the class. (Her own son was not involved.) Stepp wrote about the sex ring in a front-page article for the Post, which led to further research.
She??�s had her share of positive feedback, including from educators and from young women like those in her book.
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One 18-year-old student, who calls herself a feminist, e-mailed her to say she had approached the book warily, but came to believe it will change the way my generation views sex.
Contacted later by telephone, the student, Liz Funk, said she agreed with Stepp??�s contention that real relationships among college students don??�t really exist anymore.
'Thanksgiving for guys'
Sexploration ??" By Brian AlexanderPLAYING WITH FIRE AT A SEATTLE SEX CLUBBrian Alexander's new book 'America Unzipped' takes readers on a wild ride.?�What's it like to squeeze into PVC pants??�What's the secret to sexual compatibility??�Special sex just for the holidays??�Special sex just for the holidays ?If I or my friends had the opportunity for real relationships, we??�d take it, says Funk, who attends school in New York City. But my generation hasn??�t really been conditioned for it. Hookups, she adds, which she rejected for herself long ago but some of her friends still embrace, are like Thanksgiving for guys. They don??�t have to do anything to get sex! And she bemoans the amount of time fellow students can spend on hookups: It can be like a full-time job.
Anotherness student, at a small women??�s college in South Carolina, says the hookup culture is not all that pervasive, in her experience.
I??�m aware of it, said Grace Bagwell, 22, a senior at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.. But it??�s untrue to say women aren??�t having meaningful relationships at this point. I??�ve been in one for three years, and I have a lot of friends who are getting married or are engaged.
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