Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both by Laura Sessions Stepp is what started me on my current reading slump. It is an impactful, enlightening book about a disturbing cultural trend that I absolutely think people should read but it was too on the nose to be anything but depressing. Perhaps for people with more distance from the subjects it would be an easier read but as a young twenty-something who grew up in precisely the environment where the hookup culture began (among affluent, white, over-achievers at private schools or elite universities, though it is by no means confined to this group any more) it brought back all the anger I had towards my friends – male and female – who accepted and perpetuated the hookup culture and of how incredibly frustrating it was to witness the emotional turmoil and emerging cynicism brought on by these casual, careless encounters. It was basically 269 pages of reminders of why the whole university experience was so disappointing. Bad flashbacks to the torturous bar scene in my university town and to early mornings spent counseling my friends of both genders on their mistakes of the night before. Yes, cheering stuff.
As a quick introduction to the topic, here is Stepp’s definition of ‘hooking up’ (emphasis mine):
Hooking up can consist entirely of one kiss, or it can involve fondling, oral sex, anal sex, intercourse or any combination of those things. It can happen only once with a partner, several times during a week or over many months. Partners may know each other well, only slightly or not at all, even after they have hooked up regularly. A hookup often happens in a bedroom, although other places will do: dance floors, bars, bathrooms, auditoriums or any deserted room on campus. It is frequently unplanned, though it need not be. It can mean the start of something, the end of something or the whole of something. Feelings are discouraged, and both partners share an understanding that either of them can walk away at any time. (p. 24)
Sounds special, doesn’t it? Look, I’m going to be bitter and slightly jaded throughout this entire review so consider yourself forewarned. This is a topic that I feel passionately about and that I can’t pretend to be objective towards. It makes me both unbearably angry and unspeakably sad. I went to an all-girls school from the ages of twelve to eighteen. There was no radical feminist agenda, no claims of the superiority of women over men, just a firm expectation that we would mature into confident, respectful, equal members of society. And I think that made a huge difference to how we approached life after we graduated and what made the contrast with the other young women we encountered so upsetting. From conversations with high school friends, it seems that biggest shock of university for most of us was trying to decipher what the female sexual script was. Hooking up was part of that script and while we heard a lot about safe sex from our residence don and from university advisors there was never any discussion about good or meaningful sex. It seemed right from frosh week that we were expected to be having random, drunken hook ups, as if this were a key part of the university experience not to be missed. The drunken part is important and perhaps partially explains why the thought processes that must take place before a hook up will always escape a teetotaler like me. Without alcohol, as Stepp notes, there would be no hook up culture:
Of the hundreds of young women I interviewed about hookup experiences, less than a half-dozen said they were sober at the time. Some drank for the exhilarating high, others because everyone around them was drinking, others to relax and still others…to quiet the cautionary voices in their heads. (p. 115)
Stepp’s analysis of the issues that form the basis of the hook up culture were particularly resonant. These arrangements thrive in work-hard, play-hard environments that prize achievement while discouraging emotional sincerity or attachment. So much of the focus has shifted onto the individual and his or her personal achievements, first academic and then career-related, that these young men and women feel lost when it comes to figuring out where a spouse or partner fits in to all of these plans or how to handle a long-term relationship once it arrives. Hook ups are easier. They are instant gratification with no commitment. They are an illusion – all the physical manifestations of a relationship without any of the work or emotional risk (or reward).
But this mindset has to come from somewhere and Stepp is happy to place some of the blame on the parents who have spent countless hours training their child to succeed academically, to expect her dedication and commitment to studies, sports and countless extracurricular activities, but who shy away from discussions about emotions or relationships, leaving their daughter with no expectations of how she deserves to be treated (or how she should treat her partner) in a healthy relationship: Because kids hear and participate in so few adult discussions about love, and rarely see examples of love among the adults they know, they come to believe that the sex they see around them is love (p. 180). Neither Stepp nor I can stress how important a factor this is. I see so many friends – particularly of divorced parents – who base their relationship fantasies on what they see on television or read about in books. Without a real-life example in front of them, without parents who openly talk about both the struggles and rewards of long-term commitment, they seemed doom to chase after a non-existent fairy tale with the earnest belief that the perfect guy really does exist and that no one else is worthy of them. My parents lament how many of their thirty-something colleagues – warm, intelligent men and women with so much to offer – are still single even though they admit to desperately wanting to get married. This is why. Part of the university experience used to be learning how to date, how to have serious relationships. That is no longer the norm and hooking up establishes a holding pattern that people may not know how to break, even once they feel ready to. In the words of Robert Blum at Johns Hopkins:
It’s one things to say relationships can wait when you’re twelve. It’s something else to say ‘I’ll wait until I’m thirty to get my personal life in order.’ If you do not have experience with forming relationships earlier, your likelihood of entering into a relationship later that can sustained over time is at risk. It’s like taking an exam assuming you’ll do well without experience in the subject, lots of studying and lots of practice.’ (p. 247)
Stepp focuses, quite rightly, on how hookups affect young women but she also gives brief insights into a few male subjects, showing how difficult these arrangements are for them emotionally. Stepp repeatedly stresses the importance of female friendships and the emotional connections that ground girls as they flit from hookup to hookup. Stepp’s female subjects have male friends but they never seem to be close ones, just potential hook up partners, making it presumably that much easier to objectify and use men than if they actually took the time to talk honestly with them and to discover how similarly both genders feel about the situations they find themselves in. After moving out of residence after first year (the norm at my university), I shared a house with four old floor mates: one girl and three guys. After living with guys for so long, seeing them fall in love and get their hearts broken, seeing them wander around in confusion after hooking up with a girl they really liked but who now ignored them, seeing them try to have relationships with girls too scared of getting hurt to ever risk opening up to even the most faithful partner, it’s difficult to imagine viewing their gender as simply and as disdainfully as these girls do.
I loathe the hook up culture because it emblemizes the carelessness and insincerity that have become societal norms. Sarcasm rather than wit, meaningless promises rather than honest actions, board meetings with furtive under the table text messaging rather than open discussions at family dinners. We demean ourselves by undervaluing both our bodies and our emotions and then wonder that we feel lost and alone: welcome to your Quarterlife Crisis! Not so long ago:
There were generally accepted rules back then about what to do and not do sexually. These standards restricted young women more than young men, by no means a fair deal, but they at lest allowed women time and space to consider what kind of partners they wanted to love and what love should look like. The guardrails have vanished, except among certain religious communities, and in their place is an increasingly sophisticated marketing industry pushing sex-toy workshops and T-shirts that read “Juicy” and “Cunning Linguist”. (p. 180)
What did we really establish by trading in the old conventions and timelines for this brave new world of unlimited options and undefined but overwhelming (and increasingly unrealistic and unfulfilling) expectations?
The Captive Reader 
Having worked in a college where most of those things were the norm, it’s such a worry that the students think they have the casual physical aspect nailed, but are completely unable to deal with the emotional fall out. Great post, very thought provoking.
I couldn’t agree more! So many of my friends are happy to date several men concurrently, sleep around, and wander back to stranger’s homes after a night out. I sometimes feel like the only person my age who doesn’t want casual sex and to flit from meaningless date to meaningless date. Granted, for religious reasons I choose not to do these things, but even before I was a Christian, I didn’t behave that way, largely because I found it demeaning and painful to watch friends be prepared to treat themselves like a commodity and be used by men.
I think our generation has so many more opportunities than our parents, and because of that, we are reluctant to settle down and as such this hook up culture has developed as a way to avoid responsibility and commitment for as long as possible. When my parents were young, most people from their social background (working class) married the boyfriend/girlfriend they met at school. They settled down earlier because they left school and started work earlier – there was no university for people like my parents, who had to leave school at 15 and start contributing to the family income. So, by the time they were 20, they were the equivalent of where we are by the age of 26/27 – ready to settle down, to buy a house, working their way up the career ladder, etc. However, this trend of settling down young in a rapidly modernising world led to huge divorce rates, and as such, people like me, who witnessed the messy break down of my parent’s marriage as a teenager, I’m more reluctant to settle down because I want to make sure when I do, it’s with the right person. I don’t want to end up bringing up children in an unhappy marriage like my parents did.
So it’s two fold – we have more choice, and we’ve also witnessed an unprecedented amount of marital strife growing up. I’m not surprised by the hook up culture because of that, but I’m not happy about it, and I would like to see young men and women valuing their sexuality and their hearts and treating each other and themselves with more respect.
I especially appreciated your point about “expectations of how she deserves to be treated”. From my experience, a lot of hooking ups have their origins in low self-esteem, especially for young women. The need for external approval is a powerful thing and a hook-up is a quick fix of feeling beautiful, wanted and desired.
So much of the hook up culture seems to me to be a result of peer expectations, and I do wonder about parental role models and involvement when girls and young women treat their bodies and their selves with such little respect.
I’m not sure I am in the mindframe right now to read this book myself, but I very much appreciate your insightful and thought-provoking post.
Wow. No, I don’t feel the need to read the book. I hate this aspect of our modern day culture. Things were tracking this way when I was in university, but not to the extreme that they are now. I feel for you young single ladies out there, but I would say to you, “Don’t give up! There are some good men out there who have decent values like yourselves. Yes, they are harder and harder to find, but they do exist.” I find myself saying this more and more as my friends’ daughters are in college now and looking around for the men who are actually serious about something besides a party. I pray for them all the time. I shall add you to the list, Claire! (and you, Rachel – I’m scanning the above to see if I recognize any more of you…) No matter what the “world” says, you ladies are making the better choice!
Okay, I’m climbing off my podium…
Very insightful, Claire. Thanks as always for sharing with us.
I have very mixed feelings about all this. On one hand, I know that this kind of culture can be very bad and damaging, but I think that the culture of sex and marriage we’ve left behind was bad and damaging in different ways. Both of them put men and women into narrowly defined categories and then ridicule them for failing to fit perfectly within those categories.
>>>I see so many friends – particularly of divorced parents – who base their relationship fantasies on what they see on television or read about in books.
YES. Very big yes to this. I knew this girl once who had obviously based all of her ideas on how relationships should go on Gilmore Girls. (I’m not picking that show at random; watching it a year later, I couldn’t believe how similar this girl’s mannerisms during interpersonal conflict were to the Gilmores’ conflict mannerisms.) People don’t realize how much what they read/watch affects them; and TV shows so rarely show characters facing genuine, long-term consequences for their bad behavior.
Such an interesting post and responses. I am sort of the opposite to Rachel, in that I had a religious upbringing but am no longer religious, but, that too has inculcated the sort of values that make me as an adult very conscious of my relationship choices. I think it is sad when people feel the need for hook-ups, but I can well imagine how it comes about when so many young women have such low self-esteem.
How fascinating, eye opening, and refreshing, Claire. I found your blog today for the first time (through Harriet’s), and by the way also Book Snob’s (through Simon’s). As someone who is now officially an older person (65), and without much contact with people your age, you cannot imagine how jubilant I am, to know that there are young women like you out there who truly Think For Themselves, and moreover, love the things I love and will therefore be keeping them alive after I am gone. I live in Los Angeles, so I’ve often been in doubt if younger generations will love Virago authors, for instance, or know Jane Austen through the books (not the movies). And I’m afraid that it is my generation that’s partly responsible for making the “free love” (as it used to be called) world that you grew up in, and now look upon with incredibly rational bleakness. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, a bohemian writer girl, but noticed very early that what’s now called hooking up (it wasn’t called that then) was not particularly gratifying, nor at all how I wished to live my life; it only desensitized and devaluated relationships. My personal history is that I had a brief teenage marriage and son at 18, but brought him up well, worked, and finished university in my mid-20s. I’ve been married to my second husband for 40+ years, since we were in our early 20s, and we are friends and lovers forever, even now with ailments beginning to set in! We made up our minds very early to be faithful to each other, even though we have no religious faith; and I have to tell you, in my life experience, this is basic to a long and trusting love. I’ve had a good career and have always been principal breadwinner and feminist – but it was going against the tide for me to choose to eschew the hookup culture as I did, and *when* I did. This choice, and also the act of thinking for myself which it represented, resulted in a most satifying life for me; and I am most cheered to encounter such brilliant young women not succumbing to whatever the cant of the day is (as even the brilliant tend to do), but doing the best thing of all – thinking for themselves.
P.S. Sorry, I meant to leave my blog link…chalk it up to aging computer-reflexes.
lightbrightandsparkling.blogspot.com
Thanks for posting about this Claire. I relate completely to your experience in college. I too went to an all girl’s school which had a definite, “you can do anything and deserve to be respected” culture. Once at university, I found myself in a group of friends where sleeping around and, more specifically, having guys want to sleep with you, were overriding concerns. The girls in this group seemed to completely base their self worth on how much attention they received from our guy friends, and were willing to do pretty much anything to get that attention, even for only a few hours. I too don’t drink, which made this behaviour and way of thinking even more incomprehensible. I just wanted to grab these girls and say, you’re worth so much more than this!
As for the guys, you’re completely right in that this idea that you don’t have to start thinking about relationships until 30 has permeated the thinking of guys my age (early 20s). While I’m certainly no advocate for young marriage or anything like that, I agree that university should be a time for learning how to be in a relationship and gaining experience dating so than when you are ready to think about settling down, you have some idea of what you’re doing.
Tomorrow I’m having a joint birthday with my best guy friend. I happen to by the only girl in our friendship circle that he hasn’t slept with. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s the two of us, rather than anyone else in the group, that have become such good friends.