Unhooked: The new culture of casual sex

Listening to her in the spring of 2005, my mind went back to 1968 again and I found myself making generational comparisons once more. Sure, we used to leave our college dorm windows cracked so our boyfriends could sneak in. But we were terrified of being found out and ­wouldn’t think of taking off our clothes until the guys were inside and the lights were off. Now girls were stripping in the student center in front of dozens of boys they ­didn’t know, pantomiming sex onstage and later doing the real thing without saying much, if anything, to their partners. When did conversation and negotiation drop completely out of the picture?

Clearly, young women have changed not only the way they relate intimately to young men but also the way they think about intimacy. My Post articles on sexuality since the oral-sex scandal have not been about isolated acts of a promiscuous few but indications of a large cultural shift. To some degree, depending on their temperament, upbringing and luck, all girls are caught up in the changes. Young people have virtually abandoned dating and replaced it with group ­get-­togethers and sexual behaviors that are detached from love or ­commitment—­and sometimes even from liking. High school and college teachers ­I’ve talked to, as well as researchers, remark on this: Relationships have been replaced by the casual sexual encounters known as hookups. Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold or seen as impossible; sex is becoming the primary currency of social interaction. Some girls can handle this; others, like Morgan, are exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually by it. They struggle largely outside the awareness of parents who either ­don’t know what is going on or are vaguely aware but ­don’t know what to do.

Science tells us that sexual attractiveness plays a significant role in the emotional and social lives of young women. Parents seem largely unaware of this or of how firmly hooking up has taken hold in young people’s imaginations and lives. They are reassured by statistics that show a significant decline in teen pregnancies and a slight drop in the proportion of high school students having intercourse. What they ­don’t understand is that sexual intercourse, or any other sexual act, is only part of the story. What ­is—­or ­isn’­t—­going on in addition to sex is at least as important.

The crucial thing to remember in all of this is that hooking up, in the minds of this generation, carries no commitment. Partners hook up with the understanding that however far they go sexually, neither should become romantically involved in any serious way. Hooking up’s defining characteristic is the ability to unhook from a partner at any time, just as they might delete an old song on their iPod or an ­out-­of-­date “away” message on their computer. Maybe they tire of their partner, or find someone who is “hotter” or, for some other reason, more to their liking. Maybe they get burned badly in a relationship, or find themselves swamped with term papers and final exams. The freedom to unhook from ­someone—­ostensibly without ­repercussions—­gives them maximum flexibility. Although I use both phrases, this is not a hookup culture so much as an unhooked culture. It is a way of thinking about relationships, period.

Excerpted from “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both" by Laura Sessions Stepp. Copyright ©2007.  Excerpted by permission of Penguin Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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