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Introduction
The journalist Tom Wolfe, a keen observer of American culture, offeredthis musing on junior high, high school, and college students:
Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (neck-ing) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus grop-ing and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home platewas going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000 wecan forget about necking. Today’s boys and girls have never heard ofanything that dainty.Today’s first base is deep kissing, now known astonsil hockey,plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base isoral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is learning eachother’s names.
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Clearly, times have changed. Most images that we see today of collegestudents are in a sex-charged atmosphere like MTV’s
Spring Break,
where bikini contests, bump and grind dance contests, and “beachsports” with barely clothed contestants arecommon scenes. Comparingtoday’s “co-eds gone wild” with our idea of college students of yester-year,it is perhaps easy to jump to the conclusion that our young peoplearein moral decline. But it is too simplistic to characterize the change inmoral terms. Wolfe’s “bases” point to something much more than an in-crease in sexual activity among today’s youth. I would argue that todaythere is something fundamentally different about
how
young men andwomen become sexually intimate and form relationships with one an-other.For American youth, particularly college students, “dating” andmating has become a whole new ball game.Dating, which permeated college campuses from the 1920s throughthe mid-1960s, is no longer the means to
beginning
an intimate relation-ship.
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College students rarely date in the traditional sense of the term.Do they have sexual encounters? Yes. Arethey interested in finding
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boyfriends and girlfriends? Many are, yes. But unlike previous genera-tions, college students today are not forming relationships via dating.Iwant to suggest that two factors have been especially importantin the demise of traditional dating on college campuses.
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First, youngpeople are postponing marriage. Age at first marriage is at an all-timehigh; the typical groom is 27; the typical bride is 25.
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Although today’smen and women may be delaying marriage, they are often sexually ac-tive from adolescence; the average age of first intercourse is 17.
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Second,agrowing proportion of young people nationwide are spending theearly years of their adult life on college campuses. From 1970 to 2000,enrollment in undergraduate institutions rose by 78 percent.
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Thus, col-lege has become an increasingly important setting for early sexual ex-periences. So, if college students are not dating, just what are theydoing?In 2001, a national study on college women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors revealed that instead of dating, many students were “hook-ing up.”
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The study defined a hookup as “when a girl and a guy get to-gether for a physical encounter and don’t necessarily expect anythingfurther.”
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The results of this study sparked a media firestorm over theidea that hooking up had replaced dating on college campuses.
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Media reports often portray an extreme version of hooking up. It isnot so much that the reports are false as much as they don’t representthe whole truth. Atypical story line comes from Karen Heller of the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
who reported that “the latest lie teenagers tellthemselves is about having ‘friends with benefits,’ the ability to havesex, to ‘hook up,’ without the attendant drudgery of relationships. Thismeans that kids expose private parts, exchange bodily fluids, risk preg-nancy and STDs, but don’t have to plan Saturday dates.” This pieceleaves readers with the impression that anyone who has hooked up hasengaged in sexual intercourse or some other form of “risky” sex. How-ever, hooking up covers a wide range of activities and many college stu-dents use the term to refer to “just kissing.”In other cases, media references go beyond portraying the extremeto actually giving a misleading definition of hooking up. It’s been de-fined as “oral sex,” “a one-night stand,” or “engaging in a lot of promis-cuous sex.” These definitions arenarrow at best, and often fuel publicconcern that today’s youth are engaging in behavior that is a danger totheir physical and emotional well-being. Even given that the ambigu-ous natureof the term “hooking up” makes it difficult to figureout
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INTRODUCTION
what is really going on, it is still irresponsible, though not surprising,for journalists to add to the confusion by presenting only the mostrisqué stories in order to sell papers.Further, hooking up has been connected to an array of social prob-lems, such as binge drinking, drug abuse, and sexually transmitted dis-eases. In addition, feminist scholars have been concerned about the link between hooking up and sexual assault, while conservatives havelinked hooking up to being raised by divorced parents.
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Some of theconcern over the link between hooking up and other problems is legit-imate, but these potential connections do not justify denouncing thehookup system on those grounds alone.Much of what has been said about hooking up falls on one end ofthe spectrum or the other. The mass media takes on a moralistic tone,suggesting that young people are engaging in immoral behavior thatwill ultimately lead to their doom, whereas recently released books like
The Happy Hook-Up: ASingle Girl’s Guide to Casual Sex
authored bywomen of the hooking-up generation make light of the hookup scene.
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Neither of these opposing perspectives provides the most useful way toanalyze the current culture, nor do they add clarity to the discussion.
MY HISTORY WITH HOOKING UP
My introduction to hooking up came firsthand. During my own collegecareer in the early 1990s, hooking up seemed to be at the center of thesocial scene. I recall spending a lot of time talking to friends, who wereattending colleges up and down the East Coast, about whom theyhooked up with, whom they wanted to hook up with, or who they“heard” had hooked up with whom. Although many of these conver-sations were just for fun, there was also a more serious side to these dis-cussions. Students I knew often struggled with various aspects of hook-ing up; for example, “how far” a hookup should go, how to act withyour hookup partner the next day, and how to turn a hookup into a re-lationship. Although most of my close friends werefemale, I saw malefriends struggle with hooking up as well. From my standpoint, it ap-peared that hooking up, for better or worse, was an entrenched part ofthe college experience.Fast-forward to 2000. As a graduate student in sociology, specializ-ing in gender,Iwas having a conversation with one of the members of
INTRODUCTION
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