Laura Sessions Stepp’s unnecessary alarm over college “hookup culture”
By Ann Friedman
Thursday March 8, 2007
This Valentine’s Day, as conservative groups lamented the supposed death of romance on college campuses due to the popularity of The Vagina Monologues, they found an ally in the mainstream media. In the Washington Post Style section, reporter Laura Sessions Stepp weighed in with a lengthy piece about how women just don’t care about finding love anymore.
It was an excerpt from her new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which explains the purportedly disastrous effects of the “hookup” on high school and college women.
According to Stepp, a hookup is anything from making out to sex to passing out partially clothed in the same bed. For the past 10 years, Stepp has taken a shocked-and-appalled “kids these days!” tone in explaining the youth dating scene to the Post‘s baby-boomer (and older) readership. She penned a cutting-edge expose of the “wingman” phenomenon last year, as if friends haven’t been helping friends get dates for millennia. After mining some of her contacts from reporting that story and sending letters to campus administrators, Stepp found a handful of high school- and college-aged girls who were willing to share with her the details of their sex lives for the better part of a year. Their stories make up the bulk of the book.
While this type of in-depth interviewing doesn’t really allow for a representative sample under even the best circumstances, Stepp doesn’t even make a minimal effort at statistical integrity. She interviewed six college students who attend two primarily white, upper-class, Greek-heavy private schools: Duke University in Durham, N.C., and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. These girls aren’t just “privileged” in the sense that they can afford to attend private universities. One drove to school in a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, a high school graduation present from her father. Another girl’s mother took her on a Caribbean vacation when she was feeling a bit down after a breakup.
These are women who have been told they can do and have it all, who have grand career ambitions, who work hard in school and play even harder on the weekends. They like to get drunk at bars called Shooters and Charlie’s, and maybe go home with the occasional lacrosse player. In the course of Stepp’s year with them, most have a series of unfulfilling hookups, as well as at least one more important relationship.
Stepp says women aren’t naturally inclined to initiate sex; they just think they have to because they’re encouraged to pursue what they want in other areas of life. Rather than sit demurely and wait for men to come calling, they’d rather enjoy the thrill of making the first move, kissing a guy in the corner of a bar, grinding against a stranger on the dance floor, and taking him home.
They’re fooling themselves, Stepp says. She calls for reinstating the sexual double-standard (men pursue, women are pursued) for feminist reasons: It wasn’t fair, but it was better for girls because it kept them from getting hurt, and it ensured that loving relationships developed later in life. Back in the good old days “there were generally accepted rules back then about what to do and not do sexually,” she writes. “These standards restricted young women more than young men, by no means a fair deal, but they at least allowed women time and space to consider what kind of partners they wanted to love and what that love should look like.” Because for Stepp, love, not academic or career ambitions, should be the focus of young women’s energies.
Stepp makes at least one valid point. If women aren’t finding hookups sexually pleasurable (and indeed, many women go as far as to say they are emotionally damaging), then something needs to change. But Stepp never proves destructive hookups are as widespread as she believes. She argues that all hookups are problematic in and of themselves, regardless of how women feel about them at the time. In other words, Stepp’s subjects feel unfulfilled because they’re having casual sex, not just because they’re having bad sex.
Her solution is for women to exit the bar scene altogether, go home, and attract a loving boyfriend by honing their baking skills. “Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods,” she chirps.
This is exactly what many young women want to avoid, and rightfully so. It’s their ambition to have a successful career—not their ambition to bed the cutest guy at a party—that’s keeping them from forming lengthy, serious relationships in college. For ambitious students, the chances seem slim that a relationship can continue after graduation unless one partner (historically, the woman) makes some serious sacrifices. Today people marry later in life; the sacrifices don’t seem quite as worth it when you don’t expect to settle down until you’re in your late 20s.
But for Stepp, having serious a boyfriend is the be-all end-all of the college experience. “When you talk about ambition, there’s probably no one who’s more ambitious than I was in college,” Stepp told me over the phone last week. “But I didn’t want to let that ambition get in the way of having boyfriends.”
But the women Stepp interviewed do have relationships. Most don’t last more than a few months, but they’re certainly more than casual hookups. And as Stepp’s 22-year-old son recently pointed out to The New York Times, sometimes hookups do lead to more serious dating.
One of the women Stepp follows, Nicole (Stepp changed the names of all of her interview subjects), breaks up with her semi-serious boyfriend because she’s off to Greece for an internship, and he’ll be entering his third year of medical school in Dallas. Given the overall thrust of her book, Stepp seems to imply that the reason Nicole chose not to stay with her boyfriend after graduation is somehow related to hookup culture. Writes Stepp, “Patience and willingness to work through difficulties do not come easily to a Google generation that expects problems to be quickly resolved.” But in reality, it’s not laziness. It’s Nicole’s desire to be tethered only to her own career path that prevents her from continuing the relationship. She sees marriage as a long way off. “Maybe I should just stick with the girls,” she tells Stepp.
Despite Stepp’s tendency to drop never-used slang into the book (when’s the last time you called someone a “stud muffin,” or referred to cunnilingus as “eating a roast beef sandwich”?), she seems to understand young women’s thinking on this issue. She simply doesn’t agree with them. She writes, “If they were to date someone seriously, they’d enjoy steady companionship, affection, and perhaps an occasional bauble or bouquet. But the costs would be enormous: time that could be spent with friends, attention to schoolwork or athletics and, perhaps most significant, a sense of independence. They’re not stupid, these girls.”
Indeed, they’re not. Although Stepp might not believe it, they’ll have plenty of time for serious relationships after college. She fails to show how women lose when they “delay love.” This would seem to be an equally important part of Stepp’s argument—after all, she claims that casual hookups have a negative effect on young women’s lives beyond the morning after. And yet Stepp devotes only one skimpy chapter to what happens after graduation to girls who’ve enjoyed a lot of hookups in college. Perhaps the most important part of her argument, that this behavior damages girls’ ability to form serious and lasting relationships later in life, isn’t even weakly supported in her final chapters.
She mentions, but casually dismisses, experts like Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who “suggests that most college graduates become serious about pairing up in their middle to late 20s and then start the rehearsals that will prepare them in their 30s for marriage.” Steinberg also notes that the divorce rate is lower for women who married at age 25 and older.
“Frankly there’s very little data on dating/mating habits of young singles,” Stepp told Campus Progress. “All I could do in that last section is raise the question.”
But she does more than simply raise the question. Her definitive conclusion is that casual college hookups have created a generation of women who don’t care about love. She ends on an ominous tone, citing one study by the Pew Center for Internet Life, that shows the majority of young single women (ages 18-29) aren’t looking for a partner. And she weakly refers to the proliferation of internet dating sites as additional proof that 20-somethings are having trouble dating. I’d argue that the rising popularity of sites like Match.com says just the opposite: that women (and men) in their mid-20s are actively looking for more serious relationships. If they wanted to keep casually hooking up, they would be out at a bar. Not to mention that young people today are simply very, very comfortable with using the internet to do just about anything, including dating.
“People are asking questions,” Stepp said. “That’ s all we can do is wonder. I hope 10 years from now, 20 years from now, someone is looking at this.” And I hope if so, that someone isn’t Laura Sessions Stepp.
Ann Friedman is associate web editor of The American Prospect and an editor of Feministing.com.
--------
Comments
Ugh. This book sounds horrible. Even David Brooks was able to write about the “hook-up culture” in his book without resorting to this pseudo-feminist antiquated tripe. While it certainly has its downside (mostly manifesting in post-coital misunderstandings), I’d posit that on the whole the hook-up culture has been one of our generation’s most useful inventions, and good for nearly all involved. Even girls who enjoy baked goods.
— Michael - Mar 8, 04:36 PM - #I KNOW the “hook-up” culture has been GREAT for at least ONE group….those pharma companies cranking out the HPV innoculations…..I wonder why they didn’t need such a thing back in the 40’s or 50’s?
— mighty aphrodite - Mar 9, 08:27 PM - #I wonder why they didn’t need such a thing back in the 40’s or 50’s?
Because they were so much more concerned about syphillis, gonorrhea, and pregnancy that they didn’t bother trying to prevent HPV?
— Jackmormon - Mar 11, 08:39 PM - #If by “hookup” she means “getting laid”, then there’re nothing new about any of this.
— Brautigan - Mar 11, 09:09 PM - #2,3: They only discovered the HPV virus in the 1980s, and the link between sexual activity anc cervical cancer (showing that many cases of the cancer are caused by something transmissible through sex) was only definitively established in the 1950s or 1960s.
So, they weren’t talking about HPV in the 1940s and 50s because they didn’t know what it was, not because they were so much more sexually pure than we are now.
— Paul - Mar 11, 09:36 PM - #Who says they didn’t need it? They just didn’t have it. The logic on display there is like suggesting nobody needed a polio vaccine till it was invented.
— Ezra - Mar 11, 10:31 PM - #I’m just amazed at the way this sexist clap trap is treated as serious scholarship. It’s all just based on the notion that young women couldn’t possibly enjoy casual sex. I think it says a lot more about the author than her subjects.
As an old guy of the blank generation — college years 1978-82 — I can assure that people were hooking up happily in the days before the internet tubes. What do you know, we were also drinking and taking drugs and generally having a fine old time of it. Most of us had monagamous relationships that proved to be less than permanent (not a bad thing either) but between those relationships, people (even women people) had needs. This was generally considered fun, harmless amusement if you will, for all parties concerned. Maybe Ms. Sessions Stepp (isn’t that some kind of workout?) really is in her 80s.
— Klein's tiny left nut - Mar 11, 10:44 PM - #“Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods,”
— DavidS - Mar 12, 12:50 AM - #Yeah, I learned how to bake.
I have seen women hang out at “men’s” places. It is a shame that people like Stepp still claim that “It’s a man’s world”, still tolerating rape and murder against women. I am also a feminist, and I believe that to tolerate injustices against women makes the critics of women enjoying sex and drawing or painting the female nude no better that the thugs or creeps committing these injustices. This is no longer “a man’s world”. Men have to share and let ladies go first. There are NO excuses for men being “superior” or selfish, vicious faggots!
— Jamesha Walker - Mar 12, 01:04 AM - #The rise of Internet dating sites doesn’t say anything about what women are looking for. It says only that whatever it is they’re looking for, the Internet is a good and efficient way to find it.
Other than that, I’m with Klein, nothing new here. I’m from the same era, and at my school, at least, in the early 80’s, there was no dating, per se, but lots of “hooking up”. Sometimes said hooking up was good for all involved, sometimes feelings were hurt, sometimes it led to long-term relationships, sometimes not. Imagine that.
— lewp - Mar 12, 11:48 AM - #As someone who was actually born in the 50’s, I can say with fair certainty that people weren’t talking about anything even remotely related to sex. But they were doing it, and they were also having abortions in back alleys. Let’s not return.
— Czarina - Mar 12, 01:01 PM - #As a recent college grad, I saw lots of different types of relationships in college. Tons of these “no serious, we are getting married” relationships with high school partners broke up freshman year; I know only one couple that stayed together since high school and they are now engaged. Most people who were coupled at points throughout college were pretty healthy about it; a few did the obsessive thing and that generally broke up the relationship. Certainly a lot of my friends hooked up at bars and parties, no worse for the wear the next day. Fun was had by all, so who cared? There were tons of different situations, but no one seemed to graduate with an inability to love.
— Jennifer - Mar 12, 01:22 PM - #I saw a review of this book in the Boston Globe a couple weeks back and it made me so irate, but I couldn’t find the words. I’m glad to see someone took the time to actually READ this nonsense and provide a comprehensive feminist analysis. You said everything I was thinking. Thanks!
— Amy - Mar 12, 02:23 PM - #Hook-up culture represents an evening of the playing field from a gender perspective, a reduction in sexism, as it were. It also represents a shift in social mores. Perhaps Stepp should focus on her moral objections and stop writing in the name of ‘feminism’.
— Darlene - Mar 13, 01:29 PM - #The most hurtful sexual experiences I’ve had occured within relationships. I slept around in my early 20s and college days and have no regrets. However, I certainly regret some of the relationships I’ve had. But then I enjoy bars as well. Guess I’m not feminine enough for this book.
— Karen - Mar 13, 05:51 PM - #13: Amy – you were irate BEFORE you read the book? Why don’t you try reading it, rather than simply dismissing it based on some preconceived notions. It may actually change your mind, and perhaps help you lose your prejudice.
— lanikai - Mar 17, 05:32 AM - #What about the point that, converse to her point, young women also want sex and those who believe the stigma and limit themselves to having sex only in committed, “loving” relationships are more likely to enter into a committed relationship with someone they really shouldn’t be with? Letting go of the necessity of an intense emotional connection to sexual partners can provide an outlet for sexual energy and allow young women to be more judicious in choosing emotional and physical partners who are really good and healthy choices for them.
I’ve met a lot of young women who hook up with guys and, afterwards, feel really guilty about it. I always ask them, “Did you want to do it at the time? Did you enjoy yourself? Forgetting about what you think other people think, do you regret anything? Then what are you worrying about?”
Attaching stigma to women who indulge their sexual desires, if they do it in a safe and healthy way, is intensely psychologically harmful—much more harmful than one bad hookup, generally speaking. Instead of attaching shame to a completely normal, natural behavior, we should be empowering young women to make smart, healthy choices about their sexuality and sexual activity by providing a sex-positive environment and universally accessable education and reproductive health products and services.
— Shaz - Mar 17, 05:34 PM - #Being an ‘old’ feminist (not to be confused with feminazi like #9 above), I must say that I would have to side against the author of the book. Not having read the book, and relying solely on what was written here, even my mother, who was born in ’44, would disagree with her. My mother was a “good little girl” who learned to bake and learned to sew and learned to keep a home, and was beaten bloody every weekend when her husband came home drunk. What a wonderful life to dedicate one’s self to. I, on the other hand, was just the opposite, but I am now madly in love with, have two beautiful children by and have been married to the same man for over 21 years. Hmmmm. I think one story just debunked her whole book.
— Lilith - Mar 18, 12:17 PM - #man, the feminist movement REALLY has the male heirarchy in a bind! I see the whole “be a submissive woman so you can be a REAL feminist” idea as the conservatives’ panicked attempt to put women back in the kitchen and silence them. Female power scares the crap out of misogynists, and so they go to incredible lengths to quash it however they can. It’s too bad there are so many turncoat females who will help this happen.
— tim - Mar 18, 12:52 PM - #the lengths to which “conservative” ideals have gone to over the last 40 years to reverse the simple idea of women being PEOPLE is a testament to the power of this idea!
the more detailed a deconstruction the conservatives offer for feminism, the more scared they are of losing their male “privelege” (read: freudian overcompensation)
I guess my point/advice would be for ladies: don’t deconstruct the “bake for your man, you feminist!” argument—speak to the creepy little man behind the curtain of that facade, and LAUGH in its face!
This is an example of conservatives using a spectre of promiscuous young women to rally their base to attack female independence.
Women are being stereotyped as selfish and sexually wanton to fulfill conservatives’ truly selfish wish to turn back the clock to times when their retrograde values were privileged.
Unhooked claims of concern for young women’s well-being as opposition to the “hookup culture,” which is used by conservatives as a code word for assertive female sexuality.
Other anti-woman code words include “aggressive” to describe women with career ambitions and dreams and “feminazi” to deride feminists’ oppositions to everyday sexism.
The thing is, there’s nothing new about college sex. The difference is that over time, young women have felt less ashamed of sexual exploration—less so than in the 1970s, 1980s or even the 1990s. And as long as people are sexually experimenting—which is natural for many—it is healthier for all when women and men are equally empowered to do so. Keep in mind that sexual exploration does not mean promiscuity.
Moreover, why is it that conservatives rarely ask about actual promiscuity’s effects on men’s well-being and relationship skills?
Conservatives do not support—in fact, they oppose—healthy relationships and sexuality based on mutual respect and equity. They believe too strongly in a pecking order for that. Men above women, rich above middle class and poor, white above persons of color.
An interesting historical parallel lies in the 1960s. Then, conservatives used code words like “crime in the streets” and “law and order” to purportedly call for public safety while stoking white fears of black independence and empowerment, by promoting still all-too-common stereotypes of black criminality.
— Progressive Citizen - Jun 3, 11:04 PM - #My husband certainly didn’t want a virgin when we married in our mid-thirties. And at this stage of life, four kids, a cat, dog, home, and all that, it’s the hook-ups that keep the spice in our love life, thanks to the guys that taught me so much, my husband thanks you too.
— lilorphant - Aug 17, 09:40 PM - #roast beef sandwich? seriously…?
— Ayla - Aug 18, 06:02 AM - #As a 20-year-old woman, I married a 21-year-old man who turned out to be a paranoid, abusive and voilent person.
— QG - Oct 16, 05:12 PM - #Thankfully, I had the feminist movement to save me from having a miserable family with this man, and now, at the age of 33, after receiving 2 college degrees (BFA and MFA) that I worked my ass off for, a wealth of life experience (including a few hook-ups!) have brought me to my wonderful, caring, respectful fiancee.
If anything, “hook-ups” led me to the perfect relationship, rather than the opposite.
Whew. My apologies for the grammatical nightmare!
— QG - Oct 16, 05:14 PM - #Stepp’s big “mission” is based on the premise that women don’t think and need to be saved from themselves. Why not LET them think? Why not believe in their ability to take care of their own lives rather than try to put them all in straightjackets of do’s and don’t‘s? The conservatives’ urge to play God and tell everyone what to do is arrogant and disrespectful beyond belief.
— Januaries - Nov 18, 01:36 PM - #I’m a guy. I had a hook-up with a girl and it hurt. She dated me, let on that she liked me, slept with me, tricked me, and left. I should’ve waited longer to avoid having her just sleep with me and leave.
I’m liberal, libertarian, agnostic. I don’t buy that people who have hook ups are happy. It just doesn’t make scientific sense. There’s less sexual pleasure, less bonding pleasure, less ability to enjoy another person and escape the loneliness of individualism and existentialism. Why should people have to sleep with only those that they don’t like? And if they do like their mate, why wouldn’t they want to stay, at least for a little while, to gain all the other benefits? Further, I can imagine enormous numbers of people get hurt, because consciousness is only a little part of the mind, residing mostly in the cortex, and so peoples’ entire minds will be conflicted if they think they can just sleep and leave.
I suppose genetically a lot of people may wired to sleep around sometimes (the polyamory model), because this diversifies genes in the offspring. However, I doubt everyone is wired this way, because why else would it hurt so significantly? Further, it may be advantageous to genes to sleep around but still cause significant trauma to the organism.
I think I’m a loner and also feel quite deeply, so it may be that others have been conditioned in a different manner and thus feel less strongly about sex. However, I don’t think that they really feel nothing. If they do, that’s great, because we’ll be able to make robots in not so many years for sex mates.
Regardless of my rant, I think we’re each responsible for making the choices that make us happy. So if the majority of people are irrational and mindlessly sexual, people like me just have to protect themselves.
— Anonymous - Apr 25, 07:44 PM - #26: A few points.
I don’t see how your self-pity helps your argument. People get hurt by other people all the time. It’s just part of having relationships and maturing. Moreover, just because someone says they like you or has sex with you does not entail that they then ‘belong’ to you!
I don’t get your ‘scientific’ arguments. Firstly, I don’t get what you mean by ‘scientific sense’ in terms of pleasure and intimacy – why does science tell us anything in this field? Secondly, how does sleeping around diversify genes in the offspring?! Surely the ‘polyamory model’ applies to maximising reproductive fitness, not genetic diversity? And how does the emotional pain of the ‘organism’ have any effect on reproductive success?
In any case, people don’t always have sex to have kids – otherwise we wouldn’t have such a high demand for contraception – so why reduce it to just that?
Finally, people have sex for lots of different reasons. On the other hand, they also get things such as relief from deep-seated existential angst by doing stuff like… going out and experiencing life. Or even getting a hug off of a friend. Or even looking at the flowers. Or whatever.
Anyway, such narrow, reductionist arguments really wind me up. And so does the assertion that everyone who does not think like you is a crazed, libidinous monster, blindly humping their way towards pain and misery. Ha!
— George - Aug 5, 10:58 AM - #