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> Source:
http://news.yahoo.com:80/s/ap/20070309/ap_en_ot/hooking_up_6
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> Book on Women's sex 'hookups' draws fire
>
> 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 people 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 disease, 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 mother 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, 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).
>
> 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 other 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.
>
> 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."
>
> "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."
>
> Another 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."
>
> Sociologist Kathleen Bogle has also studied hooking up, which she says dates
> back to the '80s. She has a book, "Hooking Up," coming out this fall.
>
> "I argue that we shouldn't look at this from a moralistic viewpoint - as in,
> our youth is in decline - and we shouldn't celebrate it either, in a 'Sex in
> the City' light," says Bogle, who hasn't read Stepp's book. She also
> believes that it's wrong to assume women aren't hoping for something more
> from their hookups.
>
> "It's a system for finding relationships - and there isn't really an
> alternate system," says Bogle. "It feels like it's the only game in town,
> and if you don't do it, you're left out." She did find that after college,
> there was a transition back to traditional dating.
>
> The debate over hooking up - how prevalent, how harmful - was neatly
> displayed not long ago in a high school classroom in Virginia. Nancy Schnog,
> who teaches a course in adolescence to 12th-graders, was discussing Stepp's
> findings.
>
> "She hit the nail on the head," one girl said, according to Schnog. "She
> perfectly described our social climate." Many agreed, but an equally vocal
> faction argued the opposite. "This is totally overblown," said another girl.
> "Why do adults always stereotype our generation so negatively?"
>
> At the University of Maryland, Robin Sawyer, who teaches a course on
> sexuality, finds Stepp's book pretty much on target.
>
> "Men have always hooked up," says Sawyer. "What you are seeing now is a
> desire of women to act in a masculine way, without being judged a whore." He
> also finds that the "hookup" vocabulary softens the impact of the behavior.
> "'I hooked up with someone' sounds a lot better than 'I had oral sex with
> someone whose name I don't even know,'" says Sawyer, who is mentioned in
> Stepp's book.
>
> "Can you generalize from a few women? If you can find a criticism, it is
> probably that," Sawyer said. "But her thesis is pretty accurate. This is not
> your grandparents' generation."
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