Dating, which permeated college campuses from the 1920s through the mid-1960s, is no longer the means to beginning an intimate relationship.2 College students rarely date in the traditional sense of the term.
Do they have sexual encounters? Yes. Are they interested in finding 1
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boyfriends and girlfriends? Many are, yes. But unlike previous generations, college students today are not forming relationships via dating.
I want to suggest that two factors have been especially important in the demise of traditional dating on college campuses.3 First, young people are postponing marriage. Age at first marriage is at an all-time high; the typical groom is 27; the typical bride is 25.4 Although today’s men and women may be delaying marriage, they are often sexually active from adolescence; the average age of first intercourse is 17.5 Second, a growing proportion of young people nationwide are spending the early years of their adult life on college campuses. From 1970 to 2000, enrollment in undergraduate institutions rose by 78 percent.6 Thus, college has become an increasingly important setting for early sexual experiences. So, if college students are not dating, just what are they doing?
In 2001, a national study on college women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors revealed that instead of dating, many students were “hooking up.”7 The study defined a hookup as “when a girl and a guy get together for a physical encounter and don’t necessarily expect anything further.”8 The results of this study sparked a media firestorm over the idea that hooking up had replaced dating on college campuses.9
Media reports often portray an extreme version of hooking up. It is not so much that the reports are false as much as they don’t represent the whole truth. A typical story line comes from Karen Heller of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who reported that “the latest lie teenagers tell themselves is about having ‘friends with benefits,’ the ability to have sex, to ‘hook up,’ without the attendant drudgery of relationships. This means that kids expose private parts, exchange bodily fluids, risk preg-nancy and STDs, but don’t have to plan Saturday dates.” This piece leaves readers with the impression that anyone who has hooked up has engaged in sexual intercourse or some other form of “risky” sex. However, hooking up covers a wide range of activities and many college students use the term to refer to “just kissing.” In other cases, media references go beyond portraying the extreme to actually giving a misleading definition of hooking up. It’s been defined as “oral sex,” “a one-night stand,” or “engaging in a lot of promiscuous sex.” These definitions are narrow at best, and often fuel public concern that today’s youth are engaging in behavior that is a danger to their physical and emotional well-being. Even given that the ambiguous nature of the term “hooking up” makes it difficult to figure out I N T RO D U C T I O N
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what is really going on, it is still irresponsible, though not surprising, for journalists to add to the confusion by presenting only the most risqué stories in order to sell papers.
Further, hooking up has been connected to an array of social problems, such as binge drinking, drug abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, feminist scholars have been concerned about the link between hooking up and sexual assault, while conservatives have linked hooking up to being raised by divorced parents.10 Some of the concern over the link between hooking up and other problems is legit-imate, but these potential connections do not justify denouncing the hookup system on those grounds alone.
Much of what has been said about hooking up falls on one end of the spectrum or the other. The mass media takes on a moralistic tone, suggesting that young people are engaging in immoral behavior that will ultimately lead to their doom, whereas recently released books like The Happy Hook-Up: A Single Girl’s Guide to Casual Sex authored by women of the hooking-up generation make light of the hookup scene.11
Neither of these opposing perspectives provides the most useful way to analyze 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 college career in the early 1990s, hooking up seemed to be at the center of the social scene. I recall spending a lot of time talking to friends, who were attending colleges up and down the East Coast, about whom they hooked up with, whom they wanted to hook up with, or who they
“heard” had hooked up with whom. Although many of these conversations were just for fun, there was also a more serious side to these discussions. Students I knew often struggled with various aspects of hooking up; for example, “how far” a hookup should go, how to act with your hookup partner the next day, and how to turn a hookup into a relationship. Although most of my close friends were female, I saw male friends struggle with hooking up as well. From my standpoint, it appeared that hooking up, for better or worse, was an entrenched part of the college experience.
Fast-forward to 2000. As a graduate student in sociology, specializ-ing in gender, I was having a conversation with one of the members of 4
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