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Jonathan Ernst/Riverhead Books
"I felt like young women were getting a false message, that by acting like the guys, they could beat the guys at their own game," says Laura Sessions Stepp.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Maddalena McDonnell stood outside of the Kiva Han coffee shop in Oakland last week, frowning at the title of a book called "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both," by Laura Sessions Stepp.
Hear excerpts from Laura Sessions Stepp's coversation with the PG's Mackenzie Carpenter:
Why Stepp's book focuses mostly on young women
About "hooking up" starting in high school and accelerating in college
"Nothing she's saying is new," said Ms. McDonnell, 19, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. "This sort of thing has been going on for decades. And why didn't she write about men? By focusing on women, she's just perpetuating a double standard."
Ms. Stepp's controversial new book on the "hookup culture" of casual sex among young people -- not to be confused with the 40-something version of meeting for lunch or a movie -- has attracted its share of criticism. Some, like Ms. McDonnell, say it overstates the emotional damage done to young, ambitious college women who decide they want sex but are too busy and achievement-oriented for committed relationships.
On the other hand, there is Tasha Studeny, 22, a former nursing student at UPMC Shadyside, who said the book is right on target. The Stanton Heights native went through her own phase of hooking up once she graduated from high school, although a number of her friends did it even earlier.
"You do it because you're lonely, because it makes you feel good, and because it's easy to do, if you're not looking for long-term relationships," said Ms. Studeny. "But I found myself always feeling 100 percent worse about myself afterward. After about six months, I made a conscious decision to stop."
Such mixed reviews don't faze Ms. Stepp, 55, who said she's received a handful of negative responses but also more than 100 e-mails from young people -- and their parents -- who, she said, "said, 'Thank God someone finally said this.'
"I wanted people to talk about this issue," said Ms. Stepp, a Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter for the Washington Post, who in 1998 wrote a widely discussed series in which she uncovered a ring of middle-schoolers engaging in oral sex.
"My whole point with the book was to have a national conversation about the book, and that is happening."
Yes, it is.
Critics and supporters weigh in
The stories and images in "Unhooked" -- of a restless culture of girls having one or more partners an evening, fueled by alcohol and peer pressure -- "seems meant to instill sexual shame," notes Kathy Dobie in a review of "Unhooked" in the Washington Post.
"In our teens and early 20s, sexual relationships are less about intimacy than about expanding our intimate knowledge of people -- a very different thing," she wrote.
On the Internet and in college newspapers, too, "sex-positive" feminists have complained about the book, claiming today's young women should be able to enjoy sex in the same unencumbered fashion that men do.
Still others, however, say the book is long overdue.
"She's raising one of the major concerns of parents today, which is the pervasive separation of sex from relationships," said Deborah Roffman, a nationally known sexuality educator and author of "Sex and Sensibility," a guidebook for parents. As a teacher in several Baltimore-area private schools, Ms. Roffman says she's seen girls as young as in middle school claiming to "hook up" with boys.
While there's a consensus that such early sexual activity is dangerous, she takes issue with feminists who regard the current hookup culture on college campuses as progress for young women.
"I'll be convinced something positive is happening when I see an equal number of boys saying, 'No, I want sex to be in the context of a relationship,' " said Ms. Roffman. "Until boys can say that proudly, I'm going to say we're still stuck in patterns rooted in centuries of stereotypical masculine approaches to sexual behavior."
But is there really anything new here, given the widespread casual sexual encounters of the 1960s and 1970s on college campuses? Ms. Stepp said there is. After a full year of research, closely following three groups of young women -- one in high school, the other two at Duke and George Washington universities -- she became convinced the hookup culture is more widespread and more deliberate.
"It starts earlier, and then once you get into college, it becomes a pattern, it becomes a way of thinking about relationships. Many of us had casual sexual flings, but at least you kind of liked the guy, and you always had the idea that it might turn into a relationship. And there was dating back then and serious relationships, in addition to casual ones."
Today, though, all these options seem to have vanished from young women's lives. Instead, it's an either-or society: fleeting sex with people who are barely acquaintances, or a slightly more connected but still uncommitted version known as "friends with benefits." At the other extreme, serious couples are described as being "joined at the hip," she says, "which is a relationship so serious and time consuming that no busy young woman or young man wants to have that."
These young women pay a steep price for such freedom, she argues -- in loneliness and confusion about relationships later on.
Still, what of Ms. McDonnell's complaint, that the book's message "is that young women are being held responsible for having casual sex while young men are given a pass"?
Focused on the girl culture
Ms. Stepp said she understood the criticism, but "I really did feel that to understand the girl culture, I needed to stick with girls. I didn't think I could put both in the book. Developmentally (males and females) are at different points in their life. Biologically, the responses to hooking up are different. There are so many other assumptions we make about guys that are different from what we make about girls.
"And finally, I felt that the girl culture was important to look at because it is the changes within that culture that has allowed 'hooking up' to flourish. Did it happen before? Yes. Are guys responsible? Yes. But it's the empowerment that young women now feel and act on that allows it to flourish."
Beyond the usual suspects -- pop culture, Madonna, MTV -- these girls and young women cited other influences, she said, including their own parents, who didn't seem particularly happy in their own relationships. That made these young women question whether it was even possible to be "in love" and committed.
They didn't see their parents working through problems. They'd say, "I know Mom and Dad are mad at each other for two weeks, but I have no idea why."
Another factor in the hookup culture? The hands-off approach by colleges and universities, who have all but chucked the "in loco parentis" role they once had.
In "Unhooked," there's the "date auction" sponsored by the student athletic council at George Washington University "in a student center funded by parents' money, with a faculty adviser standing there, watching, saying she wouldn't have let her daughters do it," Ms. Stepp recounted, disbelief in her voice.
Then there was the effort by Boston University President John Silber to regulate coeducational dormitories a few years ago, which caused a storm of protest from the faculty, "because the faculty had grown up in the '60s, as I did, where we wanted to get rid of all the single-sex dorms.
"Today, there's this ethos on campus where, once a student is 18, they're an adult and they can do whatever they want to do. They go to an environment where there are no rules and no regulations, where you don't have parents telling you you have to be home at midnight, you don't have parents saying, 'So where were you?' "
During her time researching "Unhooked," it wasn't easy for Ms. Stepp, a mother of three grown sons, to stand by "and watch these young women who I thought were giving their power away."
Chalk it up, perhaps, to a generational difference between the feminism she knew and the sort experienced by bloggers in their 30s, "But I felt like young women were getting a false message, that by acting like the guys, they could beat the guys at their own game. If that's what they were trying to do, they were going to lose, and I wanted them to feel like they were winning."
Not all girls want to do this, she emphasized.
"Victoria, the last girl in my book, didn't go out all year at Duke, because she was afraid if she did, she'd be pressured to hook up. She did in fact find a boyfriend the next year, and she had a relationship, and it's fair to say she never hooked up.
"So it is possible to withstand the crowd, but you have to be really strong in your convictions in order to do that."
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First Published: March 20, 2007, 4:00 a.m.