The media both celebrates and condemns “hookup culture,” a mythical environment in which college students have an endless string of casual sexual partners. In fact, students are having a lot less sex than these stories suggest. More, they report that the sex they are having is disappointing, to say the least. In this talk, I discuss the difference between hooking up as a behavior, a script, and a culture; what it means to live in a hookup culture; and why students report distress, disappointment, and trauma. The solution? Not to abandon the casual hookup (it has some interesting advantages), but to even the playing field on college campuses by taking power away from privileged students, giving everyone the information they need to make informed decisions, and then let students themselves nurture and innovate new sexual cultures, thus diversifying sexual options on campus.
2. “I’m basically in a paradise full of girls I’m
attracted to. I love it here. Everyone is
fucking each other. Last semester was one
of the most interesting, exciting, and
strangest times of my life.”
– Owen (white, heterosexual)
3. “A lot of the social life I’ve experienced is
some twisted sort of self-perpetuating
vicious cycle of unrealistic expectations,
boundless enthusiasm, and copious
amounts of alcohol.”
4. “When I think about my sex life, it feels like
my insides tie themselves tight together... I
can’t handle another negative sexual
relationship…My heart might break.”
5. Most students are excited to hook up, but
they often discover that they don’t like it.
Why not?
• sexual assault
• unequal pleasures
• bias and exclusion
• emotional distress
6. The Research:
• 101 student journals
• Visits to 80
colleges
• Over 300 articles in
college newspapers
• 100s of research
studies
8. “I know that I should want to have sex all
the time and should take advantage of it
when I get the chance. [When] I didn’t, I
felt like a loser, or uncool. … “You’re at
college and you’re not having sex. What’s
wrong with you?”
– Wren (white, pansexual)
9. • How did college become fun?
• How did sex become part of that fun?
• And how did sex-for-fun become so
widely endorsed?
10. I would incomparably rather
resign my place than allow
young men the right to meet
in secret when they choose
without knowledge of the
Faculty.
11. I did get one
of the nicest
pieces of ass
some day or
two ago.
12. Some of us are becoming the
men we wanted to marry.
13. “I railed against the idea that women were
needy, dependent, easily heartsick, easily
made hysterical by men, attention-
obsessed, and primarily fixated on finding
romance. I did this by proving how very like
a boy I could behave.”
– Eloise (white, heterosexual)
16. competitive vs. cooperative
I win win-win
personal pleasure shared pleasure
status-based status-neutral
achievement discovery
exploitation care
17. Doing sex-without-care is a challenging
interpersonal task because:
• students are having emotions
• sex is often and ideally emotional in
American culture
• when two students hook up, it means
they picked each other when they could
have picked someone else
19. “[If you are sober] it means you both are
particularly attracted to each other and it’s
not really a one-time thing. When drunk,
you can kind of just do it because it’s fun
and then be able to laugh about it and
have it not be awkward or mean
anything.”
– Riley (white, heterosexual)
24. “Being mean is the best way to handle it.”
– Giselle (white, heterosexual)
25. Strategies for “doing” casual:
• Be drunk.
• Be hot, but not warm.
• Keep cool.
• Cap your hookups.
26. “We’ve only hooked up once, so . . . it
automatically is not a big deal.”
– Hiro (Asian, bisexual)
27. competitive vs. cooperative
I win win-win
personal pleasure shared pleasure
status-based status-neutral
achievement discovery
exploitation care
28. “The stigma attached to women being the
emotional creatures in the relationship and
the men being the physical ones had never
been so apparent to me. . . . He clearly
thought that he was the one with the power
to hurt and I was the one that was expected
to cry with anguish.”
– Deanna (white, heterosexual)
29. • sexual assault
• unequal pleasures
• bias and exclusion
• emotional distress
30. “When you have a hookup buddy, you
never admit true feelings. It’s best to show
the least amount of interest or emotions or
even more so, be cold… It can come across
as rude but, rather than showing any
emotion, I would prefer to act like I don’t
care.”
– Farah (Asian, heterosexual)
31. “For the first time ever, we lie in bed
together, kissing now and then and
holding hands. We’d never done anything
that personal. We spoon and snuggle.”
32. “My heart kind of stopped. I sat next to
him on the concrete in the cold and hoped
the question would come again so I could
say, ‘Yes, I do like you.’”
33. “From the stories I have heard, the only
guys that do not pressure girls are the ones
that actually might care about the girl.”
– Gaby (Latina, heterosexual)
34. “The guy kind of expects to get off, while
the girl doesn’t expect anything.”
– Celeste (white, heterosexual)
35. “In our room, sex is a commodity, which,
like gold, increases a man’s social status,
especially if he ‘scores’ or ‘pounds’ an
especially blonde girl.”
– Justin (Latino, heterosexual)
36. “This kind of judgment… makes for a
hostile environment where you have no
idea what is going to be said about you for
your actions and [it] concerns me
whenever my friends or I choose to hook
up with someone else as I don’t want our
reputations to be hurt or judged by for
that.”
– Corey (white, heterosexual)
37. “The whole point of hookups is get some
and then be able to point the person out to
your friends and be like, ‘Yeah, that guy.
That’s right. The hot one over there. I got
that.’”
– Alondra (black/white, heterosexual)
38. “Hooking up is not for black people.”
– Jaslene (African American, lesbian)
