Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both

This is an excellent book.Sadly one which is unlikely to be read by the hookup culture.I work with young adolescent women. The majority of them engage in hooking up. As a mature adult woman, I observe how this behaviour devastates them. It hinders their ability to develop and mature in a natural manner. As well as, (from my perspective) it circumvents their future success. How I wish they would care enough about their present and future selves to read this book. It would make a huge difference if they took the time to think about the long term implications/ consequences of their intimate choices.

Having once been young, I all too well remember that young people always think themselves wise enough for any endeavor; now, with age, I know it's the same confidence of old drunks who think they are still sober. So it is with this book, a tut-tut-tutting account of youth who embrace sex as the jalapeno of life before learning that it is a spice and not a main course. It's similar to the fate of youth and cars, or youth and alcohol, or youth and guns. Inevitably some overindulge and hurt themselves. Tell me about a time when it wasn't so. Given the choice of youthful angst with or without sex, many young people have decided sex is merely a sensuous bodily pleasure. The lack of love, commitment and romance is shocking to some, but by the time they marry they've been hurt often enough to finally make a reasonably wise choice. The same is true for alcohol; most learn, after a few hangovers, that moderation is a much longer lasting pleasure. The proof is evident in the divorce rates. Figures compiled by Steven Martin of the University of Maryland indicate about 45 percent of women without a high school degree are divorced within 10 years of their first marriage, compared to about 15 percent for those with a college degree. When it comes to children raised by a single mother, almost 40 percent of the mothers have less than a high school degree; about 10 percent of single mothers have a college degree or better. Sex was the last taboo for most women; first it was hem lines, then smoking in public, then alcohol and, in the 1960s, the advent of a little pill which let them delay having children without delaying their inner urges. None of this changes or erases the agony of youth; regardless of what anyone does, something different often looks better in retrospect. Stepp has written a riveting account of sex for fun among the young, and the severe hangovers it sometimes causes. A similar book should be written about virgins who marry at 17 and divorce by 20 after the collapse of their illusions and delusions. It's not easy being young, regardless of how anyone chooses to live. When will someone write that youth is sometimes unmitigated agony (with or without sex). But, out of this misery can come a lifetime of happiness, pleasure and commitment? Easy sex isn't a mistake. It's a process of learning what isn't suitable. Think of Thomas Edison and his thousand experiments to develop a lightbulb; his unsuccessful attempts weren't failures, he thought of them as having learned what doesn't work. It's time for authors to think of "hooking up" in the same practical manner; it's something youth already knows, and adults need to learn.

This was a very interesting book. I had to read it for my graduate class on college student experience and write a paper about it referencing theory, literature, etc. I did find this book very interesting, though I did take issue with a few things. First, I wasn't sure if the people she was interviewing were the most representative example of college students. She seemed to only interview people who either didn't participate at all in the hookup culture, or who did and ended up not being able to handle it as hard as they tried. I understand her point about delaying love and how women are not learning how to be in truly loving relationships, but I am not sure that it's true that all women cannot handle the hookup culture. I would have liked to have seen an interview from a student who did not secretly feel unsatisfied with the hookup culture. I also would have liked to have heard interviews with men because she kept making it seem like men could handle the hookup culture better than women and I would like to know if that is really true. My gut instinct is that it isn't. Anyways, this was an interesting book, but don't take it as the end all on the hookup culture. If you would like more background after reading, I suggest reading Karen Arnold's article about the hookup culture--it references this book and she is a scholar/professor of student development theory.

Stepp takes on the daunting task of understanding and explaining the "Hook Up" culture. She explores this culture through the experiences and voices of several young women, most of whom are upper-middle class and white. Stepp documents a cultural shift experienced by both boys and girls where love and romance are deliberately and systematically decoupled from the broader range of sexual behavior. The main characters in her book, highly successful young women who attend elite private high schools and universities, have taken control over their life circumstances and vow never to be bounded by traditional gender stereotypes. Several of these girls, interestingly enough, passionately reject their mothers' role in "traditional marriages" and are committed to making it in the world, on their own if necessary.Control over their sexuality and sexual behavior is intimately linked to their conceptual notions of liberation. These young successful women are committed to using their sexuality in highly instrumental ways, most directly to derive personal and immediate pleasure alone. Their sexuality, along with that of the young men (and occasional female partner), are merely instruments of immediate personal pleasure. Their personal relationships are imbedded in a lifestyle of excessively dangerous alcohol abuse and risky sexual behavior. Stepp considers in detail the individual and cultural consequences of these shifts.The most alarming part of Stepp's story relates to these girls' perceptions of empowerment and liberation. To be "empowered," these girls passionately reject traditional feminine qualities of love and emotional attachment. To fall in love is to act like "silly girls." In their world, girls who become attached to sexual partners deserve to be emotionally victimized because they should have known to avoid emotional attachments connected to sexual encounters. In the end, the reader gets a picture of girls who are working hard to adopt the most extreme and veiled characterized of the very men that the women's movement seemingly rejects.Many critics have argued this book amounts to conservative propaganda - nothing could be further from the truth. Readers interested in understanding the unintended consequences of the women's movement, the social relationships of young people, and the impact of their own parenting skills should read this. It is an incredibly important story.

As the parent of a sixteen year old daughter, and because I volunteer at the local high school, I was very interested in what this book had to say. I wanted to know more about hooking up; the culture, causes, signs and demographics, as well as what can be done to possibly prevent it from occurring.At the high school we have had instances of what, in retrospect, was behavior by students that mimicked the "hooking up" culture. The parents who knew about the incidents, as well as most administrators, were blissfully unaware that what were we seeing in some students was this phenomena. When the incidents occurred, we thought they were simply girls who were, as they were described when I went to school,[...].When I went to college in the 70s, things were not nearly as loose as things now, however they were less stringent than the author remembers. While we didn't "hook up", there were more than a few one night stands and there was a lot of drinking going on. I fail to see how, on the college level, this culture is all that much worse than what we experienced, with the exception of the presence of diseases now that we didn't have to contend with back then.I tend to agree with the author that this behavior, in high school, is dangerous and somewhat self destructive, but in college the students are moving quickly toward adulthood, and if this is the way they want to behave then they should be allowed to. I have a hard time seeing how you would curb such behavior in college anyway.Overall, I think the message is good, but the author's muddled writing tended to make it hard to see. She writes, in the beginning, about the girls, but interrupts the flow with commentary which makes it hard to follow the girl's stories. I would have preferred to see the case study, followed by the commentary. In addition, the author references back to previous experiences with other girls, further muddying the waters.I think it's important for parents, as well as high school administrators to learn about this culture, but I'm not sure this is the best book for that purpose.