Hooking Up on campus: Is everybody doing it?

                                      © Yuri Arcurs | Dreamstime.com                          

  While there is agreement that casual sex is common on college campuses, the question many parents ask is:  Is everybody doing it? 

What is "Hooking Up?"

Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp, the author of Unhooked:  How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both (Riverhead Books, 2007), offers this definition: 

"Hooking up can be anything from kissing to intercourse.  It's deliberately vague and undefined by this generation so that when you tell a fried you hooked up with someone last night," than to say "I gave Johnny a blow job."  It conceals what you've done and you can talk yourself into thinking it really doesn't matter."  

Stepp, who conducted her research by immersing herself in college life and interviewing students, reports that "hooking up" has taken hold across the board, that it crosses all racial, social and economic lines.  What is startling to many parents is that the "hook up" has replaced the "first date."  It is after the "hook up" that the couple decides whether or not they will pursue a relationship.

Is everybody doing it?

The shift from traditional dating to the  now common group partying started back in the 1970's. The "sexual revolution," "free love" and "make love not war?"  seems to have morphed into "hooking up."  Studies conducted at the beginning of the decade reported:

• 91% of students say hooking up is very common or fairly common on their campuses. (2001)
• 87% of college students report having hooked up. (2000)

More recent statistics might argue that the prevalence of "hooking up" is overstated.  A recent survey for the American College Health Association found that students estimated that their peers had three times the number of sexual partners than they actually had.  Kathleen Bogle, who conducted the study and wrote "Hooking Up:  Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus, (New York University Press, 2008) reports that the number of sexual parters for m ales actually dropped from 2.6 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006.  There is more support for this:  According to a Centers for Disease Control survey released in 2007, the number of high schoolers who ever had intercourse dropped from 54.1 to less than half to 47.8 percent.  (There was other good news in that survey:  condom use increased by 30 percent.)

Bogle, who studied students at a private college and at a large public university, states that it is "unfair to characterize th entire system, much less all college students, by what we see on MT's coverage of spring break."  She also notes that students refer to the "walk of shame" -- that morning-after trek back to the dorm attired in the 'going-out' outfit from the night before.  She queries:  If students accept hooking up and believe that "everybody's doing it," then why do they use the term shame when referencing a hook up encounter?"

For more info:

Guess, Andy.  “The Sociology of Hooking Up,” Inside Higher Education, January 29, 2008.  www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/29/hookups

Glenn, Norval and Marquardt, Elizabeth.  ”Hooking Up, Hanging Out and Hoping for Mr. Right - College  Women on Mating and Dating Today.”  Institute for American Values.  July, 2001.

Kahn, Fricker, Hoffman, Lambert, Tripp and Childress.  ”Hooking up:  Dangerous new dating methods?”  American Psychological Association Symposium:  Sex, unwanted, sex and sexual assault on college campuses.  2000.