In bars and dorm rooms and campus coffee shops, Laura Sessions Stepp heard the same refrain from dozens of students: Casual sex is rampant on college campuses. But that was hardly shocking to Stepp, who covers adolescents and sexuality for The Washington Post. The surprise: The hookup has all but replaced dating among college students.
In her new book, "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both," Stepp describes the birth of a "hookup culture" and the death of dating on college campuses, and says that young women are eschewing relationships for brief sexual encounters for a number of reasons, including an intense focus on academic and professional achievement.
The hookup is defined in part by its ambiguity, Stepp said, and can be anything from a one-night stand to the longer-term "friends with benefits" or "hookup buddies. It is often the result of casual meetings in bars and at parties, is devoid of commitment and has largely replaced dating on college campuses, Stepp said. Mark O'Connell, an instructor at Harvard Medical School's department of psychiatry, said dating, once an important part of developing a young person's sense of self, has all but disappeared on college campuses in the past two decades or so.
At least in the major urban centers where people end up thinking about these things and writing about them, kids don't talk about dating anymore. There's something about the negotiation of a relationship that happens when you date that's very different from what we're seeing now.
In her book, Stepp cites a survey of college students as one of the earliest studies of hookups. In the study, four out of five students surveyed said they had hooked up, and half said they started their evenings with plans to hook up without having anyone in particular in mind.
