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Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both
by Laura Sessions Stepp
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Synopses & Reviews An eye-opening examination of the hookup culture, seen through the personal experiences of high school and college age women who confront the hard lessons of dating, love, and sex.
We're living in an increasingly sexualized world, and it's the young — particularly young women — who must deal with the consequences. Kids are having more sexual contact than ever, and at an earlier age. They call it hooking up. But what is hooking up? According to Laura Sessions Stepp, a reporter at The Washington Post, hooking up eludes a neat definition. It can be anything from an innocent kiss to sexual.
In Unhooked, Stepp follows three groups of young women (one in high school, one each at Duke and George Washington universities). She sat with them in class, socialized with them, listened to them talk, and came away with some disturbing insights, including that hooking up carries with it no obligation on either side. Relationships and romance are seen as messy and time-consuming, and love is postponed — or worse, seen as impossible. Some young women can handle this, but many can't, and they're being battered — physically and emotionally — by the new dating landscape. The result is a generation of young people stymied by relationships and unsure where to turn for help.
"The need to be connected intimately to others is as central to our well-being as food and shelter," Stepp writes in Unhooked. "In my view, if we don't get it right, we're probably not going to get anything else in life right." Review: "In her second book, journalist Stepp ( Our Last Best Shot) gets an inside perspective on the 'hookup,' which has become the 'primary currency of social interaction' between the sexes in high schools and colleges. Though it's clear where Stepp, mother of three, stands in regard to 'hooking up' — a no-strings-attached sex act that allows participants 'the freedom to unhook' at any time — Stepp has a seasoned pro's ability to step back, examining carefully and sympathetically the 'cultural shift' in its particulars, through the individual stories of interviewees, as well as in its broader cultural impact. Inspired by a series of articles she wrote on eighth-grade oral sex rings for The Washington Post in 1998 ('two years before the popularity of oral sex in middle schools percolated through the media'), Stepp avoids breathless sensationalism, preferring instead to explore the meaning of 'hooking up,' its fallout, potential long-range consequences for women and men, and the factors that have allowed such a shift to take place — wisely asking, 'Where are young women's teachers?' rather than 'What is wrong with these girls?' Though it would have benefited from a winnowing of interviews, this insightful study is vivid and engaging, and includes a practical conversation guide for mothers and daughters, making it a valuable text for parents that goes beyond the latest the-kids-are-not-alright headlines." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Articles, op-ed pieces and radio shows have been devoted to the sexual practice of 'hooking up,' but Washington Post reporter Laura Session Stepp's Unhooked is the first book on the phenomenon and, one hopes, not the last. For when someone takes such a volatile aspect of young people's lives and puts it under a microscope — or in this case, a concerned, disapproving gaze — you ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) want the large, well-lit view. Stepp follows three high-school girls and six college women through a year in their lives, chronicling their sexual behavior. These girls and women don't date, don't develop long-term relationships or even short, serious ones — instead, they 'hook up.' Hooking up, Stepp writes, 'isn't exactly anything.' It can 'consist entirely of one kiss, or it can involve fondling, oral sex, anal sex, intercourse or any combination of those things. It can happen only once with a partner, several times during a week or over many months. ... It can mean the start of something, the end of something or the whole something.' If that sounds as if hooking up can mean almost anything but 'fried fish for dinner,' Stepp goes on to offer something more definite: What makes hooking up unique is that its practitioners agree, quite openly, that there will be no commitment, no exclusivity, no feelings. The girls adopt the crude talk of crude boys: They speak of hitting it, of boy toys and filler boys, 'my plaything' and 'my bitch.' Why hook up? According to Stepp, college women, obsessed with academic and career success, say they don't have time for a real relationship; high-school girls say lovey-dovey relationships give them the 'yucks.' Stepp is troubled: How will these girls learn how to be loving couples in this hookup culture? Where will they practice the behavior needed to sustain deep and long-term relationships? If they commit to a lack of commitment, how will they ever learn to be intimate? These questions sound reasonable at first, until one remembers that life just doesn't work that way: In our teens and early twenties, sexual relationships are less about intimacy (our families and friends teach us how to achieve that) than about expanding our intimate knowledge of people — a very different thing. Through sex, we discover irrefutable otherness (he dreams of being madly in love; she hates going to sleep alone; he's got a crush on his sister), and we are scared and enraptured, frustrated and inspired. We learn less about intimacy in our youthful sex lives than we do about humanity. And of course, there is also lust, something this very unsexy book about sex doesn't take into account. In fact, Unhooked can be downright painful to read. The author resurrects the ugly, old notion of sex as something a female gives in return for a male's good behavior, and she imagines the female body as a thing that can be tarnished by too much use. She advises the girls, 'He will seek to win you over only if he thinks you're a prize.' And goes on to tell them, 'In a smorgasbord of booty, all the hot dishes start looking like they've been on the warming table too long.' It seems strange to have to state the obvious all over again: Both males and females should work hard to gain another's affection and trust. And one's sexuality is not a commodity that, given away too readily and too often, will exhaust or devalue itself. Tell girls that the opposite is true (as they were told for a number of decades), and they will rebel. The author is conflating what the girls refuse to conflate: love and sexuality. Sometimes they coexist, sometimes not. Loving, faithful marriages in which the sex life has cooled are as much a testament to that fact as a lustful tryst that leads nowhere. In the final chapter, Stepp writes a letter to mothers and daughters, in which she warns the girls: 'Your body is your property.... Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?' And: 'Pornographic is grinding on the dance floor like a dog in heat. It leaves nothing to the imagination.' The ugliness of these images seems meant to instill sexual shame. Stepp is most thought-provoking when she considers the culture at large: All the females she interviews come from reasonably well-off families, we're told, and all are ambitious. 'Hooking up enables a young woman to practice a piece of a relationship, the physical, while devoting most of her energy to staying on the honor roll... while working ten to fifteen hours a week in the cafeteria, playing lacrosse, working out every day in the gym and applying to graduate programs in engineering.' In a culture that values money and fame above all, that eschews failure, bad luck, trouble and pain, none of us speaks the language of love and forbearance. And that is tragic, but it is not hooking up that has created this atmosphere. Hooking up is either a faithful reflection of the culture, a Darwinian response to a world where half the marriages end in divorce, or it is an attempt at something new. Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex. Why bring someone into your bed? Maybe because she is brilliant and has a whimsical sense of humor, or he is both sarcastic and vulnerable, and has beautiful eyes. And perhaps as this generation grows up (her subjects are only in their teens, after all, 21 at the oldest), they will come to relish other sides of an intimate relationship more than we have: the friendship, the shared humor, the familiar and loved body next to you in bed at night. This is the most hopeful outcome of the culture Stepp describes, but no less possible than the outcome she fears — a generation unable to commit (to relationships or careers or ideals), unable to weather storms or to stomach second place or really to love at all." Kathy Dobie Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "A must-read for young women grappling with important sexual decisions." Booklist Review: "Unhooked is suffused with the vague anxiety that is symptomatic of the teens-in-crisis genre....Buying into alarmism about women, Unhooked makes sex into a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous thing than it already is." Meghan O'Rourke, Slate Review: "Unhooked is a remarkable book: astute, insightful, and rigorously reported. By investigating the struggles young women face as they navigate the differences between sex and love, Laura Stepp shows us how rocky a road that can be. This book and the issues it raises demand the attention of all of us — young and old, children and parents, women and men." William Raspberry, author of Looking Backward at Us Review: "A riveting and shocking book. Laura Stepp's superb investigative work raises questions that are as compelling as they are appalling: Are young women accepting as okay sexual behavior that isn't okay and never has been? Can girls really act like boys and get away with it emotionally? What happens when boys who have no sexual boundaries placed upon them grow up to be men? This is a book you can't stop reading and you won't stop talking about." Patricia Cornwell, bestselling author of Predator About the Author Laura Sessions Stepp is a journalist who specializes in covering teenagers and the adolescent years for the Style Section of The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in such publications as Parent, Child, Working Mother, Reader's Digest, and Nieman Reports of Harvard University. She has served as a member of the U.S. Surgeon General's Healthy People 2000 Panel on Adolescence in 1998 and 1999 and chairs the board of advisers of the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781594489389
- Author:
- Stepp, Laura Sessions
- Publisher:
- Riverhead Hardcover
- Author:
- Sessions Stepp, Laura
- Subject:
- Interpersonal Relations
- Subject:
- Sexuality
- Subject:
- Man-woman relationships
- Subject:
- Dating (social customs)
- Subject:
- Life Stages - Adolescence - Sexuality
- Subject:
- Life Stages - Teenagers
- Subject:
- Teenagers
- Copyright:
- 2007
- Publication Date:
- March 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 304
- Dimensions:
- 9.30x6.46x1.02 in. 1.09 lbs.
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