Synopses & Reviews
Features a new Afterword for this edition. A controversial look at today's sexual hook-up culture, and "[a] book...you won't stop talking about."-Patricia Cornwell From the front lines of today's sexual battlefield comes an eye-opening examination of the hookup culture, seen through the personal experiences of the teenage girls and young women who live it-and who are left unprepared for its consequences. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author presents a disturbing and enlightening indictment of the hookup culture, the social forces that contribute to it, and what can be done to change it.
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
Synopsis
A Washington Post reporter evaluates the sexual experiences of three groups of young women who have responded to what the author terms America's increasingly sexualized culture by engaging in obligation-free intimate relationships rather than navigating the physical and emotional turbulence of the new dating landscape.
About the Author
Laura Sessions Stepp is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who specializes in covering teenagers and young adults for the Style section of The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in such publications as Parent, Child, Working Mother, Reader's Digest, and Harvard’s Nieman Reports. She has twice been a resident scholar at the National Academy of Sciences, has served as a member of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Healthy People 2000 panel on adolescence and chairs the board of advisors of the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland. Stepp, who has three grown children, lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband.
Table of Contents
Unhooked
Foreword Introduction
Section One
Hooking Up: What It Means (Jamie's Story)
Section Two
What It Looks Like, What It Feels Like
High School (Stories of Sienna, Anna and Mieka)
College (Nicole's Story)
Section Three
How We Got There
Feminism (Shaida's Story)
Parents and the Greenhouse Effect (Cleo's Story)
The College Environment (Victoria's Story)
Section Four
Hooking Up: Why It Matters (Alicia's Story)
A Letter to Mothers and Daughters
Afterword to the Paperback Edition
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index