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
"Riveting." -Patricia Cornwell,
New York Times bestselling author "On target and thought provoking." -
Atlantic Monthly "Educational-and almost always shocking...ought to come with a parental advisory." -
St. Louis Post Dispatch "Stepp's work is remarkable." -
The Baltimore Sun "Required reading for all young women-and their parents." -Hilda Hutcherson, M.D., author of
What Your Mother Never Told You About SexSynopsis
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.
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