Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: American Hookup
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://lisa-wade.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://lisa-wade.com/full-cv/ * http://www.oxy.edu/faculty/lisa-wade
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2014064858
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2014064858
HEADING: Wade, Lisa (Professor)
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of California, Santa Barbara, B.A., 1996; New York University, M.A., 1997; University of Wisconsin, Madison, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, professor. Sociological Images, blogger. Has worked previously as a lecturer, teaching assistant, and adjunct instructor.
MEMBER:ASA Steering Committee on Public Engagement (2016 to present), Pacific Standard (editorial advisory board member, 2017 to present).
AWARDS:Public Sociology Award, American Sociological Association Communication, 2012; Occidental College Linda and Tod White, 2013; Teaching Prize, Information Technologies Teaching Award, American Sociological Association Distinguished Contributions, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, including Annual Review of Sociology, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Media, Culture & Society, and Sexuality and Society Reader.
SIDELIGHTS
Lisa Wade is a writer and sociology professor at Occidental College in California. Her sociological work focuses on sex and gender in society, power and sexuality, and race issues. Wade has worked as a visiting professor at Loyola University, a lecturer and teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, and an adjunct instructor at City College of San Francisco, Chabot College, Diablo Valley College, Las Positas College, and San Jose City College.
Wade received her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, her M.A. from New York University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She was a participant at the Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society at the University of Amsterdam in 1997. Wade is the principal writer for Sociological Images and has published over two dozen research papers, book chapters, and educational essays.
In American Hookup, Wade examines the sexual behavior of modern college students, as well as the culture and expectations surrounding that behavior. Wade’s findings suggest that students are not participating in more sexual activity than earlier generations, but the culture around sexual behavior has changed significantly.
According to Wade’s findings, the cycle of sexual relations follow a predictable pattern. Each weekend students drink in dorm rooms, go to parties to dance and get more drunk, then pair off to spend the night with a member of the opposite sex, which may or may not result in sex. Following the weekend, the details of the night are discussed among friends and the individual couples ignore each other in an attempt to prove that the hookup was meaningless.
Wade’s research suggests that this cycle can end up leaving participants feeling anxious or depressed. The involvement of alcohol is significant, creating a buffer of responsibility which can allow individuals to later shy away from emotional responsibility toward members of the opposite sex. The inclination to ignore or avoid the person with whom sexual experiences were shared is the result of the fear of being perceived as too needy, or conversely out of a fear of losing the opportunity to lead a sexually open lifestyle.
While presenting the potential downsides to this culture of sex, Wade also acknowledges that this culture arose from the the progressive intentions of sexual liberation movements. American culture has adopted more emphasis on sexual independence and an openness to sex before marriage than it had in the past, but, she suggests, we are far from achieving sexual equality. In heterosexual dynamics, sex still lays in the hands of men, causing women to fall into the roll of desperate or rivaling participants.
Wade explains that the media portrays a much more scandalous portrait of college sex life than that which actually exists, leading incoming students to believe that they will, or must, participate in sex culture in a specific way. She also acknowledges that this attitude is institutionalized by the colleges themselves, specifically by fraternity culture, perpetuating the old dynamic of men holding sexual power over women.
Wade acquired the data for her research through numerous sources, including national surveys, dissertation studies and journalistic accounts. In addition, she incorporates the journals of three classes of freshman who were asked to document their sexual experiences in college life. She discusses American history, the rise of the sexual liberation movement, and the history of social structures of college life and fraternities in particular to explain how the times have given way to our current hookup culture. Rebekah Kati in the Library Journal described American Hookup as a “fascinating and heavy study into the social lives of college students,” recommending it to “anyone interested in college life or sexuality studies.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, January, 2017, Kelly Blewett, review of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, p. 25.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of American Hookup.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Rebekah Kati, review of American Hookup, p. 102.
Publishers Weekly, October 10, 2016, review of American Hookup, p. 66.
ONLINE
Bookpage, https://bookpage.com/ (July 20, 2017), Kelly Blewett, review of American Hookup.
Metapsychology, http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/ (February 7, 2017), Christian Perring, review of American Hookup.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 18, 2017), Jennifer Senior, review of American Hookup.
NPR, http://www.npr.org/ (February 14, 2017), Shankar Vedantam, review of American Hookup.
Santa Fe New Mexican, http://www.santafenewmexican.com/ (March 10, 2017), Jennifer Levin, review of American Hookup.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (February 2, 2017), Gayle Brandeis, review of American Hookup.
Time, http://time.com/ (January 6, 2017), review of American Hookup.*
Lisa Wade is a professor at Occidental College. She is the author of "American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus," "Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions," and the editor of "Assigned: Life with Gender." She has also published over two dozen research papers, book chapters, and educational essays. She is also the principal writer for the blog, Sociological Images, and appears frequently in print, radio, and television news and opinion outlets. Learn more at lisa-wade.com.
HOME › ARTICLES › BOOKS › OFF THE HOOK: A Q&A WITH "AMERICAN HOOKUP" AUTHOR LISA WADE
BOOKS
OFF THE HOOK: A Q&A WITH "AMERICAN HOOKUP" AUTHOR LISA WADE
by Andi Zeisler
Published on January 9, 2017 at 3:25pm
picture of Lisa Wade, a smiling, blond woman
As a longtime fan of Lisa Wade’s blog, Sociological Images, I would have gladly read pretty much any book she wrote. But, as it happens, the first book by Wade—who teaches sociology at California’s Occidental College—addresses one of the most widely misunderstood concepts of the past few decades: The college hookup. Vilified, tsk-tsked, and blamed for everything from the death of chivalry to the epidemic of campus rape, the hookup and its gendered dimensions has become an obsession of mainstream media .
American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus uses data, reporting, and journal entries from students of various races, classes, and religions to put together a compelling, and often depressing, picture of a culture in which feelings are discouraged, orgasm ratios are skewed, and young people aren’t induling in the kind of orgiastic ecstasy conjured by the overheated imaginations of their moral guardians. It considers what happens when “fun” becomes narrowly defined and when theories about gender equality don’t match a reality in which sexual double standards still reign. “Students are less happy and healthy than in previous generations,” writes Wade, and American Hookup—out tomorrow from W.W. Norton—is her effort to find out why hookup culture might play a part in that.
So much has been written about hooking up and hookup culture in the past decade since it’s been diagnosed as a cultural “problem.” When did you start to become interested in a different, less moralistic way of looking at hooking up?
It’s easy to be moralistic in the abstract, but students are real people to me. When I teach sociology of sexuality, which I’ve done for a decade, I have in-depth discussions with them about sex on campus. Nothing about these conversations is ever simple, and certainly not morally so. The students themselves are diverse. They bring many different ethical perspectives and points of view. They’re able to think about their experiences intellectually. Often they’re learning by trial and error, but they are learning, processing information in sophisticated ways. And they’re making all kinds of different choices and responding in all sorts of different ways to a complex set of pressures. The media coverage just doesn’t do them justice.
I love the way you use the idea of “fun” as a frame for hookup culture, because it exposes how contrived “fun” can be—and, in the case of hookups, how things we associate with fun, like spontaneity and unself-consciousness, are absent in crucial ways. Can you talk a little about that frame?
It was a magical day when I came across sociologist Clare Hollowell’s dissertation about fun. Here is this word we all use more or less constantly, and yet how often have we been reflective about it? Why is fun so important to us? And who gets to define what counts as fun?
I scoured the journals written by the 101 students who contributed to the book—more than a million words—and I found it everywhere. Students spent a lot of time worrying about whether they were having enough fun, if they were fun people, and if the fun they were having was the “right” kind of fun: raucous, drunken, sexy, and just a tad perilous. Hooking up is the pinnacle of this. It’s more than just casual, it’s careless. It’s a way of throwing cares to the wind, letting alcohol bring on a freer state of mind, and just doing whatever—and to hell with the consequences. And to be that careless about sex, of all things, can seem especially bold.
That’s the ideal, anyway. In practice, sex without care is tricky to pull off. Because everyone knows sex is meaningful, so establishing that any particular interaction is meaningless is a difficult interpersonal task. So, students actually have a pretty elaborate and arguably brutal set of rules for how to perform meaninglessness. Those rules work, often all too well.
The gendered aspects of hooking up—and the gendered emotions ascribed to hookup participants—perpetuate a lot of double standards about sexual behavior. Is there anything you discovered in writing the book that contradicts the conventional wisdom of hookups as “guys wanting them all the time” vs. “girls just kind of going along with them”?
In 2015, a set of scientists mathematically compiled over 20,000 studies of 386 possible gender differences representing over 12 million people. Evidence for anything but the smallest of gender differences on a minority of traits is vanishingly small, even given the powerful socialization we experience. Men and women really aren’t very different on the inside.
Both men and women were represented among students who expressed enthusiasm for casual sex. And both men and women seek connection with each other. In fact, 71 and 67 percent, respectively, say they wish they had more opportunities to find a long-term partner.
We do see gender differences in behavior, but that’s because the balance of risk and benefits is in men’s favor. Women are more likely than men to be labeled as slutty or desperate, they’re more likely to encounter degradation or coercion, and they’re less likely to be given an orgasm. These differences in actual experiences translate into different tolerances for hooking up.
There’s a strong race and class analysis in the book with respect to what hookups look like. Can you say a little about how hookup culture is part of shaping a larger white culture that prioritizes not only leisure but a sort of idyllic “college experience”?
The idea of the idyllic college experience, sometimes described intimidatingly as “the best years of your life,” is new. Colonial college life was rigid and the curriculum was dry. At the time, most students were middle class men who wanted to be ministers. During the 1700s, though, wealthy families started to send their sons to college to attain degrees and justify their hoarding of wealth and power. These men were much less amenable to tedium and they expressed their discontent with 100 years of riots. They shot out the windows of faculty homes, set fire to academic buildings, and generally wreaked mayhem. Local militias were brought in to tamp down their rebellions, and they sometimes failed. People died.
These groups of elite, entitled, mischief-inclined men eventually became fraternity men and, by the 1920s, they dominated the social life on campuses, so much so that their way of doing college became the way of doing college. Contemporary college culture, then, has its roots in frat culture and frat culture has always been a way for rich white men to exert control over both higher education and their peers.
So yes, hookup culture is a racialized, classed, and heterocentric culture as well as a gendered one. All things being equal, white, class privileged, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, conventionally attractive men hook up more than anyone else on campus. Students who carry devalued or stigmatized identities often find hookup culture hostile or indifferent to them, or they recognize that participation carries more risks for them than it does for others, and they are more likely to have personal standards that are incompatible with the norms of behavior hookup culture rewards.
You connect a lot of dots in this book between history and economics and sexual mores, and you write “It’s not the hookup itself, but hookup culture” that needs to change. Are there optimistic steps that you see actual students taking to change this equation?
I am. I trust students. They’re thoughtful about the world and hopeful about the future. Given the right resources—knowledge, networks, and institutional support—I’m confident they could change the cultures on their campuses. That’s the thing about culture; it only exists with our consent. As soon as a critical mass of students decide they will no longer obey it, it ceases to exist.
But they will need institutional support. Hookup culture’s routines are embedded in the rhythms and architecture of higher education. Campuses need to take a good hard look at how their organization facilitates the more toxic and dangerous features of hookup culture and put substantial resources behind ending that support and enabling alternatives.
With students and administrators working together, I can imagine a campus culture changing—and fast. And once shifted, students may simply socialize new students into this new campus life, hopefully one supportive of many different ways of engaging sexually, giving students options and requiring them to be thoughtful about what they want and communicate that to each other. That’s my hope—that American Hookup will not only inform students, parents, and administrators about the state of sex on campus, giving them tools for managing it—but give them information and inspiration to help them change it for the better.
American Hookup is available wherever books are sold, but, as ever, we recommend buying from your local independent bookseller.
American Hookup
Kelly Blewett
BookPage.
(Jan. 2017): p25.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
AMERICAN HOOKUP
By Lisa Wade
Norton
$26.95, 304 pages
ISBN 9780393285093
Audio, eBook available
SOCIAL SCIENCE
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
College students aren't having as much sex as everyone thinks, professor Lisa Wade writes in American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on
Campus. Instead, most students are just talking about hooking up--and participating in a set of rituals that goes along with it.
Wade describes the cycle: pregaming in dorm rooms, dirty dancing at parties and then pairing off in bedrooms where actual sex may or may not
occur. The next day, the events are discussed obsessively with friends. The pair who hooked up follow rigid rules, avoiding each other to prove
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the hookup was meaningless. The next weekend, the whole thing starts again.
To compile specifics about sexual behavior, Wade relied on journals prepared by three classes of freshmen. These journals are predictably
scintillating. It's important to remember, though, that they were prepared for a professor and may therefore be regarded with some skepticism.
Wade complements the journals with data from national surveys, dissertation studies and journalistic accounts.
As a teacher at a residential college, I was not totally persuaded by Wade's representation of sex culture on campuses--there are many students
who opt into social circles with other kinds of rituals, and there's more nuance and complexity in campus culture. Still, American Hookup could
be a helpful conversation starter--and Wade's takeaways about how to make the culture of hooking up kinder and more compassionate are well
supported and important.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Blewett, Kelly. "American Hookup." BookPage, Jan. 2017, p. 25. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225450&it=r&asid=97ffe1190b502b617a06a6f0a0b893c3. Accessed 22 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225450
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Lisa Wade: AMERICAN HOOKUP
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lisa Wade AMERICAN HOOKUP Norton (Adult Nonfiction) 26.95 ISBN: 978-0-393-28509-3
How and why American college students are engaging in nonintimate one-night stands.Although students on college campuses profess to be
having a lot of sex, according to Wade’s (Sociology/Occidental Coll.; co-author: Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, 2014, etc.)
research, “today’s students boast no more sexual partners than their parents did at their age.” The difference is the
culture surrounding the intimacy, a topic the author thoroughly and perceptively explores. Using in-depth research and multiple surveys from
hetero, bi, trans, and queer students of all ethnic and economic levels from colleges across the country, Wade delves into the new hookup culture,
which allows students access to sex but can leave them feeling anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed. It comes as no surprise that drunkenness
and sex often go hand in hand, that many students feel they would not be able to have sex with just anybody without the alcohol, and that the
hookup often starts on the fraternity party dance floor. What is surprising is the intentional lack of emotions allowed after the sexual encounter
has taken place, with students deliberately acting cold toward each other after sex. Since no one wants to be tied down or viewed as clingy, needy,
or desperate, all partners act as if the other person doesn’t exist, which leads to doubts about why the hookup happened in the first place.
Wade does a solid job explaining the pros and cons of this new culture and includes historical data that shows how it evolved from the shift in
family dynamics following the Industrial Revolution. The most interesting perspectives come from the journal entries written by students, in
which they admit to wanting an emotionally charged relationship with someone but don’t want the stigma of being
“uncool” or of losing the opportunity to “live their sexual lives freely.” An eye-opening, conversationstarting
examination of sex on the American college campus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lisa Wade: AMERICAN HOOKUP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551437&it=r&asid=cb27f8ec38f15e5250d3251000262c1b. Accessed 22 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551437
---
6/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Wade, Lisa: AMERICAN HOOKUP
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wade, Lisa AMERICAN HOOKUP Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 1, 10 ISBN: 978-0-393-28509-3
How and why American college students are engaging in nonintimate one-night stands.Although students on college campuses profess to be
having a lot of sex, according to Wade's (Sociology/Occidental Coll.; co-author: Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, 2014, etc.) research,
"today's students boast no more sexual partners than their parents did at their age." The difference is the culture surrounding the intimacy, a topic
the author thoroughly and perceptively explores. Using in-depth research and multiple surveys from hetero, bi, trans, and queer students of all
ethnic and economic levels from colleges across the country, Wade delves into the new hookup culture, which allows students access to sex but
can leave them feeling anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed. It comes as no surprise that drunkenness and sex often go hand in hand, that many
students feel they would not be able to have sex with just anybody without the alcohol, and that the hookup often starts on the fraternity party
dance floor. What is surprising is the intentional lack of emotions allowed after the sexual encounter has taken place, with students deliberately
acting cold toward each other after sex. Since no one wants to be tied down or viewed as clingy, needy, or desperate, all partners act as if the other
person doesn't exist, which leads to doubts about why the hookup happened in the first place. Wade does a solid job explaining the pros and cons
of this new culture and includes historical data that shows how it evolved from the shift in family dynamics following the Industrial Revolution.
The most interesting perspectives come from the journal entries written by students, in which they admit to wanting an emotionally charged
relationship with someone but don't want the stigma of being "uncool" or of losing the opportunity to "live their sexual lives freely." An eyeopening,
conversation-starting examination of sex on the American college campus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wade, Lisa: AMERICAN HOOKUP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329187&it=r&asid=4d2501059b7133d7b016785b39632f57. Accessed 22 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466329187
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Wade, Lisa. American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on
Campus
Rebekah Kati
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p102.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Wade, Lisa. American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. Norton. Jan. 2017. 288p. notes, index. ISBN 9780393285093. $26.95; ebk.
ISBN 9780393285109. SOC SCI
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Using case studies, informational interviews, articles from student newspapers, and publicly available data, Wade (sociology, Occidental Coll.;
Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions) explores "hookup culture" on college and university campuses. Hookup culture is defined as the
expectation that students will have an abundance of casual sex in college, and that this is part of the "whole college experience." First, Wade
explores the history and sociology of sex and dating to provide context for the prevalence of promiscuity among college students. She then shows
how hookups happen, including the strong influence of alcohol, and how they affect participants' social status. Subsequent chapters tell how race,
socioeconomic status, religion, and sexual orientation impact students' experiences. LGBTQ relationships are mentioned briefly, as the majority
of study subjects are heterosexual. Additionally, Wade considers students who opt out of the behavior and feel alienated from their peers. The
examination ends with an investigation of student relationships after graduation. VERDICT A fascinating and heavy study into the social lives of
college students. Recommended for anyone interested in college life or sexuality studies.--Rebekah Kati, Durham, NC
Kati, Rebekah
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kati, Rebekah. "Wade, Lisa. American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 102+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413047&it=r&asid=9799ebf6139dcb74983dcda66ac994fb. Accessed 22 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413047
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American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus
Lisa Wade. Norton, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-393-28509-3
Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College, reframes the conversation about casual sex on college campuses today with a sharp, canny
report on how hookup culture has become a new norm of American campus life ("It's more than just a behavior; it's the climate"), and why its
sexual dynamics should be cause for concern. Wade includes firsthand accounts from her research subjects (her students from the two American
liberal arts colleges where she's taught), who report in fresh and candid language on their experiences. She groups them into "abstainers,"
"dabblers," "strivers," and "enthusiasts." Both the media and the students themselves overestimate how much sex is happening on campus, and
this leaves those who aren't having sex (intentionally or not) feeling left out. The price of the perception, Wade notes, is high: the entrenchment of
gender stereotypes, insistent heterocentrism, punishing competition among women for male approval, and the prevalence of sexual violence.
Wade writes engagingly, and the research is historically grounded (though the history is sketched swiftly and with broad strokes); her conclusions
won't surprise anyone, but the numerous student voices she includes set her book apart from others on the topic. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616191&it=r&asid=b3a29cbd04c50767b8d41e9ea68be929. Accessed 22 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616191
Review: ‘American Hookup’ Gives College Sex Culture a Failing Grade
Books of The Times
By JENNIFER SENIOR JAN. 18, 2017
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College sex, it turns out, is not so very different from the hotel food in that old Jewish joke made famous by “Annie Hall”: terrible, and in such small portions.
Lisa Wade opens “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus” with a cascade of statistics that says as much. The average graduating senior has hooked up just eight times in four years, or once per semester. Almost one-third of college students never hook up at all. Those who do report mixed feelings about the experience, with one in three saying that intimate relationships in the past year have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle.”
“In addition,” Ms. Wade writes, “there is a persistent malaise: a deep, indefinable disappointment.”
After such a sober, resolutely nonsensationalist introduction, the reader expects that Ms. Wade, a sociologist at Occidental College, will continue with a sober, resolutely nonsensationalist discussion of sex and the single student.
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But the pages that immediately follow paint a more lurid picture, giving the distinct impression that college kids are fornicating willy-nilly, like so many bunnies in a hutch. One of the very problems Ms. Wade bemoans throughout her book — how the media peddles “salacious stories” about partying students obsessed with casual sex — is one she unwittingly replicates in her own pages, especially early on.
Chapter 1, which outlines the “anatomy of the hookup,” starts in a dorm, where two women are applying frescoes of makeup to their faces and cantilevering their breasts into skimpy outfits, “going for a classy stripper vibe.” The theme of tonight’s party: burlesque. The women, obviously, are encouraged to dress like harlots. Everyone is encouraged to get wasted. These gatherings often devolve into orgiastic mosh pits of bumping and grinding, with men approaching their quarry from behind, freely given “license to grope.” It’s just a matter of time before the party reaches its “gross stage.”
You really don’t want to be there for the gross stage.
Readers sit for a long time with this information, contemplating it in the same kind of muzzy, Jell-O-shot haze that befuddles the students they’re reading about. What are we to make of this? Is Ms. Wade suggesting that this is what college is like now, everywhere?
Photo
Lisa Wade, author of “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus.” Credit Babs Evangelista
Unless readers are acquainted with other books or reporting on this subject, they might also be forgiven for wondering if college students still have romantic relationships. The answer is yes. (Many, in fact. It’s just that most started as hookups.) But Ms. Wade doesn’t say so until Page 145, whereas Kathleen A. Bogle’s “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus” — the best-known book on this topic, published in 2008 — answers this question on Page 1.
Creating such confusion was clearly not Ms. Wade’s intention. She set out to clarify the mating rituals of the modern college campus. Her theory, ultimately, is simple: If sex is causing students anxiety and consternation, the problem is not the hookup itself (a nebulous term, incidentally, which only 40 percent of the time seems to refer to intercourse). It’s the culture surrounding the hookup, which is retro, hetero, blotto and — at moments — worryingly psycho.
Ms. Wade is no prude. She recognizes the positive aspects of the culture she’s studying, seeing it as an outgrowth of many progressive social movements, which collectively gave students “a joyous sense of liberation” when it came to sex. Yet she worries that our own mores haven’t evolved enough to make hookup culture humane or safe. Men still control love and pleasure in this new world, turning women into desperate, anxious rivals. Throw in booze, and you’ve got a recipe for all kinds of selfishness, ugliness and depredation.
These are not exactly original insights. But Ms. Wade’s research, drawn from data she personally collected and a range of supplementary sources, does convey exceptionally well the perverse callousness of hookup culture.
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The hookup is predicated on indifference. Betraying any hint of emotion, especially if you’re a woman, could mean you aren’t independent and modern. The minute people hook up, therefore, they distance themselves from each other, so as not to seem clingy, needy. “If students were good friends, they should act like acquaintances,” Ms. Wade explains. “If they were acquaintances, they should act like strangers.”
She tells the story of two students, Farah and Tiq, who can’t admit they have feelings for each other, even though they’ve been sexually intimate a number of times.
“Do you like like me?” Tiq finally screws up the courage to ask.
“No,” Farah lies.
Their drama plays out like “The Remains of the Day,” only in hoodies and with lots of weed.
Yet throughout “American Hookup,” I was dogged by a low-level hum of uncertainty, never quite sure how oppressive the insipid parties are, or how widespread the writhing bacchanals. Is it the same on campuses large and small? And is there really no way to lead a life outside this nonsense?
If there is, Ms. Wade says disappointingly little about it. Considering that one-third of students are “abstainers,” to use her word, you would hope that at least one-sixth of her book would be about them.
But it isn’t. In her one chapter on abstainers, she implies that those who don’t participate in the hookup scene aren’t really opting out; they’re being shoved out because they never truly belonged — they’re people of color, gay or working-class.
It’s important to note that hookup culture can actively exclude minorities. But the culture ignores others, too, and still others surely ignore it — the shy, the nerds, the hobbyists whose passions and enthusiasms might instead guide their lives. Ms. Wade almost never discusses whether there might be thriving alternative cultures for anyone at the margins. If anything, she suggests the opposite — that marginalized kids are so isolated that they don’t even make one another’s acquaintance.
Yet in her penultimate chapter, she mentions that a number of students in her sample started socializing differently once they’d entered sophomore year and made real friends. Or gotten down to the actual business of studying.
She suggests, in other words, that there are other ways on campus to live and to be.
She revisits a woman named Celeste, who, after many unfulfilling encounters, has finally found a boyfriend. “Their hookup didn’t start at a party,” Ms. Wade writes. “It started in the library.”
But is that even a hookup? It sounds suspiciously like something people did before hookups existed at all.
Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @jenseniorny
American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus
By Lisa Wade
304 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
A version of this review appears in print on January 19, 2017, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Giving the Sexual Culture on Campus a Failing Grade. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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W.W. Norton
SOCIETY
How American Colleges Became Bastions of Sex, Booze and Entitlement
Lisa Wade
Jan 06, 2017
IDEASWade is an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College and the author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus.
Thanks to everything from pop culture to college propaganda, when students arrive on campuses today they expect—with varying levels of inclination and trepidation—to have a really good time. Many assume they’ll encounter, as one student featured in American Hookup put it apprehensively, a “big four-year orgy.” “Like most people I knew,” she wrote, “I believed that college was a wild, sexual party scene, and that to fit in, you had to be into alcohol, weed, and sex.”
It’s taken for granted today that college is supposed to be fun and that sex is part of why. “The best years of your life,” is how another student put it. “Fun takes priority over sleep and rest,” she insisted, forgetting to mention studying altogether. It’s an odd way to think about an institution dedicated to occupational training, if you think about.
How did college become fun? And how did casual sex, of all things, become synonymous with enjoying one’s higher education? To really understand, we have to go back, back three hundred years at least, to when college was not fun at all.
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During the colonial era in the U.S., college was, as one historian described it, a “veritable straitjacket of petty rules.” Essentially every detail of students’ lives was controlled: how they kept their room, how they dressed and wore their hair, what they could do, when and what they ate, where they could go and when. There were substantial penalties for deviance and they came swiftly.
At the time, most students were relatively humble middle-class men studying to be ministers like their professors. They were generally obedient, but as the eighteenth century came to a close, colleges were increasingly filled with wealthy sons of elite families. These young men weren’t as interested in higher education as they were in a diploma that would ratify their families’ hoarding of wealth and power. Predictably, they had a much lower tolerance for submission.
As a result, higher education became a battleground. Between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s, there were student protests and uprisings at every school in New England and most of those in the South, with students objecting to everything from the quality of the food to the rigidity of schedules to the content of the curriculum. They sang, yelled, and blew horns late into the night to torture their sleeping professors. They set fire to school buildings, smoked faculty out of their offices, and rolled flaming tar barrels across campus. At Yale students detonated a bomb, occupied buildings, and drove back a local militia. People got killed in campus riots. Somebody lost an eye.
Expulsions were common. After one riot at Harvard, 62 percent of the graduating class was expelled. Princeton once expelled more than half its student body. In an effort to make the punishment as powerful a deterrent as possible, college presidents agreed among themselves not to admit students who had been kicked out of other institutions. There was one lone exception: Eliphalet Nott, the president of Union College in Schenectady, New York. Defying the consensus, Nott took in the errant sons of the other colleges, which may be one reason why, in the year 1825, Union College became home to one of the biggest rebellions of all: Kappa Alpha, the first social fraternity.
Greek life is thoroughly embedded in higher education today, but at first the two were at odds. The men who started fraternities did so specifically to cultivate values that their professors opposed. They rejected the religious values held by their pious professors and lauded the skills they believed would be useful for winning in this life, not the next. Instead of humility, equality, and morality, fraternities promoted status, exclusion, and indulgence. At a time when the declaration that “all men are created equal” was still freshly penned—however imperfectly it was applied—fraternity men lauded hierarchy. They used their clubs to isolate themselves from and claim superiority over “blue skins,” their slur for their middle-class peers. Their attitude was summed up by one nineteenth-century Virginian. “I am an aristocrat,” he said. “I love liberty; I hate equality.” Fraternities, with their rules about who could and couldn’t join, seemed decidedly undemocratic, even unAmerican.
Infused with a rebelliousness that was their birthright, fraternities incubated a lifestyle that revolved around recklessness and irresponsibility. Members encouraged one another to neglect their studies and mocked those who were earnest about getting an education, disparagingly calling academically hardworking students “digs” and “grinds.” Nicholas Syrett, the scholar who penned the definitive history of white fraternities, wrote that by the early 1900s it was “glaringly obvious” that, “for the most part, fraternity men did not study much, dedicating themselves instead to extracurricular activities, camaraderie, athletics, and having fun.”
To these preoccupations, fraternities would eventually add sexual conquest. Before the 1900s, fraternity men had sex mostly with prostitutes, poor women, and women they enslaved. Early fraternity men enjoyed these activities—“I did get one of the nicest pieces of ass some day or two ago,” wrote one brother to another in 1857—but it wasn’t a game. The women they had sex with weren’t their social equals, so they had little power to negotiate sexual terms. Since men needed no skill to get access to the women’s bodies, there was little basis for masculine rivalry.
By 1930, though, women made up 40 percent of the national collegiate population and college was becoming a place where young men and women of the same class mingled relatively unsupervised. This changed the way fraternity men thought about sex. Once recreational, it became increasingly competitive. Extracting sexual favors from women who weren’t supposed to give them out became a primary way that frat boys earned the respect and admiration of their brothers.
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Partly in response, the criteria for membership shifted to reflect the social and sexual functions of fraternity life as much as its economic elitism. As a dean at Princeton put it in 1931, frats still preferred to pledge rich men, but they mostly just wanted members who weren’t “personally unattractive” or, in the parlance of the time, “wet”: “The question of family will enter in only if he wishes to make the most exclusively snobbish upper-crust fraternities or clubs,” the dean wrote, “and even there family cannot prevail over ‘wetness.’”
The modern frat boy was born.
By this time popular interest in college life had reached a fever pitch and the fraternity man was at the center of the story. His way of doing college was so frequently depicted, so relentlessly glamorized, and so ceaselessly centered, that it had become impossible to imagine college without him. And, rather quickly—and here is where his story meets the stories of so many college students in America today—his way of doing college became the way of doing college.
For a while, college administrators continued to try to control students, employing curfews, adult residence hall monitors, punishments for drinking and sexual activity, and other rules and practices meant to protect students from themselves. Rules were especially strict for women. Eventually, the baby boomers put an end to that control. Chafing under the restrictions on their freedom, they demanded to be regarded as the legal adults they were, and they got their wish.
When Animal House was released in 1978, the alcohol industry saw an opportunity and aggressively ramped up marketing on campus. They started advertising in school newspapers, erecting massive inflatable beer cans at sporting events, promoting drink specials at nearby bars and clubs, and hiring students as representatives of their brands to give beer away for free. They spent millions in the 1980s to convince students that “it’s naturally part of college life to drink.”
Between the vision of college life promulgated by the alcohol industry and the founding of Kappa Alpha more than 150 years before, college life had steadily transformed. Nothing emerged to stop or slow the march toward more and more fun, until 1984. That year the U.S. government initiated an effort to reduce highway deaths, informing states that it would cut their transportation budget allocation if they didn’t raise the legal drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one. By 1987, all states had complied and campuses were held accountable for policing underage drinking in residence halls.
Still, collegiate life was far too drenched in drink to be derailed by such a little thing. College drinking didn’t slow down during Prohibition, and it didn’t slow down in the 1980s. The new drinking age succeeded only in driving much of the drinking off-campus. Today, if students want to party—and they do—they’re probably going to do it in rented houses, bars and clubs, sorority functions at local businesses, stadium parking lots, or fraternities.
In some ways, residential colleges today aren’t that different from the colonial colleges of the 1700s. They still coordinate groups of young people, organizing their lives in sometimes rigid ways. Many colleges are, in other words, still “total institutions,” planned entities that collect large numbers of like individuals, cut them off from the wider society, and provide for all their needs.
Because many colleges are total institutions and hookup culture is totally institutionalized, colleges don’t just control what students learn, when they eat, where they sleep, and how they exercise; they also have an influence on whether and how they have sex. Thanks to the last few hundred years, most colleges now offer a very specific kind of nightlife, controlled in part by the same set of privileged students that brought partying to higher education in the first place, and designed to promote, as much as possible, the “big four-year orgy” that students both desire and dread.Reprinted from American Hookup by Lisa Wade. Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Wade. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
BOOK REVIEW
"American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus" by Lisa Wade
Jennifer Levin Mar 10, 2017 (0)
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W.W. Norton & Company, 304 pages
According to sociologist Lisa Wade, students are “hooking up” with drunken abandon at colleges and universities across America. But what is hooking up? It varies. It might be sex with your best guy friend or oral sex with a stranger. Or it could be what used to be referred to by older generations as “heavy petting.” It’s best not to try to pin down a precise definition, though, because in hookup culture that will definitely earn you a reputation as “needy.”
Wade writes that it is mainly the culture around sex and dating on college campuses that has changed in recent years. Though college kids today are not actually having more sex than they were two, three, or even four generations ago, they are enjoying it less while talking about it more. Relationships are out and casual sex is in. In the world that Wade studied in preparation for the book, going out on prearranged dates in order to get to know someone before you sleep with them is a thing of the past. Now, hookups begin on the dance floors of bars, fraternity parties, or school-sponsored events, where “women who are willing press their backs and backsides against men’s bodies and dance rhythmically.” The goal is to get back to a dorm room. After that, the proper protocol is to ignore each other for several days or weeks so as not to appear as if you need or desire anything from the other person. Whoever texts first loses.
For American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Wade consulted numerous studies, surveys, and articles. She conducted primary research on undergraduates enrolled in an introductory sociology course and a sexuality-themed writing intensive between 2010 and 2015 at two liberal arts colleges. Students were required to keep journals about what they observed of hookup culture. They were invited to write as much or as little as they wanted about their own experiences. These firsthand accounts give life to the book’s narrative, which is at times droll. Wade’s research took her to 24 colleges and universities in 18 states. Most of the schools offered Greek life or similarly structured party scenes, and most also had athletic programs. Wade takes a neutral but open-minded tone throughout, saving her moralistic concern for the emotional ramifications of participating in hookup culture, in which people are mean to one another as part of a larger game plan. When the goal is to “get some” from people you don’t really know, treating each other terribly is allowed and even encouraged.
“Once sex is over, the rule is to go from hot to cold,” Wade writes. “As one student explained, ‘The two worst things a boy can say to a girl is that she is fat or that she is clingy.’ Clingy, desperate, and needy are extremely effective insults, invoking all the things that students don’t want to be: weak, insecure, unable to control one’s emotions, and powerless to separate sex from feelings.” In the aftermath of a hookup, “Do not make anything a thing,” says one interview subject. Though young women often get the raw end of the deal when it comes to being treated respectfully — and being sexually satisfied — in hookup culture, Wade reveals coeds to be fully capable of objectifying men. Prospective hookups are discussed purely in terms of social advantage by some women, and young men’s bodies are described pejoratively during the morning-after play-by-play, in which women include the same intimate details that have traditionally been considered locker-room talk among men.
Wade explains that not everyone participates in hookup culture. Some dabble for a bit and lose interest, others don’t desire casual interludes, and still others are loners who don’t party. A handful of her student diarists never felt bereft by hookup culture and enjoyed it without shame or regret, while another segment experienced the worst of it in the form of sexual assault — a topic to which she devotes a chapter. Though students at all but the most religious colleges have some form of hookup culture, not all college party scenes are identical, so though the book is almost ridiculously entertaining, it does have its limitations. It would have been interesting to know if students’ hookup behavior differed by academic major, for instance. Wade does note that students participate in hookup culture more readily in the freshman and sophomore years and become less interested as their involvement in academic life increases.
Wade’s primary concern is the decoupling of relationships and respect. “Students … conclude that non-monogamy involves no kindness at all. …Students see two categories of engagement — hard and easy, caring and careless, emotional and emotionless — and nothing in between. But this isn’t as functional as it might sound. It’s one thing, after all, to have casual sexual encounters with someone with whom you are not in love, but it’s entirely another to do so with someone who may have no positive regard for you at all. In hookup culture, it can be hard to tell the difference.”
Hookup Culture: The Unspoken Rules Of Sex On College Campuses
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February 14, 201712:01 AM ET
RHAINA COHEN
RENEE KLAHR
Shankar Vedantam
SHANKAR VEDANTAM
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MAGGIE PENMAN
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TARA BOYLE
JENNIFER SCHMIDT
CHLOE CONNELLY
Today's college students aren't necessarily having more sex than previous generations, but the culture that permeates hookups on campus has changed.
mark peterson/Corbis via Getty Images
Few topics send the media into a panic like the idea of hookup culture on college campuses. But are college students actually having more sex than their parents did a generation ago? Research suggests the answer is no.
Lisa Wade, a sociologist at Occidental College, says something has changed, though: In today's hookup culture, developing an emotional attachment to a casual sex partner is one of the biggest breaches of social norms.
For her new book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Wade spent 5 years investigating hookup culture on American colleges and universities. In this culture, she says, there's a dichotomy between meaningless and meaningful sex, and students have to go out of their way to "perform meaninglessness." They have to prove that they're not emotionally attached to their sex partners, and in fact that they care less than the other person.
This leads to seemingly contradictory situations, such as people who only have sex with partners they're not interested in, and friends being meaner to each other after developing a sexual relationship.
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This Valentine's Day, Lisa Wade talks with us about hookup culture and investigates the complex social rules surrounding casual sex on American college campuses.
Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, and Renee Klahr. Our intern is Chloe Connelly, and our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.
January 2017
AMERICAN HOOKUP
A look at modern sex culture at college
BookPage review by Kelly Blewett
College students aren’t having as much sex as everyone thinks, professor Lisa Wade writes in American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. Instead, most students are just talking about hooking up—and participating in a set of rituals that goes along with it.
Wade describes the cycle: pregaming in dorm rooms, dirty dancing at parties and then pairing off in bedrooms where actual sex may or may not occur. The next day, the events are discussed obsessively with friends. The pair who hooked up follow rigid rules, avoiding each other to prove the hookup was meaningless. The next weekend, the whole thing starts again.
To compile specifics about sexual behavior, Wade relied on journals prepared by three classes of freshmen. These journals are predictably scintillating. It’s important to remember, though, that they were prepared for a professor and may therefore be regarded with some skepticism. Wade complements the journals with data from national surveys, dissertation studies and journalistic accounts.
As a teacher at a residential college, I was not totally persuaded by Wade’s representation of sex culture on campuses—there are many students who opt into social circles with other kinds of rituals, and there’s more nuance and complexity in campus culture. Still, American Hookup could be a helpful conversation starter—and Wade’s takeaways about how to make the culture of hooking up kinder and more compassionate are well supported and important.
Review - American Hookup
The New Culture of Sex on Campus
by Lisa Wade
W. W. Norton, 2017
Review by Christian Perring
Feb 7th 2017 (Volume 21, Issue 6)
Lisa Wade's American Hookup is one of the more thoughtful books about the sexual lives of young people in the US today. Her basic message is that students on campus are very conscious of their reputations and experience peer pressure to engage in sexual interactions with each other, but they are scared of intimacy and real relationships, so they get drunk in order to make it socially acceptable to hook up. She bases her survey both on interviews with college students she had in her classes, and also on other results from researchers. She argues that for the most part this continues a tradition of young women lacking power in their lives, and that it does not help men that much either. She considers the claims by some feminists that hookup culture is a way for young women to get sexual pleasure and still have time to pursue their careers, but she is not fully convinced. Wade argues that the current situation is not actually as hedonistic and wild as many portray it: statistics show that young people are having less sex than they often imagine their peers are. She also notes that there's a diversity of experience, with some people abstaining from sex altogether, and others engaging in a variety of kinds of sexual experience.
American Hookup was released a month ago, and so far it has received little of the attention that Mary Jo Sales' sensationalistic American Girls or Peggy Orenstein's more sensible Girls & Sex got. Maybe it is because the topic has been exhausted or that people are now obsessed by the current political debacle, but it is a shame, since Wade's book is more useful than many similar ones. Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College, and while this book is very much for a general readership, it is informed by facts and argument worth investigating.
‘American Hookup,’ by Lisa Wade
By Gayle Brandeis Published 11:39 am, Thursday, February 2, 2017
"American Hookup" Photo: Norton
Photo: Norton
IMAGE 1 OF 2 "American Hookup"
It’s happening on college campuses all across the country: the same multi-stage, highly gendered hookup. Sociology professor Lisa Wade breaks it down in her engaging, illuminating study, “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus”:
Step 1: Pregame: Get dolled up (if you’re a woman.) Get drunk (all genders.)
Step 2: Grind: Dance (if you’re a woman.) Rub your junk against a woman’s trunk (if you’re a man.)
Step 3: Initiate a hookup: Turn to face the guy grinding on you (if you’re a woman, and you’ve received hand gestures from your friends that indicate that the guy is hookup-worthy.)
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Step 4: Do ... something: Anything from kissing to full-on sex. The term “hookup” is ambiguous that way.
Step 5: Establish meaninglessness: The hardest step, according to Wade, who further breaks this step down:
Step 5-A: Be (or claim to be) plastered: “If students are being careless,” writes Wade, “they can’t be held responsible for what they did, but neither can they be held responsible for who they did.”
Step 5-B: Cap your hookups: Multiple hookups with the same person could lead that person (usually the woman, men stereotypically fear) to “catch feelings” and think a relationship is forming.
Step 5-C: Create emotional distance: “The rule,” writes Wade, “is to be less close after a hookup, at least for a time.” And “plenty of students feel uncomfortable with this proposition, but hookup culture has a way of enforcing compliance.” Compliance, and often unkindness.
Wade notes that even though the hookup is supposedly “a fun, harmless romp,” it has “oddly strict parameters. It’s spontaneous, but scripted. ... It is, in short, a feat of social engineering.”
Wade offers brief but fascinating looks into the history of courtship in America and the history of the American college that, taken together, helped engineer today’s campus culture. She writes, “If the young people living it up in cities in the 1920s are the hookup generation’s ideological grandparents, the gay men of the 1970s might be their two dads.”
Although it owes much to feminism and gay liberation, however, most campus hookup culture is not very woman-friendly and tends to be predominantly heteronormative, as well as predominantly white, exclusionary for students of color, working-class students, queer students, disabled and neurologically different students, and women whose bodies don’t fit a narrow definition of “hot.”
Not all students actively hook up — Wade divides students into “abstainers,” “dabblers,” “strivers” and “enthusiasts,” with enthusiasts making up less than a quarter of all students studied — and statistically, students aren’t having any more sex than their parents did at their age; still, no student is safe from hookup culture, which Wade calls an “occupying force,” a force that fosters cruelty, pits women against one another and divorces students from their emotions so profoundly, many of them feel numb.
“Enthusiasts” find hookup culture freeing, fun and empowering, but for many others, it can lead to depression, isolation and self-doubt, as well as, most disturbingly, sexual assault. Wade notes that hookup culture is “a rape culture, a set of ideas and practices that naturalize, justify, and glorify sexual pressure, coercion, and violence.”
Wade doesn’t often inject herself into the narrative, but this is no dry, academic study — her lively, natural voice comes through in lines like, “So, yeah, there’s an orgasm gap on college campuses” when she discusses the privileging of men’s pleasure, and “Welcome to dating, kids! It’s a thing grownups do that is weird and miserable” when she discusses her students’ difficulty in transitioning from hooking up to dating after graduation.
It’s clear she cares deeply for, and worries about, her students. And she’s no puritan; she has a sex-positive approach, and wants her students to be able to have fun, safe, satisfying sex, if they choose to partake. She wants the same for all of us.
For this study isn’t just about the bubble of college campuses — what she’s writing about affects our wider culture, too. “The corrosive elements of hookup culture are in all of our lives,” Wade writes. “In our workplaces, in our politics and the media, within our families and friendships, and, yes, in bars and bedrooms. ... It makes no sense, then, to shake our fingers at college students. They are us. If we want to fix hookup culture, we have to fix American culture.”
When we have a new president who has exhibited the worst of hookup culture — a culture where groping and denigrating “locker room talk” about women are normalized — it feels all the more imperative for us to transform hookup culture into a sexual culture that is more inclusive, more equal in its distribution of pleasure, more kind. “Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, change has to happen collectively,” Wade reminds us. “American Hookup” is an important wake-up call.
Gayle Brandeis’ most recent novel is “The Book of Live Wires.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com
American Hookup
The New Culture of Sex on Campus
By Lisa Wade
(Norton; 304 pages; $26.95)