Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Kathy Dobie

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 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 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 hook-up 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 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 ), 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 it is such a commodity (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 . . . playing lacrosse . . . 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. 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, 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, unable to weather storms or to stomach second place or really to love at all.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Books (February 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489386
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489389
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,890 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll Be Hooked, February 27, 2007

By	Matt Fabian (Navasota, TEXAS United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I give this book 5 stars simply for shedding light on the new way in which teenagers and young adults view sex and relationships. The author says that for many young people today the concept of courtship or dating is antiquated. It has been replaced by the hookup.

The essence of hooking-up, which can be anything from kissing to intercourse, is that there are no strings attached. There is no relationship, only instant gratification. It is suppose to be primarily a physical act, devoid of emotions. There is usually alcohol involved. The author is clearly against the hooking-up culture. She is no Puritan when it comes to sex, but for her, physical intimacy should happen within a meaningful relationship.

The author interviewed high school and college girls to learn all about the hookup culture.

So why do girls hookup? Isn't that exactly what men want, easy sex? So why are girls giving it to them? According to the girls interviewed, they feel a sense of power at being able to use the guy. They are also too busy being star atheltes, straight A students, and pursuing their dreams (or their parents dream for them). Who has time for a boyfriend? Not these girls. In addition, they have seen their parents' marriages break up and cause all sorts of misery. Real relationships can cause pain, hookups can't, right? Well, not exactly.

There are fairly serious consequences to the hooking up culture: don't learn how to have real relationships, after-the-fact-regret, unprotected sex, creates an ideal situation for date rape, low self-esteem, inability to trust, etc.

The author's solutions to keeping your child from engaging in the hooking up lifestyle are nothing new. Parental involvment is essential. Girls with poor relationships with their father are far more likley to do it.

Even if you do not end up agreeing with the author's opinions on hooking up, it is still worth the read to get a glimpse into the personal lives of high school and college students. It is a very engaging book following the lives of young girls as they grow up in the 21st century.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Research is interesting, but much like the hookup the results unsatisfying, June 24, 2007

By	D. Parvin "dparv" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked is a well researched but ultimately unfulfilling book about the changes in sexual culture among today's adolescents and college students. While her original research is quite well done - there's enough here to qualify for an anthropology degree - and deserves 5 stars, once she ventures from the subject of teenagers having sex she badly overreaches. I take two stars off for the latter, giving it 3 overall.

Stepp is a writer for the Washington Post who has put in a substantial amount of work in the last few years on teenage sexuality, and like many other reporters decided to publish a book; Unhooked is the result. When she stays on the subject of teenagers and college students having sex and how the culture both differs from their parents' generation and has significant destructive aspects, this is a powerful book. To sum up her argument in a sentence, women under 25 are far more promiscuous, far more demanding sexually, and far less interested in relationships than their elders. Interview after interview points out how early girls start doing things that their parents took very seriously but they don't, how they are far more comfortable talking about it without social consequence, and how young women are now playing the same games that young men did all along - the "walk of shame" has been renamed the "stride of pride," and Stepp makes a pretty good argument that a good chunk of this comes from women "empowering" themselves. As a result, this generation of young women has largely postponed having meaningful relationships despite wanting the same thing their mothers did (albeit at a later age) - marriage and children. All this is very interesting stuff.

That's about half the book. It lags when she starts getting into the "whys" and "what can be done" parts, where Stepp has little research and doesn't do a particuarly good job of supporting her arguments. It's not that some of her conclusions don't make sense - particularly that many members of this generation have been babied and entitled beyond belief, and as she puts it "it might have been better to take them to church or a mosque" rather than wipe their knee every time they scraped it - but there's a good slug of academic research on the subject that Stepp doesn't incorporate, and as a result the policy part tends toward preaching rather than thoughtful discussion.

Another major problem here is that she focuses almost exclusively on the experience of young women, despite coming up with the conclusion that "young men are as dissatisfied with hooking up as young women." There is a strong sense of feminism gone awry here - a long section talks nostalgically about how men were once required to woo women, but doesn't discuss why perhaps men might not be nearly as interested in doing so given the major shifts in the roles between men and women over the last twenty years (which Stepp dismisses as a result that men can have a lot of sex a lot easier) - and a better book would have taken a long leap across the war of the sexes to figure out what young men were really thinking as well. It takes two to tango.

Still, the original research on this generation is worth a read, although parents probably shouldn't be rushing out to lock kids up until they're thirty as a result of reading this. Each generation scares their parents silly, and while there are certainly very, very good reasons to be scared about the "entitlement generation" there are other books that do a better job of explaining why their kids are doing what they're doing.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yikes! From feminists to Paris Hilton in one generation, March 17, 2007

By	Jeri Nevermind "loves to read" (Idaho) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Stepps's "Unhooked" could hardly be scarier.

She was the reporter for a story about 8th grade students where "as many as a dozen girls had been performing oral sex on two or three boys for most of the school year" (p 1). And not only was she the reporter, but "the school was my son's"(p 1).

She began digging deeper into the mores of this generation, and what she found was young women who were the beneficiaries of all that feminism from the 70's. Not to mention the endless smutty jokes on TV, Cosmo magazine, Madonna, and free condoms thrown from every school window.

It seems amazing to this generation that there was actually a debate back in the 50's about whether Lucy on "I Love Lucy" could use the word "pregnant". That there are people alive today who can remember a time when courtship was standard practice, when young men took girls on dates, after being warned by her parents to bring her back before 11 or the wolf pack would be released. Yeah, things have changed. But few older adults realize just how deeply the changes have gone.

The girls--yes, they are back to calling themselves girls--seem stuck in perpetual childishness. Rootless. Marriage, taking care of a baby, and the slow growth of learning to love and understand your mate, all are postponed. So is real adulthood. So, it can be argued, is character. They are a sad lot, with blunted emotions, and many seem incapable of forming deep attachments to anyone.

What is left is sex. Sex without love. Lesbian sex. Sex while drunk. Hooking up, the way to describe engaging in some sort of sex with a total stranger one doesn't expect to see again. Parties that are more like orgies than social events. Dating is now as dated as the horse and buggy on colleges, where pointless hook ups are all that is left.

When one professor asked his class at Duke, "'Tell me, how do you go from hooking up to wedding vows?'" Not a hand went up" (p 20). Apparently no one had thought of how to make an easy transition between the two. These are some of the brightest students in the country. Yet even for them the connection between hooking up and marriage seemed obscure. In Germany, as many as 40% of college educated women never marry. The statistics here are lurching in that direction as well.

In fact, we walked off the cliff a long time ago. There is not a single major civilization in written human history with an illegitimacy rate of over 30%. and where the divorce rate is 50%, and where most young children will experience part of their childhood with only one parent, with all the attendant problems with drug abuse, school problems and emotional disturbances. Can our civilization continue like this? Who knows? And what will happen to most of those young women who experience one sexual encounter after another? Will they ever be able to form a deep attachment to any one person?

Right now, stable families are a shrinking group. Sexual disease is rampant.

And the young women...the women who were supposed to be empowered by all this freedom are being harmed. They are lonely. Their lives are not as rich with love and relationships as were all previous generations. And all they've gotten in return is memories of drunken good times and maybe herpes.

"'It feels hopeless when I think about the culture here,'"(p 197)one young college student said.

No kidding.

Anyone interested in the subject will want to read Maggie Gallagher's "The Abolition of Marriage", an astounding book, with all the facts and statistics you will want to know about our cultural collapse.