Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I must admit that this book was sometimes very hard for me to read, because it hit way to close to home. I am a 37 year old black male and I have definitely seen a change in the landscape when it comes to relationships in today's culture. I was brought up overseas and in a home and culture where a man was supposed to treat a woman with respect and dignity, get to know her and know her passions and dreams before taking her to bed. When I came back to the United States in 1994, I realized that I was totally unprepared for the casual nature of sex and the way many women basically treated men as boy-toys who were just there to fulfill a need at that particular time. This is not to say thjat all women are like this, as the book eloquently shows, but most women are totally UNPREPARED and shocked when they do meet someone who shows chivarly and is old fashioned in their values and wants to actually get to know them. It is almost always assumed that to want to know someone is to try and "tie them down" and prevent them from being able to be emotionally free from you at any time. But this is the irony, and "unhooked" tells the story so well, being unhooked does not actually prevent emotional bondage, it actually increases sadness and creates a level of emptiness that surfaces later on.

This is a MUST for all especially if you are concerned about the way sex has become such a casual entity in our society. THere is enough blame to go around and is not simply a matter of "these kids don't have moral". Read the book and be sobered and humbled....

I can't stress enough how accurate a portrayal this book is of most modern young women. As a 28-year old woman who has just finished medical school but never had a lasting relationship because I always felt my studies should come first (and so I've been told all my life), this book hit very close to home.

I always figured it was something wrong with ME. I wasn't able to take a step back and gain broader perspective on the messages that have surrounded me almost from birth. No, I'm not trying to sound like a victim, but it's crucial to know how many seemingly small factors can come together to form a larger problem.

And I know it's not just me... For example, my best friend (who recently got her MBA) was sitting a bar and chatting with this guy she was really interested in, both physically & mentally, for hours. He hinted that she should come back to his apartment with her, but she didn't take the hints (or says she didn't). The next day she came to me, asking, "Why couldn't I just have sex with him??" There is a lot of confusion in young women today... Not only in terms of balancing academic/career/extracurricular goals with personal relationships, but also the pressure to BE overtly sexual and treat men disposably while at the same time really desiring a deeper emotional connection.

I think Stepp is right... Some of us, through a combination of factors, aren't equipped with the tools (due to lack of experience, and being actively influenced away from experience with messages like "There'll be plenty of time to date after <college, grad school, whatever> is done.") to adequately integrate a loving relationship into our lives. There are quotes in this book, much like the above, that I have heard since early adolescence. There are other lines that I have used almost verbatim as excuses to guys as to why I couldn't have an emotionally vulnerable relationship with them.

I can see how many people will think I'm over-exaggerating. Or how Stepp is overstating either the prevalence of the hooking up culture or the factors that contribute to it. But I promise you, she's not. Of course, what you read won't apply to ALL young women (there are no universalities), but for a great many of us, it's completely accurate. I can't tell you how helpful it's been to me to realize that I'm not alone in this.

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.

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.

Stepp takes on the daunting task of understanding and explaining the "Hook Up" culture. She explores this culture through the experiences and voices of several young women, most of whom are upper-middle class and white. Stepp documents a cultural shift experienced by both boys and girls where love and romance are deliberately and systematically decoupled from the broader range of sexual behavior. The main characters in her book, highly successful young women who attend elite private high schools and universities, have taken control over their life circumstances and vow never to be bounded by traditional gender stereotypes. Several of these girls, interestingly enough, passionately reject their mothers' role in "traditional marriages" and are committed to making it in the world, on their own if necessary.

Control over their sexuality and sexual behavior is intimately linked to their conceptual notions of liberation. These young successful women are committed to using their sexuality in highly instrumental ways, most directly to derive personal and immediate pleasure alone. Their sexuality, along with that of the young men (and occasional female partner), are merely instruments of immediate personal pleasure. Their personal relationships are imbedded in a lifestyle of excessively dangerous alcohol abuse and risky sexual behavior. Stepp considers in detail the individual and cultural consequences of these shifts.

The most alarming part of Stepp's story relates to these girls' perceptions of empowerment and liberation. To be "empowered," these girls passionately reject traditional feminine qualities of love and emotional attachment. To fall in love is to act like "silly girls." In their world, girls who become attached to sexual partners deserve to be emotionally victimized because they should have known to avoid emotional attachments connected to sexual encounters. In the end, the reader gets a picture of girls who are working hard to adopt the most extreme and veiled characterized of the very men that the women's movement seemingly rejects.

Many critics have argued this book amounts to conservative propaganda - nothing could be further from the truth. Readers interested in understanding the unintended consequences of the women's movement, the social relationships of young people, and the impact of their own parenting skills should read this. It is an incredibly important story.

Good non-fiction, to my mind, should be 1) fun and engaging to read, much like a good novel, and 2) informative and enlightening. _Unhooked_ more than satisfies both of these requirements. The stories are told in a way that compels you to keep reading; each has a plot. And I learned so much from this book about a campus culture that was just beginning to develop when I graduated from college in 1993. I was particularly struck by Stepp's dead-on observation that young women have been taught to put achievement first and not to value relationships -- that "love can wait." But of course they still have sex, so sex becomes unconnected from relationships. Stepp's commentary, I believe, adds to rather than takes away from the stories, providing very needed context. One of the best books I have read this year.

I read this book because I have three children - all male - and I wanted to better understand the dating landscape they are now facing as young men. I found the author's approach to writing and research refreshing and easy to read. The message, however, horrified me. My husband and I have tried our best to raise our children to be honorable young men and treat girls/young women with the utmost respect. From listening to my young men talk about the young females their age and from my reading of this book, it's clear to me that young MEN need to be protected from these young females! To be "used" as nothing more than a tool for someone else's sexual gratification is deeply damaging to one's self esteem irrespective of gender. I feel deep compassion for any female "hooking up" because it's clear they are engaged in self-destructive behavior with long-term, perhaps lifelong, consequences to their self esteem and sense of self worth. And why? So they can be more biologically like males? If evolution is what these young females are attempting to alter, good luck, but don't drag well-intended, repectful, loving, young men down with you. This book is a warning shot across the bow for BOTH genders!

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.

I believe that this is a book that most modern young women will be able to identify with. What must be kept in mind while reading it is that is it not written by a psychologist but rather a journalist. Sessions Stepp does indeed cite journal articles, professionals, and research to supplement her findings thus giving more scientific validity to her own research. It's a worthwhile read whether you're a parent trying to understand your daughter in the context of the hook-up culture or a young woman confused by the hookup culture yourself.

As the parent of a sixteen year old daughter, and because I volunteer at the local high school, I was very interested in what this book had to say. I wanted to know more about hooking up; the culture, causes, signs and demographics, as well as what can be done to possibly prevent it from occurring.

At the high school we have had instances of what, in retrospect, was behavior by students that mimicked the "hooking up" culture. The parents who knew about the incidents, as well as most administrators, were blissfully unaware that what were we seeing in some students was this phenomena. When the incidents occurred, we thought they were simply girls who were, as they were described when I went to school,[...].

When I went to college in the 70s, things were not nearly as loose as things now, however they were less stringent than the author remembers. While we didn't "hook up", there were more than a few one night stands and there was a lot of drinking going on. I fail to see how, on the college level, this culture is all that much worse than what we experienced, with the exception of the presence of diseases now that we didn't have to contend with back then.

I tend to agree with the author that this behavior, in high school, is dangerous and somewhat self destructive, but in college the students are moving quickly toward adulthood, and if this is the way they want to behave then they should be allowed to. I have a hard time seeing how you would curb such behavior in college anyway.

Overall, I think the message is good, but the author's muddled writing tended to make it hard to see. She writes, in the beginning, about the girls, but interrupts the flow with commentary which makes it hard to follow the girl's stories. I would have preferred to see the case study, followed by the commentary. In addition, the author references back to previous experiences with other girls, further muddying the waters.

I think it's important for parents, as well as high school administrators to learn about this culture, but I'm not sure this is the best book for that purpose.