The Review

Issue date: 2/27/07 Section: Mosaic

Media Credit: Courtesy of Laura Sessions Stepp [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: Courtesy of Laura Sessions Stepp [Click to enlarge]

She hovers over the bed, watching his sleeping form turn under the rumpled, sweaty covers. His chest slowly rises and falls, oblivious to the absence of her body in the narrow twin bed. She's dressed in last night's jeans and his plain, white undershirt, her hair in a messy ponytail and her make-up salvaged to the best of her ability.

As she listens to him breathe, she clutches a tiny scrap of paper in her hand, a 10-digit number scrawled by a shaky hand written across the off-white background. For a brief moment, she convinces herself to leave it next to his cell phone on the night stand. Then, coming to her senses, she crumples the slip and shoves it in her purse, knowing another meeting would never be more satisfying than last night's impromptu get-together.

She is 19 years old, yearning for romance but striving for independence. The voice of her mother encouraging her to get an education and start a career plays in a continuous loop to images of her parents' boring, lifeless marriage like a soundtrack to a movie.

She is a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a niece. She's the girl in last fall's Biology 104 lecture and the one who delivers DP Dough late at night.

She is another victim of the hook-up culture - a world in which girls have abandoned dating and turned to casual, non-committal sex - and the subject of The Washington Post feature writer Laura Sessions Stepp's new book, "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both."

"Unhooked," Stepp's third book, explores the growth of the hooking-up phenomenon, why it has virtually replaced dating and how it has affected the young women who she says are almost wholly responsible for its exponential growth in the past decade.

Stepp's book is based largely on the close relationships she formed with college and high school girls while researching her book at Duke University, George Washington University, a private high school in Virginia and two public high schools in the D.C. area. She also surveyed students at schools such as The College of New Jersey and Stanford University.

What she found was intelligent, young women who were willing, and in some cases eager, to sacrifice love on the altar of education.

"A hook-up's defining characteristic is the ability to unhook at any time," Stepp says, "which is why I chose the title. Because there's no commitment you can walk away at any time. It affords the young generation a freedom of movement between partners."

Although this freedom that wasn't available to any previous generation of women can be beneficial, she says, it's harmful if abused. The repetitive surrender of the body with no emotional attachment expected in return can cause low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism and eating disorders.

"Girls can't be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think they can," Stepp says. "They think they can go into a hook-up and not feel anything the next day. Then they find themselves checking their cell phones and wondering why he hasn't called them."

The primary motivating factor in the rising number of girls hooking-up is a cultural shift in what young women are being taught about the combination of a career and romance.

The girls currently in high school and college are the first generation to be taught, from a very young age, to go after anything they want, Stepp says.

"They are being told, 'get an education, establish a career, then look for a partner,' " Stepp says. "Mothers should be saying to girls, 'education is important, a career is important, but so are relationships.' Most of us want all three of those things and we need to start practicing how to have all those things earlier."

Stepp is not the only woman to notice this potentially disturbing trend among young women.

University alumna Kathleen Bogle also wrote a book on the subject, bluntly titled "Hooking Up." Her book, which will be published this coming fall, addresses the environmental settings that cause high school and college-aged women to put their emotions on the back burner.

Her definition of hooking-up is similar to Stepp's.

"It's important that there's a range of what hooking up encompasses," Bogle says. "It can entail sex or oral sex with someone you just met 30 minutes ago, but it could be kissing someone you have had a crush on for six months."

Bogle interviewed both current university students and alumni to research her book.

"The alumni said hooking-up just doesn't work on a practical level the same way it does in college," she says. "In terms of how people define college life, it's 'Hey, I'm young, it's time to be young and party.' People don't think about life after college like this. It's time to get a job and get married."

It's not only this "time to party" mindset that lends itself to the hook-up culture. Their potential hook-up for the night probably lives within walking distance, Bogle says, and the close, neighborly feel of a college campus can make students feel safer with a stranger than they would at a bar after graduating.

Freshman Maggie Loughman agrees.

"This is just the time to do it," Loughman says. "We all want to settle down at some point."

As she cleans the remnants of her lunch, her friend, freshman Jon Clunie, who has known his girlfriend of three years since the sixth grade, says he doesn't like the idea of hooking-up.

"Every time a girl hooks up, she's labeled a slut," Clunie says. "It's not OK for guys either because then you'll be a man whore."

The two students agree on the ambiguity of the term "hooking up."

"It's like hitting triples," Clunie says. "You do everything but hit a home run."

"Yeah, even making out can be sexual in some way," Loughman says.

She also says it's OK as long as a girl doesn't get attached.

"Girls are just more open now," she says. "When they're getting male attention, they feed off it. If you're never going to see that person again, it's not a problem."

"People just do it for the thrill of it," Clunie says.

"What is the ultimate goal though? It goes nowhere, just in a big circle.

"Yeah, I mean they're always jumping from person to person like a frog on lily pads. I've never believed in this whole hooking-up thing."

Even though Loughman says hooking-up can be OK, there's a time to draw a line.

"If you're flaunting it," she says, "it's just trashy."

After observing endless conversations like these, Stepp says she began to feel almost maternal toward the girls whose stories formed the bulk of her book.

She included a "Letter to Mothers and Daughters" at the conclusion of her writing, presenting a point-by-point summary of her findings and advice.

A shortened version of the list reads:

"A guy can make you feel valuable, but it's not the guy who makes you valuable.

"Explore your feminine side beyond the black lace bra.

"Lust is not love, although it can feel like it," and, "Think erotic, not pornographic."

Stepp says she hopes her book will reach mothers, daughters and women of all ages. She received countless e-mails from girls who saw their stories in her pages, she says, which is exactly what she hoped would happen.

"All I want to do is get young women to think about that," she says. "You're a very smart generation, capable of thinking through their lives. Girls need to speak up and say, 'is this making me happy?' And if it's not, they can change it."

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