First paper

GUYLAND The

Perilous

World Where Boys·

Become Men

MICHAEL KIMMEL

•"A,RPERAn Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers www.harpcrcollins.com

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GUYLAND. Copyright © 2008 by Michael Kimmel. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be

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"The After Hours Crowd" from Some America by Patrick D. Higgins, © 2008 by Patrick D. Higgins. Reprinted here with

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9 HOOKING UP: SEX IN GUYLAND

I know'it's different at other schools:' Troy patiently tried to explain tome. "I mean, at other schools, people date. You know, a guy asks a girl out, and they go out to a movie or something. You know, like dating? But

here at Cornell, nobody dates. We go out in groups to local bars. We go to parties. And then after we're good and drunk, we hook up. Everyone

just hooks up."

"Does that mean you have sex?" I ask

"Hmm," he says, with a half-smile on his face. "Maybe, maybe not.

That's sort of the beauty of it, you know? Nobody can really be sure."

My conversation with Troy echoes an overwhelming majority of con-

versations I have had with young people all across the country. Whether

among college students or recent grads living in major metropolitan

areas, "hooking up" defines the current form of social and sexual rela-

tionships among young adults. The only point Troy is wrong about is his

assumption that traditional dating is going on anywhere else. Dating, at

least in college, seems to be gone for good.

Instead, the sexual marketplace is organized around groups of same-

sex friends who go out together t6 meet appropriate sex~.Ia1 partners in

a casual setting like a bar or a party. Two people run into each other,

seemingly at random, and after a few drinks they decide to go back to

one or the other's room or apartment, where some sexual interaction

occurs. There is no expectation of a further relationship. Hookups can

morph into something else: either friends with benefits or a dating rela-

tionship. But that requires some additional, and complex, negotiation.

Many adults find this promiscuity hard to grasp. What is this hook-

ing up culture all abouttWhat does it mean exactly? What's the point

of all that sex? Is it even fun? For the past two years, I've been involved

in a study to find out. The Online College Social Life Survey was devel-

oped initially by Paula England, a sociology professor at Stanford, and

has now been administered to about 7,000 college students at nine

campuses-large and small, public and private, elite and nonelite-

including Stanford, Arizona, Indiana, Radford, UC Santa Barbara,

SUNY Stony Brook, Ithaca College, and Evergreen State. We asked

participants about their sexual behaviors, their experiences of various

sexual activities, orgasm, drinking behavior, and their romantic reIition-

ships. We asked both women and men, gay and straight-but mostly

straight. All were between 18 and 24. I've also consulted with other

researchers at other schools, and compared our data with theirs. And

I've looked at data from several large, nationally representative studies

of sexual behavior among young people: .

Some of what's going on won't come as that much of a shock; after all,

young adulthood since the sixties has been a time of relative sexual free-

dom and well-documented experimentation. What may be surprising,

though, is how many young people accept that hooking up-recreational

sex with no strings attached-is the best and most prevalent arrange-

ment available to them. Once, sexual promiscuity co-existed with tradi-

tional forms of dating, and young people could maneuver between the

two on their way toward serious and committed romantic relationships.

Now, hooking up is pretty much all there is; relationships begin and end

with sex. Hooking up has become the alpha and omega of young adult

romance.

And though hooking up might seem utterly mutual-after all, just

who are all those guys hooking up with?-what appears on the surface

to be mutual turns out to be anything but. Despite enormous changes

Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland I 191

in the sexual attitudes of young people, the gender politics of campus

sex don't seem to have changed very much at all. Sex in Guyland is just

that-guys' sex. Women are welcome to act upon their sexual desires, but guys run the scene. Women who decide not to join the party can

look forward to going to sleep early and alone tonight-and every night.

And women who do join the party run the risk of encountering the

same old double standard that no amount of feminist" progress seems

able to eradicate fully. Though women may accommodate themselves to

men's desires-indeed, some feel they have to accommodate themselves

to them-the men's rules rule. What this means is that many young

women are biding their time, waiting for the guys to grow up and start

acting like men.

Yet the hooking-up culture so dominates campus life that many older

guys -report having a difficult time making a transition to serious adult

relationships. They all say that eventually they expect to get married

and have families, but they have no road map for getting from drunken

sloppy "Did we or didn't we?" sex to mature adult relationships. It turns

out that choosing quantity over quality teaches them nothing about

long-term commitment. Nor is it meant to. The pursuit of conquests is

more about guys proving something to other guys than it is about the

women involved.

As a result, most guys drift toward adulthood ill prepared for emo- tional intimacy better suited to fantasies of being "wedding crashers:'

(hooking up with women who are attending a friend's wedding) than

becoming grooms themselves. They know little more about themselves

and their sexuality at 28 than they did at 18, and the more subtle aspects

of romance and partnership likewise remain a mystery. They barely

know how to date. While the hookup culture might seem like some sort

of orgiastic revelry, in truth these guys are missing out. It's not just that

they're delaying adulthood-it's that they're entering it misinformed and

ill prepared.

ABrief History of Campus Sexual Patterns

In the 1930s, Michigan sociologist Willard Waller described campus

192 GUYlAND

romance as a complex dance that he called "rating-dating-mating."

Waller saw a competitive romantic marketplace in which students rated

themselves in reference to both the other sex and the evaluations of their

same-sex friends ("rating"). They then sought to date appropriately-

slightly up, but not too much. In their eyes, dating "up" too much would

make the relationship too insecure; dating "down" would decrease your

own rating.

In order to have what he called a "Class N' rating, men, Waller wrote, "must belong to one of the better fraternities, be prominent in activities,

have a copious supply of spending money, be well-dressed, be 'smooth'

in manners and appearance, have a 'good line,' dance well and have

access to an automobile." Women, by contrast, may need "good clothes,

a smooth line, ability to dance well," but paramount, by far was her

already determined "popularity as a date," since her "prestige depends

on dating more than anything else."

What is immediately striking about Waller's comment, written nearly

three-quarters of a century ago, is how accurate it continues to be-for

men. His prestige still depends, in large part, on his social networks and

his material assets. Her datability, though, no longer depends simply on social attributes. To be sure, women have to be pretty and sociable-that

hasn't changed. But, according to a recent survey at Duke, they also have to be sexy, and accomplished, and ambitious, and athletic-and not to

show that they are expending any energy at all doing any of it. "Effortless

perfection" was the phrase the university gave the phenomenon.

In Waller's time, all this rating and dating was ultimately in the ser-

vice of mating-romantic (and sexual) relationshiDs between committed

intimate partners that would lead, eventually, to marriage. But today,

the sequence of rating, dating, and mating has been all but abandoned

among young adults. To be sure, they still rate themselves and each

other. Men have to be cool, women effortlessly perfect. But the idea of

dating seems quaint but irrelevant. Today, campus culture is no longer

about dating to find an appropriate mate. Now, it's more about mating

to find an appropriate date!

"A date for me is, like, when a guy calls you up and says, 'would

you like to go someplace,' you know, like to dinner, or to a movie," says

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 193

Debbie, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Virginia. "That never

happens here!" She laughs. "Now it's like you s~e a guy at a party and

he says, 'What are you doing now? Can 1 walk you home?' It's like, you

know, the beginning of the date is like the end of the date. He walks you

home, and then you hook up."

In some ways this is not news. College campuses have always been

sexual hothouses, places of sexual experimentation, freedom, and preda-

tion. Many of the reasons are obvious: Young people are out from under

direct parental control and feel freer to experiment with different activi-

ties. The fact that many are away from home means they are also freed

from the critical scrutiny of their high-school and neighborhood friends,

free to tryon new identities with different cliques. And, of course, their

hormones are in full gear.

To many parents, the sexual shenanigans of the contemporary col-

lege campus sound like some drunken bacchanalian orgy. But this

isn't because parental restrictions have disappeared or because sexual

liberalism pervades campus life. All this sexual activity on college

campuses also has a lot to do with simple demography: the onset of

fertility in adolescence, first sexual experiences, and the delayed age

of marriage.

Stated most simply, a college student today will never again be in a

place where there are so many sexually active unmarried people. Nor will

college students ever again be around so many sexually active people like

themselves-with roughly similar class and race characteristics (since

most college sexual activity takes place with people of one's own race

and class background). Prior to college, not as many people are sexually

active. And after college, not as many people are sexually available-

either in terms of their physical proximity or in terms of their relation-

ship status. College is the quintessential gathering place for middle-class

white Americans aged 18 to 22. They don't even need to plan much-

like they do in high school when they live with their parents, or after

they graduate from college, when they actually have to go somewhere

to meet others. In college dorms they bump into each other randomly,

frequently, seemingly spontaneously, with little planning, like excited

atoms, eager to discharge.

194 GUYlAND

Hooking Up

In recent years, scholarly researchers and intrepid journalists have bravely

waded in to demarcate the term "hooking up," map its boundaries, and

explain its strange terrain. But the definitions are vague and contradictory.

One research group refers to it as "... a sexual encounter which may

nor may not include sexual intercourse, usually occurring On only one

occasion between two people who are strangers or brief acquaintances."

Another study maintains that hooking up "... occurs when two people

who are casual acquaintances or who have just met that evening at a

bar or party agree to engage in some forms of sexual behavior for which

there will likely be no future commitment."

Our collaborative research project, The Online College Social Life

Survey, found that hooking up covers a multitude of behaviors, includ-

ing kissing and nongenital touching (34 percent), oral sex, but not inter- course (15 percent), manual stimulation of the genitals (19 percent), and

intercourse (35-40 percent). It can mean "going all the way." Or it can mean "everything but." By their senior year, we found that students had

averaged nearly seven hookups during their collegiate careers. About

one-fourth (24 percent) say they have never hooked up, while slightly

more than that (28 percent) have hooked up ten times or more.

As a verb, "to hook up" means to engage in any type of sexual activity

with someone you are not in a relationship with. As a noun, a "hookup"

can either refer to the sexual encounter or to the person with whom you

hook up. Hooking up is used to describe casual sexual encounters on

a continuum from "one-night stands" (a hookup that takes place once

and once only with someone who mayor may not be a stranger) to "sex

buddies" (acquaintances who meet regularly for sex but rarely if ever

associate otherwise), to "friends with benefits" (friends who do not care

to become romantic partners, but may include sex among the activities

they enjoy together).

Part of what makes the hookup culture so difficult to define and

describe is the simple fact that young men and women experience it in

very different ways. They may be playing the same game, but they're

often on opposing teams, playing by a different set of rules, and they

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 195

define "winning," and even "scoring," in totally different ways. Sameness

doesn't necessarily mean equality.

Indeed, the current patterns of sociability and sexuality among het-

erosexuals have actually begun to resemble the patterns that emerged

in the mainstream gay male community in the late 1970s and early

1980s, the pre-AIDS era. Sex was de-coupled from romance and love,

and made part of friendships that may-or may not-have anything to

do with romantic relationships. "Fuck buddies" are the precursors to

"friends with benefits." Sex was seen as recreational self-expression,

not freighted with the matched baggage oflove and relationship. When

it comes to scoring, then, gay and straight men have a lot more in

common with each other than either group does with women. To put

it another way, it is gender, not sexual orientation, that is the key to

understanding these campus sexual patterns. If we want to understand

the complexities of the hookup culture we must do so with gender in

mind.

Deliberate Vagueness

The phrase "hooking up" itself is deliberately vague, which is why any

attempt to define it concretely will inevitably fall short. In fact, it is its very

vagueness and ambiguity that characterize it. "It's, like, anything from

like making out to intercourse," says a 19-year-old female sophomore at

Radford University. "[A]nything from, in my opinion, kissing to having

sex," says another. iiHaving sex," says another. But then she pauses.

But see, hooking up and having sex can be two different things.

It's really hard. When people say "we hooked up," you don't really

know what they mean by that. Because I don't really consider

having sex hooking up. I think that's a different thing. Like having

sex is separate from hooking up. I think it should be anyway.

Because everyone can just be, like, "yeah, we hooked up," and

you never know what they did. They could be having sex every

night and you're assuming that they probably just made out or

something like that .

. 196 GUYLAND

Maybe, as one woman suggested in an interview, hooking up is the

"yada yada yada" of sex.

Did you ever see that episode of Seinfeld where they're, like, "yada, yada, yada." And you're, like, "what does that mean?" She's, like,

"I went home with him and yada, yada, yada." And that's kind

of, like, what a hookup is. Because you don't really know exactly

what it means, unless you're talking to a really good friend and

they're telling you all the details.

Judging from our survey, there's a whole lot of yada yada yada going

on. Yet that vagueness serves men and women in very different ways.

When a guy says he "hooked up" with someone, he mayor may not

have had sex with her, but he is certainly hoping that his friends think

he has. A woman, on the other hand, is more likely to hope they think

she hasn't.

In a sense, hooking up retains certain features of older dating pat-

terns: male domination, female compliance, and double standards.

Though hooking up may seem to be mutually desired by both guys and girls, our research indicates that guys initiate sexual behavior most of

the time (less than a third of respondents said this was mutual). Hook-

ups are twice as likely to take place in his room as in hers. And, most

important, hooking up enhances his reputation whereas it damages

hers. Guys who hook up a lot are seen by their peers as studs; women

who hook up a lot are seen as sluts who "give it up." According to Duke's

study of campus sexual behavior, "Men and women agreed the double

standard persists: men gain status through sexual activity while women

lose status."

"There is definitely a double standard," says Cheryl, a sophomore

at Creighton. "1 mean, if I do what my friend Jeff does [hook up with a

different girl virtually every weekend], my friends wouldn't talk to me!

I mean, that's just gross when a girl does it. But a guy, it's, like, he's like

Mr. Man."

"If a guy hooks up w.ith a girl; he sort of broke down her wall of

protection," explains Terry, a Stanford junior. "She's the one that let her

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 197

guard down ... her job going into the night ... was to like protect her-

self, protect her moral character and her moral fiber, and it's like you

came in and went after her and she was, like, convinced to let her guard

down ..."

This is a somewhat surprising view of things, given just how much

we think everything has changed. It not only echoes the 1950s, but

even farther back to the Victorian age. Despite the dramatic changes

in sexual behavior spurred by the sexual revolution, sexual experience

still means something different for women and men. "It's different from

what it used to be when women were supposed to hold out untihhey

got married. There's pressure now on both men and women to lose their

virginity," is how one guy put it. "But for a man it's a sign of manhood,

and for a woman there's still some loss of value."

The vagueness of the term itself-hooking up-turns out to be a

way to protect the reputation of the woman while enhancing that of the

man. In addition to that conceptual vagueness after the fact, hookups are also characterized by a certain vagueness before and even during

the fact as well. Most hookups share three elements: the appearance of

spontaneity, the nearly inevitable use of alcohol, and the absence of any

expectation of a relationship,

Planned Spontaneity

In order for hookups to work, they have to appear to be spontaneous. And they do-at least to the guys. One guy told me it's "a sort of one-time,

spur-of-the-moment thing. Hookups generally are very unplanned."

"Oh, sure," said Jackson, a 22-year-old senior at Arizona State, "you

go to parties on the prowl, looking to hook up. But you never know if it's

going to happen. And you certainly don't know who you're gonna hook

up with. That takes several drinks."

Yet such spontaneity is nonetheless carefully planned. Guys have

elaborate rituals for what has become known as "the girl hunt." There

are "pregame" rituals, such as drinking before you go out to bars, since

consuming alcohol, a requirement, is also expensive on a limited budget,

so it's more cost-effective to begin the buzz before you set out.

198 GUYLAND

There are defined roles for the guys looking to hook up, like the

"wing man," the reliable accomplice and confidant. "The wing man is

the guy who takes one for the team," says Jake, a sophomore at Notre

Dame. "If there are, like, two girls and you're trying to hook up with one of them, your wing man chats up the other one-even if she's,

like, awful-so you can have a shot at the one you want. Definitely a

trooper."

When guys claim that the hookup is spontaneous, they are referring

not to whether the hookup will take place, but with whom they will

hook up. Women have a different view of spontaneity. Since they know

that hooking up is what the guys want, the girls can't be "spontaneous"

about it. They have to think-whether or not, with whom, under what

conditions-and plan accordingly, remembering a change of clothes,

birth control, and the like. They have to decide how much they can

drink, how much they can flirt, and how to avoid any potentially embar-

rassing or even threatening situations. The guys lounge in comfort of

the illusion of alcohol-induced spontaneity; the women are several steps

ahead of them.

"Girls, like, before they go out at night, they know whether or not

they're going to hook up with somebody," says Jamie, a 21-year-old senior

at Arizona State. "It's not spontaneous at all."

Yet the illusion of spontaneity remains important for both guys and

girls. It's a way of distancing yourself from your own sexual agency, a way

of pretending that sex just happens, all by itself. It helps young people to

maintain a certain invulnerability around the whole thing. It's not cool

to want something too much. It's better to appear less interested-that

way no one will know the extent of your disappointment if your plans

don't come to fruition.

The Inevitability of Alcohol

Drinking works in much the same way. Virtually all hooking up is

lubricated with copious amounts of alcohol-more alcohol than sex, to

tell the truth. "A notable feature of hookups is that they almost always

occur when both participants are drinking or drunk," says one study. In

Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland 199

our study, men averaged nearly five drinks on their most recent hookup,

women nearly 3 drinks. Says one woman:

Like, drinking alcohol is like a major thing with hooking up with

people. A lot of the times people won't have one-night stands

unless they're drurik. Actually, I can't tell you I know one person

who has had a one-night stand without drinking or being drunk,

and being, like, "oh, my head hurts. I can't believe I did that."

To say that alcohol clouds one's judgment would be an understate-

ment. Drinking is supposed to cloud your judgment. Drinking gives the

drinker "beer goggles," which typically expand one's notion of other

people's sexual attractiveness. "After like four drinks a person looks a

little bit better," explains Samantha, a 21-year-old senior at the University

of Virginia. "After six or seven that person looks a lot better than they did.

And, well, after ten, that person is the hottest person you've ever seen!"

Or, as Jeff puts it, "Everybody looks more attractive when you're drunk."

But intentionally clouding judgment is only part of the story. The

other part is to cloud other people's judgment. If you were drunk, you

don't have to take responsibility for what happens. For guys, this means

that if they get shot down they can chalk it up to drunkenness. The same holds true for their sexual performance if they do get lucky enough

to go home with someone. In fact, drunkenness provides a convenient

excuse for all sorts of potential sexual disasters, from rejection to pre-

mature ejaculation to general ineptitude born of inexperience. For a lot

of guys, the liquid courage provided by alcohol i~ the only thing that

makes them able to withstand the potential for rejection that any sexual

advance entails in the first place.

While both sexes might get to enjoy the lack of r~sponsibility alcohol

implies, this turns out to be especially important for the women, who

still have their reputations to protect. Being wasted is generally accepted

as an excuse. "What did I do last night?" you can legitimately ask your

girlfriends. And then everyone laughs. It's still better to be a drunk than

a slut. "A hangover," Laura Sessions Stepp writes in her book, Unhoohed,

'iis a small price to pay for exoner~tion."

200 GUYLAND

The Absence of Expectations

One of the key defining features of hooking up is that it's strictly a "no

strings attached" endeavor. Young people in college-and this seems to

hold true for both women and men-seem generally wary of committed

or monogamous relationships. The focus is always on what it costs,

rather than what it might provide. And if you consider that half of

young adults come from :divorced households, their cynicism is neither

surprising nor unfounded. "] don't know if ] even know any happily

married couples," one young woman says. "Most of my friends' parents

are divorced, and the ones who aren't are miserable. Where's the appeal

in that?"

Hooking up is seen as being a lot easier than having a relationship.

Students constantly say that having a relationship, actually dating, takes

a lot of time, and "like, who has time to date?" asks Greg, a junior at the

College of Wooster in Ohio. "] mean, we're all really busy, and we have

school, and classes, and jobs, and friends, and all. But, you know," he

says with a bit of a wink, "a guy has needs, you know what] mean? Why

date if you can just hook up?"

When one older teenager explained her most recent hookup to a New

Yorh Times reporter, he asked if she thought the relationship might lead to something more. "We might date," she explained. "] don't know. It's

just that guys can get so annoying when you start dating them."

"Serial monogamy is exhausting," one young woman tells journalist

Stepp. "You put all your emotions into a relationship and then you have

to do it all over again." Says another:

Dating is a drain on energy and intellect, and we are overworked,

overprogrammed, and overcommitted just trying to get into grad

school, let alone getting married. It's rare to find someone who

would ... want to put their relationships over their academics/

future. ] don't even know that relationships are seen as an

integrated part of this whole "future" idea. Sometimes, ] think

they are on their own track that runs parallel and that we feel can

be'pushed aside or drawn closer at our whim.

Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland 201

Which is a pretty revealing statement since it wasn't so long ago that

Doris Lessing remarked that there had never been a man who would

jeopardize his career for a love affair-and never been a woman who

wouldn't.

Guys seem to agree, but for a different set of reasons. Brian says:

Being in a real relationship just complicates everything. You feel

obligated to be all, like, couply. And that gets really boring after

a while. When you're friends with benefits, you go over, hook up,

then play video games or something. It rocks.

Guys may hook up because they get exactly what they want and don't

have to get caught by messy things like emotions. "A lot of guys get into

relationships just so they get steady [expletive] ," another teen tells jour-

nalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis. "But now that it's easy to get sex outside of

relationships, guys don't need relationships." "That's all I really want is

to hook up," says Justin, a junior at Duke. "I don't want to be all like boy-

friend and girlfriend-that would, uh, significantly reduce my chances

of hooking up, you know?"

Yet the absence of expectations that supposedly characterizes the

hookup seem not to be as true for women. And this is not a simple case

of "women want love, men want sex." Rather, it's a case of women being

able and willing to acknowledge that there is a lot of ground between

anonymous drunken sex and long-term commitment. They might not

want to get married, but a phone call the next day might still be nice.

Young women today are more comfortable with their sexuality than

. any generation in history. There are certainly women who prefer hooking

up to relationships. Women also hook up to avoid emotional entangle-

ments that would distract them from their studies, professional ambi-

tions, friendship networks, and other commitments. Or they hook up

because they don't think they're ready for a commitment and they just

want to hang out and have fun. Yet many also do it because it's the only

game in town. If they want to have sexual relationships with men-and

by all appearances they certainly do-then this is the field on which

they must play. Some women may want.more, some may not, but since

202 GUYlAND

more is not available either way, they take what they can get. As one

young woman explained it to sociologist Kathleen Bogle,

Most of the girls I know are looking for something, you know,

someone/even if it's not serious, s?meone that is there to hang out with and talk to. [Girls want] a feeling of being close to

someone and I don't know i(it's even that guys don't want that,

it's just that they don't care if they have that, it's like "whatever."

It could be any other girl any night and you know that's fine with them.

And for the women who do want relationships, hooking up seems to

be the only way to find the sort of relationships they say they want. They

hope that it will lead somewhere else. Says Annie, 23, who recently

graduated from George Washington University, in response to "Why do

women hook up?"

Because they want to find love. They want, even though people

don't care about consequences, they want to find love. At l~ast

girls do. At least I do. I wanted to find love. I wanted to be happy

and in love and just have that manly man hold me. They just want

. to find that. And even if the consequences are bad, it's a lot better

going through the consequences and being loved than it is being

alone and never loved.

Race and Hooking Up

Hooking up may be a guy thing, but it is also a white guy thing. Of

course there are exceptions, but minority students are not hooking up

at the same rates as white students. This is partly because minority

students On largely white campuses often feel that everything they do is

seen not in terms of themselves as individuals but representative of their

minority group. "There are so few blacks on campus," says Rashon Ray,

a sociologist at Indiana and part of our research team. "If one guy starts

acting like a dog, well, word will get around so fast that he'll never get

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 203

another date." As a result, on some large campuses, black athletes will

hook up with white women, but will date black women.

"I know we don't do what the white kids do," said one black male

student at Middlebury College in Vermont. "That's right, you don't," said

his female companion. "And I don't either. If I even thought about it, my

girls would hold me back." Said another black student at Ohio State,

"if I started hooking up, I mean, not like with some random white girl,

but like with my sisters, Oh, God, my friends would be saying I'm, like,

'acting white.' "

As a result, minority students are likely to conform to more con-

ventional dating scripts, especially within their own communities. Our

survey found that blacks and Latinos are somewhat less likely to engage

in hooking up, and Asian students are far less likely to do so.

Hooking Up and Relationships: "The' Talk"

In general, women tend to be more ambivalent about hookup culture;

some report feeling sexy and desirable, others feel it's cheap and rarely

leads anywhere. But when it comes to forming an actual relationship,

the' tilt is almost entirely toward the women. They are the ones who

must negotiate whether the hooking up will proceed to a deeper level

of intimacy. On many campuses, women are the ones who typically

initiate the ((Define the Relationship" conversation-the "DTR," Of, more simply, "The Talk." "Are we a couple or not?" she asks.

Some women don't even bother to ask. "I didn't want to bring it up

and just be, like, 'so where do we stand?' because I know guys don't like

th~t question," says one woman'to sociologist Kathleen Bogle.. Another

tells her it's the women who want the relationship and the guys who

make the final decision. "It always comes down to that," says Ann, a

junior at Wright State University.

You know, women see hooking up different from men. I mean it's

fun and all, but like after once or twice, like, where is it going? i mean, are you or aren't you, you know, like a couple? Me and my

girlfriends always talk about how to bring it up, how to start the

204 GUYLAND

talk. I know he doesn't want to hear it. But otherwise, what's all

that hooking up for?

Justin, a junior at George Washington, offers the apposite retort:

Oh, man, don't get me started on "the talk"! It'slike as soon as

you hook up with someone, and you, like, have a good time, or

whatever, and suddenly she's all, like, "well are we a couple, or

not?" Of course you're not! You just hooked up, man!

"So," I ask him, "what do you do when she wants to have that talk?"

Avoid it. Like if she says, all serious, like, "Justin, we have to

talk," like you know what's coming, right? That's when I get busy

doing something else. Or I don't call her back. Or I try and avoid

seeing her in private and only like bump into her on campus or

something. But I definitely do not want to have that talk. It ruins

everything,

But why are guys so relationship-phobic? Virtually every guy I spoke

with said that he wanted to get married someday, and that he hoped he

would be happy. Just not now and probably not until his early thirties.

Their relationship phobias are less related to fears of romantic entangle-

ments from which they would have trouble extricating themselves, and

more to do with the purposes of hooking up in the first place. Hooking

up, for guys, is less a relationship path than it is for women. In fact, it

serves an entirely different purpose.

Sex as Male Bonding

.In some ways hooking up .represents the sexual component of young

men's more general aversion to adulthood. They don't want girlfriends

or serious relationships, in part, because they don't feel themselves

ready (they're probably not) and also, in part, because they see

relationships as "too much work." Instead they want the benefits of adult

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 205

relationships, which for them seem to be exclusively sexual, with none

of the responsibility that goes along with adult sexuality-the emotional connection, caring, mutuality, and sometimes even the common human

decency that mature sexual relationships demand. Simply put, hooking up is the form of relationship guys want with girls.

Yet it's a bit more complicated than simple pleasure-seeking on the

part of guys, because as it turns out pleasure isn't the first item on the

hookup agenda. In fact, pleasure barely appears on the list at all. If sex

were the goal, a guy would have a much 'better chance of having more

(and better) sex if he had a steady girlfriend. Instead, guys hook up to

prove something to other guys. The actual experience of sex pales in

comparison to the experience of talking about sex.

When I've just got laid, the first thing I think about-really, I

shouldn't be telling you this, but really it's the very first thing, before I've even like "finished"-is that I can't wait to tell my

crew who I just did. Like, I say to myself, "Omigod, they're not

going to believe that I just did Kristy!"

So says Ted, a 21-year-old junior at Wisconsin:

Like I just know what will happen. They'll all be high-fiving me

and shit. And Kristy? Uh, well, she'll probably ask me not to tell

anyone, you know, to protect her reputation and all. But, like,

yeah, right. I'm still gonna tell my boys.

Hooking up may have less to do with guys' relationships with women

and more to do with guys' relationships with other guys. "It's like the

girls you hook up with, they're, like, a way of showing off to other guys,"

says Jeff, a proud member of a fraternity at the University of Northern

Iowa. "I mean, you tell your friends you hooked up with Melissa, and

they're like, 'whoa, dude, you are one stud.' So, I'm into Melissa because

my guy friends think she is so hot, and now they think more of me

because of it. It's totally a guy thing."

He looks a bit sheepish. "Don't get me wrong," he adds, with little

206 GUYlAND

affect. "I mean, yeah, Melissa is very nice and blah blah blah. I like her,

yeah. But," he sort of lights up again, "the guys think I totally rule."

Jeff's comments echo those I heard" from guys all across the coun-

try. Hooking up is not for whatever pleasures one might derive from

drunken sex on a given weekend. Hooking up is a way that guys com-

municate with other guys-it's about homosociality. It's a way that guys

compete with each other, establish a pecking order of cool studliness,

and attempt to move up in their rankings.

"Oh, definitely," says Adam, a 26-year-old Dartmouth graduate now

working in financial services in Boston. "I mean, why do you think it's

called~scoring?' It's like you're scoring with the women, yeah, but you're

like scoring on the other guys. Getting over on a girl is the best way of

getting your guys' approval."

His friend, Dave, 28, sitting next to him at the bar, is also aDartmouth

grad. He nods. "It's not just like keeping count," he says. "Not a simple

tally, you know? It's like 'how many have you had?' yeah, but it's also 'who

did you get?' That's how my guys ... well, that's how we evaluated you

for membership in the worldwide fraternity of guys." They both laugh.

Of course, the awesome insecurity that underlies such juvenile blus-

tering remains unacknowledged, which is interesting since that inse-

curity is the driving force behind so much of sex in Guyland. The vast

majority of college-aged guys are relatively inexperienced sexually. Most

of them have had some sex, but not as much as they'd like, and nowhere

near as much as they think everyone else has had. Perhaps they've

received oral sex, less likely they've performed it, and if they have had

intercourse at all it is generally only a handful of times with one partner,

two if they're lucky. There are virtually no trustworthy adults willing

or able to talk honestly about sex with young people. Talking to their

parents is far too awkward. Sex education in schools is often restricted

to a quasi-religious preaching of abstinence. Any information that they

do manage to cobble together-how it works, what to do, what women

like, what they expect-comes almost entirely from their peers, and

from pornography. In fact" pornography winds up being the best source of sexual information available to them, and as we've seen pornography

is filled with lies.

Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland 207

Yet most guys think that they are alone in their inexperience. They

think that other guys are having a lot of sex, all the time, with a huge

number of women. And they suspect, but would have no way of know-

ing, that other guys are a lot better at it than they are. Seen in this light,

the hookup culture, at least for guys, is more than a desperate bid simply

to keep up. It's a way to keep up, and keep quiet about it-while being

rather noisy at the same time.

Hooking Up vs. Good Sex

Mature sexual relationships are complex; good sex takes time to develop.

It usually helps to be sober enough to know what is happening. Hooking

up may provide quantitative evidence of manly sexual prowess, but it

cannot answer the qualitative insecurities that invariably attend sexual

relationships. Hooking up may make one feel more like a man when talk-

ing with other guys, but it doesn't help-indeed, it may actually hinder-

healthy and mutually satisfying sexual relationships with women. And

it certainly cannot answer the anxieties that haunt guys when they are

alone. Hooking up offers sex without entanglements, but it is attended by

so many possibilities for ego devastation, misunderstanding, and crises

that it can still become quite entangled. And since there is so much

surface interaction in hookup culture, but so little actual connection,

most of this stays buried.

With all this hooking up, friends with benefits, and booty calls, guys

should feel they have it made. But there is a creeping anxiety that con-

tinually haunts guys' sexual activities, particularly these almost-men.

They worry that perhaps they're not doing it enough, or well enough, or

they're not big enough, or hard enough. Though the evidence suggests

that men are in the driver's seat when it comes to sex, they feel that women have all the power, especially the power to say no.

And these days, those women have a new "power"-the power to

compare. Many of the guys I spoke with became suddenly uneasy when

the topic of women's sexual expectations came up. They shifted uncom-

fortably in their seats, looked down at the floor, or stared into their soft

drink as if it were an oracle.

208 GUYLAND

Jeff, a sophomore at UC San Diego said,

Uh, this is the tough part, you know. I mean, well, like, we're supposed to have hooked up a lot, but now so are they, and they,

like, talk about it in ways that we guys never would. So, like,

you feel like you have to be this fabulous lover and they have to

come at least three times, and like, your, you know, your, ub,

dick isn't the biggest she's ever seen, and, like, you always feel

like you're being measured and coming up a bit ... [he laughs

uncomfortably], short.

"I think guys in your generation were more worried about whether or

not you were going to get laid at all," says Drew, a senior at Kansas State.

''I'm pretty sure I can hook up when I want, and I have several FWBs

and even the occasional booty call. But I worry about whether I'm any

good at it. I hear all this stuff from other guys about what they do, and

how crazy they get the girl, and I think, whoa, I don't do that."

Guys feel a lot of pressure to hook up, a lot of pressure to score-

and to let their friends know about it. And they feel a lot of pressure to

be great in bed. In Bogle's study, some students estimated that some of

their friends were hooking up twenty-five times every semester. And,

they believed that while they thought hooking up meant kissing and other stuff, they thought'their friends were actually having intercourse.

"It's always the other student who, they believed, actually had intercourse every time they hooked up," she writes. .

I asked guys all across the country what they think is the percent-

age of guys on their campus who had sex on any given weekend. The

average answer I heard was about 80 percent. That is, they believed

that four out of every five guys on campus had sex last weekend. Actu-

ally, 80 percent is the percentage of senior men who have ever had vaginal intercourse in our college survey. The actual percentage on any

given weekend is closer to 5to 10 percent. This giv~s one an idea of

how pervasive the hooking-up culture is, how distorted the vision of

young men by that culture is, and the sorts of pressures a guy might

feel as Thursday afternoon hints at the looming weekend. How can he

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 209

feel like a man if he's close to the only one not getting laid? And if so

many women are available, sexually promiscuous, and hooking up as

randomly as the men are, what's wrong with him if he's the only one

who's unsuccessful?

As it turns out, guys' insecurity is not altogether unfounded. Most

hookups are not great sex. In our survey, in their most recent hookups,

regardless of what actually took place, only 19 percent of the women

reported having an orgasm, as compared to 44 percent of the men.

When women received cunnilingus, only about a quarter expe~ience an

orgasm, though the men who reported they had performed cunnilingus

on their partner reported that she had an orgasm almost 60 percent of

the time.

This orgasm gap extends to intercourse as well. Women report an

orgasm 34 percent of the time; the men report that the women had an

orgasm 58 percent of the time. (The women, not surprisingly, are far

better able to tell if the men had orgasms, and reporting rates are virtu-

ally identical.)

Many women, it turns out, fake orgasm-and most do so H to make

that person feel good, to make them feel like they've done their job."

But some women said that they faked it "just really to end it," because

they're, "like, bored with it."

"He was, like, trying so hard to make me come," says Trish, a senior

at Washington University in St. Louis. "And there was, like no way it was

going to happen. I felt so bad for him. I mean, I had gone down on him

and he came already, and he was, like, trying to be a good sport about it,

but really ... So I just faked it, and he felt good and I felt relieved."

Hooking Up and Gender Politics

Hooking up seems disadvantageous to women in so many ways, and

not only because the sex isn't so great. In fact the disincentives appear

so numerous that one eventually might wonder why women bother. The

hookup culture appears to present a kind of lose-lose situation. If they don't participate, they risk social isolatiqn-not to mention that they

also forego sex itself, as well as any emotional connection they may be

210 GUYLANO'

able to squeeze out of the occasion. If they do participate, they face the

potentially greater risk of "loss of value," and there's a good chance that

they won't even have any fun.

On the other hand, one ought not overstate the case. Anti-feminist

jeremiads fret constantly about women's lost modesty, chastity, or even

their capitulation to male standards of sexual conduct. Conservative

columnists complain about ever-loosening sexual mores, and use the

gender inequality of hookup culture to advise women to keep their legs

crossed. Women, they counsel, must remember the message that their

grandmothers might once have told them, "men want only one thing."

And so women, if they yearn for commitment and marriage, have to re-

learn how to just say no.

Since the I990s, abstinence campaigns have been encouraging

young people to take a "virginity pledge" and to refrain from hetero-

sexual intercourse until marriage (the campaigns assume that gay and

lesbian students do not exist). Abstinence-based sex education is pretty

much the only sex education on offer in the majority of American high schools. And many parents see abstinence as the best advice they can

offer their children about how to reduce their risk for sexually transmit-

ted disease, unwanted pregnancy, or sexual assault.

At first glance, such campaigns appear to be somewhat successful.

One study found that the total percentage of high-school students who

say they've had heterosexual sex had dropped from more than 50 per-

cent in 1991 to slightly more than 45 percent in 2001. But teen preg-

nancy rates have risen, and whatever decline in abortion rates may have

occurred is due largely to the restrictions on its availability, not a cur-

tailment of sexual behavior. Nor do abstinence campaigns offset the

other messages teenagers hear. Sociologist Peter Bearman analyzed data

from over 90,000 students, and found that taking a virginity pledge does

lead an average heterosexual teenager to delay his or her first sexual

experience, but only by about eighteen months. And the pledges were

only effective for students up to age 17. By the time they are 20 years

old, over 90 percent of both boys and girls are sexually active. Another

campus-based survey found that of the 16 percent who had taken virgin-

ity pledges, 61 percent of them had broken their pledge before graduat-

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 211

ing. Pledgers were also less likely to use condoms, although they were

just as likely to practice oral sex as nonpledgers.

\>\That's more, because abstinence-based programs are often used

instead of actual sex education, few people really know exactly what

"counts" in keeping your pledge. In one recent survey of 1,100 college

freshmen, 61 percent believed you are still abstinent if you have par-

ticipated in mutual masturbation; 37 percent if you have had oral sex;

and 24 percent if you have had anal sex. On the other hand, 24 percent

believed that kissing with tongues broke their abstinence pledge. In the

survey by Angela Lipsitz and her colleagues, the majority of those who

said they "kept" their vows had experienced oral sex.

At first glance, abstinence might be seen as the antithesis of the Guy

Code, since promising not to have sex would negate the drive to score that

is central to the Code. But abstinence actually sits easily within the Guy

Code. Abstinence pledges put all the responsibility on the girls to police

sexual activity-and to bear all the consequences and responsibilities if

something goes wrong. Abstinence pledges also make it a lot easier for

guys to maintain the good girl/bad girl, Madonna/whore dichotomy that

has kept the sexual double standard in place for decades. "Does having

sex with, like, a ho, actually violate your abstinence pledge?" one first-

year student asked me recently. "I mean, I definitely respect the nice

girls, and I am abstinent with them."

Even those who advocate prudence rather than abstinence nonethe-

less seem to focus all their attention on the women. If a woman ever

intends to marry, and most do, hooking up is exactly the wrong way

to go, say several recent commentators on the issue. In a 2001 survey

by the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative anti-feminist think

tank, authors Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval Glenn tell us that while

more than four out of five college women surveyed say they want to get

married, there are too many elements in college culture that "under-

mine the likelihood of achieving that goal." Marquardt and Glenn pro-

pose reviving a "culture of courtship" to encourage those old-fashioned

dates-and that old-fashioned sexual frustration.

Laura Sessions Stepp in her book Unhoohed claims that hooking up

is ila replacement for dating," in which "ir~timacy is disposable"; lIa way of

212 GUYlAND

playing at romance while controlling the unruly emotions that come

with real romance." Stepp argues that "young people have virtually

abandoned dating and replaced it with group get-togethers and sexual

behaviors that are detached from love and commitment-and some-

times even from liking." She worries that this will make it more difficult

to date, mate, fall in love, and marry. And indeed it might, for both'

sexes. Yet at the end of her book she offers advice only to mothers and

daughters-mostly about how women should be far choosier about their

dating and sexual partners, lest they permanently impair their ability to

develop those relationships-ever.

Such advice ignores the pleasure-seeking behaviors and intentions of

both women and men, and assumes that women are naturally chaste and

virginal, were it not for those rapacious men. Such an image is obviously

insulting to men, since it imagines them as no better than predators.

And it is also probably insulting to women, who have shown themselves

fully capable of seeking and enjoying sex in ways that their mothers-

and certainly those grandmothers! -could never have imagined. Both

women and men are pleasure-seeking creatures, especially on campus,

and it lets guys entirely off the hook if the focus of all the advice is only

the women.

The truth is, hooking up is not the end of the world-it's a time-out,

like college. And more important, it's a political time-out; that is, it is

experienced differently, and unequally, by women and men. Focusing

all one's moralizing attention on young V·lOmen only perpetuates that

inequality, rather than challenges it.

Hooking Up: The New Norm

What these earnest warnings miss, of course, is not the opposition

between hooking up and courtship, but that hooking up is today's culture

of courtship. It is certainly not true that all tlie women are hooking up in order to develop relationships, nor are all guys hooking up in the hopes

of avoiding precisely the relationships that the women are seeking. Most

actually want relationships. But, most say, not quite yet.

Today's college students will get married-eventually. It'll be about

Hooking Up: Sex in Guy/and 213

eight years later than their mothers and fathers did. And they'll do

that by choice, because before marriage they want to establish careers

enjoy relationships, and develop autonomy. The contemporary cultur~ of courtship is not their parents' culture of courtship, but it is no less a

"culture" and no less legitimate because of that.

The students I interviewed in depth following our quantitative

survey were convincing on this score. Hooking up, in their minds, is not an alternative to relationships-it's the new pathway to forming

relationships. Even if only a small percentage of hookups result in rela-

tionships, most relationships do begin with a hookup. For some, hook-

ing up is most definitely in the service of a relationship-just not this

particular one.

"Of course I'll eventually get married," says Anne, a Princeton junior

who happens to be sitting with Dave when I speak with him. "Just not

yet. Right now, I have to focus on my career, getting through medi-

cal school, establishing myself. Hooking up's about as much as I can

handle. It's the means to an end, not the end itself." And with that, she

gives Dave a peck on the cheek, picks up what appears to be twenty

pounds of science textbooks, and is off to the lab.

Dave looks at me, shrugs his shoulders, and grins. "All the girls at

Princeton are like that," he sighs. "You know that expression from, like,

your generation," he eyes me warily, " 'you can look but you better not

touch?' " I nod and scowl slightly at being cast as over-the-hill. "Well,

around here it's more 'you can touch but you'd better not look'-as in

look for a girlfriend."

Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist, argues that hooking up has become

the normative path to relationships on campus. "There's something

about the way people define college life as a time to party and a time to

kick back," she told a journalist. "They're postponing marriage, so they

have time to play the field."

Postgraduate Sex in Guyland

Playing the field takes a somewhat different shape after graduation.

Though young people still go to bars or parties in groups, and some still

214 GUYlAND

drink a lot, fewer are slinking off to empty rooms to hook up. On the

whole, post-college-aged people are returning to more traditional dating

patterns. Bogle followed recent graduates of two colleges, and found

that women and men exchange phone numbers or email addresses, and

some time in the next few days they will contact each other and arrange

togo to dinner or something more conventionally social. It turns out that hooking up in college has added a new act in an old drama, but it

is hardly a new play.

Of course, the fact that most young people move beyond hooking

up still doesn't neutralize its more negative aspects. Though the hookup

culture may be the new norm, that still doesn't make it ideal. Even if guys are having sex in order to assuage an understandable ins~curity,

they are nonetheless using women. And even if women are themselves

conscious sexual agents, there remains an undeniable aspect of capitu-

lat,ion in much of their behavior.

"Hookups are very scripted," one woman tells Laura Sessions Stepp.

"You're supposed to know what to do and how to do it and how to feel

during and afterward. You learn to turn everything off except your body

and make yourself emotionally invulnerable."

What kind of sex is this, where a young woman prepares by shutting

down and becoming invulnerable? Where a young man thinks more

about his friends than about the woman he's having sex with, or even

than his own pleasure? Where everyone is so drunk they can barely

remember what happened?

Much of what passes for sex in Guyland is not the kind of sex that

adults-those with considerably more experience in this a~ena-would

think of as healthy. It sometimes feels as if it doesn't build a relationship

but rather is intended to be a temporary stand-in for one. Nor does it

seem to be particularly good sex. And the real skills that young people

will need as they take on adult sexual relationships rarely feature in the

hookup culture. They're not learning how to ask for what they want, or

.. how to listen to their partners, how to keep monogamous sex interest-

ing, how to negotiate pleasure, how to improve their techniques. And

while much of adult sexuality is also a learn-as-you-go endeavor, that

doesn't mean there isn't plenty of room for advice and counsel.

Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland 215

Yet most adults aren't talking. The more religious among us may have

firmly held beliefs that dictate abstinence and tolerate no middle ground,

while the more liberal among us may give our adolescent children books

that explain the physiological aspects of what they need to know but say

nothing of the emotional component inherent in sexuality. But rarely do

mature adults actively engage their sons and daughters in the kinds of

candid conversations that might actuaIly prove useful to them. Rarely

do we talk about a sexuality that can be both passionate and ethical;

rarely do we even explain that there is such a thing as ethical sexuality

that doesn't promote or even include abstinence as a goal. Instead, the

whole subject is so shrouded in embarrassment and discomfort that we

generally avoid it, hoping that our kids will figure it out for themselves

without too much trouble in the meantime. Lucky for us they often do.

But not always.

216 GUYLAND

189 their girlfriends unless they act like porn stars." David Amsden, "Not

Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On" in New Yorh, October 20, 2003.

CHAPTER NINE: Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland

193 complex dance that he called "rating-dating-mating." Willard Waller,

''The Rating and Dating Complex," in American Sociological Review, 2,

October, 1937: 727-34.

193 depends on dating more than anything else." Ibid., p. 730.

195 there will likely be no future commitment." Tracy A. Lambert,

"Pluralistic Ignorance and Hooking Up" in Journal of Sex Research, 40 (2),

May, 2003, p. 129.

195 (28 percent) have hooked up ten times or mor~. Our numbers seem

to square with other surveys, or, perhaps, run a bit to the conservative side,

since we have a large sample of colleges in our pool, and virtually all other

surveys were done only at the researcher's university.

196 very vagueness and ambiguity that characterizes it. See, for example.

Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica RozIer. The Hooh up Handbook: A Single Girl's

Guide to Living It Up (New York: Simon Spotlight, 2005). p. 3.

196 from, in myopinion, kissing to having sex" says another. See Kathleen

Bogle. Hooking Up: Understanding Sex, Dating and Relationships in College

and After (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 26.

197 good friend and they're telling you an the details. Quotes from

students at Radford University come from research by my colleague Danielle

Currier, whose in~depth interviews parallel the survey research of the online

study. I am grateful to Danielle for sharing some of her findings.

198 for a woman there's still'some loss of value." Laura Sessions Stepp,

"Study: Half of All Teens Have Had Oral Sex" in Washington Post,

September 15, 2005; Sharon Jayson, "Teens Define Sex in New Ways" in USA

Today, October 18, 2005.

198 rituals for what has become known as "the girl hunt." See, for example,

David Grazian, "The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of

Masculinity as Collective Activity" in Symbolic Interaction 30(2), 2007.

f99 participants are drinking or drunk," says one study. Norval Glenn and

Eliz.abeth Marquardt, Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hopingfor Mr. Right: College Women on Dating and Mating Today. New York: Institute for

American Values, 2001. p. 15.

200 her book, Unhooked, "is a small price to pay for exoneration.JJ Laura Sessions Stepp. Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, (New York: Riverhead, 2007). p. 115.

Endnotes 309

201 so annoying when you start dating them." Benoit Denizet-Lewis,

"Friends, Friends with Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall" in New

York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004, p. 32.

201 pushed aside or drawn closer at our whim. Laura Sessions Stepp,

Unhooked, pp. 40, 174. 202 then play video games or something. It rocks. "Ibid., p. 32. 202 outside of relationships, guys don't need relationships." Ibid., p. 34

203 any night and you know that's fine with them. Bogle, Hoohing Up,

manuscript, Ch. 6, p. 6, Ch. 4, p. 7. 204 Asian students arefar less likely to do so. The median number of hookups

for white males, juniors and seniors, was 6 (3 for white women). The median

for black and Latino males 'was 4, and for Asians it was zero.

209 had intercourse every time they hooked up," she writes. Bogle,

Hooking Up, Ch. 5, p. 20. 210 end it," because "they're like bored with it." Paula England, Emily

Fitzgibbons Shafer, and Alison Fogarty, "Hooking Up and Forming Romantic

Relationships on Today's College Campuses" in The Gendered Society Reader

(Third Edition) edited by Amy Aronson and Michael Kimmel (New York,

Oxford University Press, 2007), manuscript, p. 7.

211 90 percent'of both boys and girls are sexually active. See Peter

Bearman and Hannah Bruckner, "Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges

and First Intercourse" in American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), january, 2001,

pp. 859-912.

212 just as likely to practice oral sex as nonpledgers. Angela Lipsitz, Paul

D. Bishop, and Christine, Robinson, "Virginity Pledges: Who Takes Them and HO\v Well Do They \Vork?" Presentation at the Annual Convention of the

American Psychological Association, August 2003.

212 kissing with tongues broke their abstinence pledge. See Bearman and

Bruckner, 2001,

and Lipsitz, Bishop and Robinson, 2003.

212 they "kept" their vows had experienced oral sex. Lipsitz, et aI., 2003.

213 impair their ability to develop those relationships-ever. Laura

Sessions Stepp, Unhooked, pp. 13,28, 58,4. 213 those grandmothers!-could never have imagined. For examples of

this, see Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked; and Norval Glenn and Elizabeth

Marquardt, Hooking Up, Hanging Out and Hopingfor iWr. Right.

214 postponing marriage, so they have time to play the field." Cited in

Sharon Jayson, "What's Up with Hookups?" in USA Today, February 14, 2007. 215 your body and make yourself emotionally invulnerable." Laura

Sessions Stepp, Unhooked, p. 243.

310 Endnotes