Lisa Wade, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 304 pp., $16.
Sociologist Lisa Wade gives us a non-judgmental, but not uncritical guide to the sexual culture of undergraduate students today, recognizing both its developmentally positive aspects and its contradictions, inadequacies, and dangers. The book synthesizes previous quantitative studies with her own qualitative study of 110 first-year students enrolled in introductory courses in Sociology or Sexuality between 2010 and 2015, who were asked to keep journals concerning their own encounters with campus sex. Conceived and written before the emergence of #MeToo and the latest storms of campus activism around issues of sexual assault and harassment, it offers balanced consideration and useful insight uncontaminated by the moralistic tone of more polemical diatribes.
Re-evaluating her book in light of the accelerating anti-sexual backlash by recent sexual assault activists and the university administrators kowtowing to them, one is struck by the utter inconsistency of both male and female student behavior with the rigid strictures of “affirmative verbal consent” that have become the hallmark of efforts at sexual regulation enforced by the “progressive” Puritans who now populate bloated Student Services bureaucracies and Title IX offices.
Her first chapter, “Hooking Up, a How To,” relies on her students’ narratives to paint a vivid tableau of loud and crowded fraternity parties in which sustained, intelligent conversation is impossible, but the press of packed bodies makes groping all but inevitable. Getting drunk or high even before the parties (called “pre-gaming”) is the price of admission. Girls will dance with each other in a circle, buttocks facing outward in an open invitation to “grinding” by male partners who approach from behind and press against them groin to butt. The common practice is to rely on other girls to signal whether their unseen male partner is desirable or not; if he is, turning around to dance facing the male partner is thought to “seal the deal,” leading to a session among the tangled bodies flopped out in the “make-out room.” Plied with more drinks and in no fit state to make it home on their own, girls are frequently receptive to invitations to come up to a boy’s room or be escorted by him to a nearby dorm – invitations they would not accept if sober. She cites a study establishing that on average, girls have had four drinks when they hook up, boys six.
Why is drunkenness considered so necessary to this ritual? Drunken sex is usually bad sex, and excessive inebriation to the point of diminished capacity raises the spectre of it being retrospectively considered rape, however compliant it may have appeared at the time. Students justify drunken sex on two grounds: (1) it loosens inhibitions and builds courage in approaching others, and (2) it frames the act as something they can treat as insignificant and subsequently explain away (“I wouldn’t have done it if I weren’t drunk”). Wade notes that students regard sober sex as something serious that is only appropriate in committed relationships. These considerations provoke the further question, why are heterosexual students so squeamish and inhibited about sex that they need intoxication to do it and then later dismiss it? Although, as Wade points out, student hookup culture aims at the sexual freedom that has long been characteristic of gay male culture, most (but not all) gay men are able to engage in promiscuous sex without the same need of intoxicants to overcome sexual repression, although drugs are sometimes used to enhance the experience.
Wade observes that the later need to frame what happened that night as “meaningless” is such that both partners frequently go out of their way to avoid each other, as appearing too eager to make something out of it might seem affectively weak. Sexual desirability depends on appearing “cool” rather than emotionally needy. But coolness often approaches callousness. Although few hookups result in relationships, Wade observes that most relationships among the undergraduate students she studied began as hookups, and the students who avoided hooking up did not find a relationship during their college years. Dating tends to follow sex, rather than preceding it, as was the norm in earlier generations. Whether this is the best way of finding a compatible long-term partner is open to question. J. Uecker et al. (2015), “The Four U’s: Latent Classes of Hookup Motivations among College Students.” Social Currents 2(2): 163-81, surveyed 500+ Duke undergrads, and found that half of them were utilitarians who hooked up in the hope of finding a committed and monogamous partner. However, the Online College Social Life Survey found that 71% of men and 67% of women are dissatisfied with their ability to find a long-term partner in college. This suggests a profound cognitive disconnect between what students really want and what they do.
According to Wade’s figures, the average student has by their senior year hooked up eight times, although half of those are with a previous hookup partner. A not insubstantial percentage do not hook up at all, so the average figure is higher for those who do. Non-white students, especially blacks, are less likely to hook up; Wade speculates that this is connected to their more precarious existence in college, including financial struggles that necessitate living at home or working while in school, leaving little time for the kind of social life enjoyed by affluent white students in fraternities and sororities. Catholic students are more likely to hook up, but religious commitment (and even attending any but the most conservative religious college) is mostly unconnected to the propensity to do so. Females who regularly attend religious services are slightly less prone to hook up, but observant males are more likely to do so than their non-observant counterparts. It may be that belief in man’s inherent lustful nature (and God’s compassionate forgiveness) actually serves as a license for sexual misbehavior on the part of religious males, as long as the sinner is duly penitent.
These cognitive dissociations manifest in cycles of intoxicated excess followed by revulsion and regret, providing a ripe environment for feelings of violation that sometimes escalate into claims of sexual assault by females and even by males who experiment with same-sex acts. Unclear communication and memories dulled by alcohol or drugs leave many students troubled and confused about what transpired. The environment provides cover for a small number of unscrupulous serial rapists who learn how to target and manipulate victims with diminished capacity for resistance. Wade sees even greater danger in the pressure of hookup culture causing otherwise non-violent male students to engage in sexual aggression that is at least rape-adjacent. She uncritically cites the familiar one-in-four statistic about women sexually assaulted in college, but fails to recognize that these studies rely almost entirely on convenience samples that are biased toward participation by students who have had a problem; the definitions of sexual assault in these studies are also often problematic.
Wade proposes an interesting explanation for the aggressiveness with which college women now pursue sex, compared to previous generations. She believes that parents and contemporary culture generally encourage more masculine behavior in girls as they grow up, pushing athletic competitiveness, career ambitions, and self-assertion instead of more traditionally feminine traits of domesticity, propriety, and modesty, and these qualities are particularly characteristic of those girls who choose to attend college rather than marrying at a young age. She correctly points out that most high school history classes emphasize as role models women who step out of traditional gender roles. Media and popular culture do the same. Although her book was written before the exponential increase in transgender identification among adolescent natal females became as apparent as it is now, this recent trend would appear to have the same etiology.
There are two areas that one wishes Wade would have explored more fully in this book. She says little about college students’ use of social media in pursuit of sexual hookups. This mechanism may be preferred by students who do not have access to fraternity parties; not all colleges have residential fraternities, and even where they do exist, fraternities and sororities are by definition exclusive and exclusionary. Social media can facilitate sexual contacts outside the immediate college environment. Wade believes college females (who are today 60% of the student body) are at a competitive disadvantage in finding male partners, but hookup apps like Tinder are widely recognized as putting male users at an even greater statistical disadvantage. Young people who are not in college may be just as prone to hooking up. Most research on college sex fails to utilize a control group of non-college females: C. M. Rennison & L. A. Addington (2014), “Violence Against College Women: A Review to Identify Limitations in Defining the Problem and Inform Future Research,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 15(3), 159-69, not in Wade’s bibliography, utilized the National Crime Victimization Survey and found that non-college women in the same 18-24 age range are actually at higher risk of sexual assault. Before concluding that college party culture is a uniquely risk-inducing problem, scholarship needs to look at the broader context. We should seek to understand what is distinctive, if anything, about sexual experience within the environment of elite residential colleges.
The other consideration we miss is the role of high school sexual socialization and how it relates to the behavior she observes among college freshmen, who hook up at a higher rate than upper-classmen. One might expect that young people who were the most sexually active as adolescents would be the most inclined to engage in college hookups, but it is also possible that these young people are more self-confident in finding partners without the support of intoxication or more likely to have already found a steady partner whom they retain while in college. The question is under-researched. Indeed, numerous studies suggest that teenagers today are less likely than their counterparts in earlier generations to be sexually active, and the average age of sexual debut for both males and females is now higher than before, leading to media stories about the “sexual recession” (Click here for our article on this subject). Could it be that our excessive anxiety to “protect” minors from exposure to sexual content and exploration has the perverse effect of unleashing wild and irresponsible behavior as soon as they are living outside of the parental panopticon for the first time? Could a more permissive attitude toward some degree of adolescent sexual experimentation defuse its allure for inexperienced college freshmen? Would more sexual experience and relationship negotiation prior to college lessen the appeal of drunken parties as the favored context for what often turns out to be uncaring and later regretted sex? Is it psychologically healthy to postpone sexual debut far beyond the age of biological maturity, despite immersion in a sex-saturated popular culture? Or do years of sexual repression, grounded in parental surveillance, unrealistic age of consent laws, and inadequate sex education limited to diseases and pregnancy, lead to the dam bursting in explosive ways with unpredictable consequences?
Wade discusses sexual experience before college in the case of only one student, whom she calls “Esther.” Esther was sexually abused at the age of 13, and subsequently pursued multiple sexual encounters throughout her high school years, continuing as an enthusiastic participant in college hookup culture. Most experts in Child Sexual Abuse would pathologize her case as one of “premature sexualization” leading to “problematic risk behaviors.” It is to Wade’s credit that she does not do so, but instead listens to what Esther herself has to say about it: Esther considered sex with multiple partners the best possible therapy for her abuse. As Wade observes, “Positive, freely chosen, pleasurable sexual experiences were the first stage of her recovery.”
At the heart of the problems Wade identifies in student hookup culture is the overconsumption of alcohol. In this area, as with sex, prohibition only seems to make matters worse, by diverting alcohol consumption from legal and highly regulated establishments to unregulated student parties. In 2008, 136 college presidents joined in signing the Amethyst Initiative, which called for reconsideration of the 1984 federal legislation forcing states to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21; many observed that binge-drinking among undergraduates had only grown more prevalent during that period. It does not appear to be nearly as great a problem among university students in European states, which set the age at 18 or even 16 and where it is customary for young people to learn to drink in moderation along with their families. Similarly, European states set the age of sexual consent lower than is common in the U.S. and see lower rates of teen pregnancy, STDs, and rape. Trusting young people with responsibility may lead to more responsible behavior than infantilizing them by telling them they aren’t old enough to act responsibly.