Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus

Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus Review

A Review of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus

An assertion of this book is that dating is disappearing. So now parents don't have to think about their older children getting into casual sexual relations. Wrong, suggests the author.

With dating, males make significant efforts; gather money, transportation, etc to make a date possible. Dating was a test of a male's ability to manage resources. This was true in colleges where males were a majority during the 20th century.

Males are in the minority in colleges in the 21st century; 40% to 60% females, typically. Males are "scarcer" and no longer have an edge in jobs as they used to. Male resources are no longer larger than those of the females.

These conditions have led to less dating and now females often have to now seek out a male if they want a relationship with one. Also, males "pick and choose" more often than they ever did in the past. Even if a female might want to see the same male repeatedly, the male is freer than ever to opt out. Instead, the male can opt for brief sexual encounters with different females.

Hence, we have the "hook-up." This serious sounding term is actually vague as it can mean getting together for just kissing and necking or it can mean sexual intercourse. It is not a repeated relationship with the same person. In fact, some females might wind up waiting for a "call" to "come over" and "hook up," with just a simple text message.

This situation is gloomy for a female looking for a marriage mate. Options seem few. The writer of this review suspects that females asking males out on dates might be an effective option.

The author of this book uses stories of people that she has interviewed to describe details without elaborate statistics. She also describes her methods of getting students to "tell all," interesting to people doing surveys. Overall, the book is good for keeping up with the Gen Y culture...

Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus Overview

Read the Gawker Review

Listen to her NPR Interview

The Sociology of "Hooking Up": Author Interview on Inside Higher Ed

Newsweek: Campus Sexperts

Hookup culture creates unfamiliar environment - to parents, at least

Hooking Up: What Educators Need to Know - An op-ed on CHE by the author

It happens every weekend: In a haze of hormones and alcohol, groups of male and female college students meet at a frat party, a bar, or hanging out in a dorm room, and then hook up for an evening of sex first, questions later. As casually as the sexual encounter begins, so it often ends with no strings attached; after all, it was "just a hook up." While a hook up might mean anything from kissing to oral sex to going all the way, the lack of commitment is paramount.

Hooking Up is an intimate look at how and why college students get together, what hooking up means to them, and why it has replaced dating on college campuses. In surprisingly frank interviews, students reveal the circumstances that have led to the rise of the booty call and the death of dinner-and-a-movie. Whether it is an expression of postfeminist independence or a form of youthful rebellion, hooking up has become the only game in town on many campuses.

In Hooking Up, Kathleen A. Bogle argues that college life itself promotes casual relationships among students on campus. The book sheds light on everything from the differences in what young men and women want from a hook up to why freshmen girls are more likely to hook up than their upper-class sisters and the effects this period has on the sexual and romantic relationships of both men and women after college. Importantly, she shows us that the standards for young men and women are not as different as they used to be, as women talk about "friends with benefits" and "one and done" hook ups.

Breaking through many misconceptions about casual sex on college campuses, Hooking Up is the first book to understand the new sexual culture on its own terms, with vivid real-life stories of young men and women as they navigate the newest sexual revolution.

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