Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  “There’s this idea now that identity is built independent of relationships, not within them,” said Leslie Bell, the psychotherapist and author. “So only once you’re ‘complete’ as an adult can you be in a relationship. It’s an interesting shift from earlier academic thinking and folk wisdom—that women are naturally relationship-oriented and develop within them more than they do independent of them.” Bell isn’t opposed to hookups, but found that her own subjects, who were five or ten years older than mine, weren’t having the experience of trying out love, intimacy, vulnerability, or self-advocacy with a partner. Their adulthood and independence were based on denying rather than expressing emotional connection through sexuality. “It’s all about the importance of not getting played,” she said. “Why isn’t there much discussion about going through a bad love experience and learning from it? Why aren’t there as many stories about the importance of taking risks even if you do end up feeling played? It’s like a perversion of relatedness and interdependence—as though for women to participate in a relationship will always mean a loss of self.”

  Listening to Bell, I recalled a conversation I’d had with Mackenzie, a sophomore at a Bay Area high school dominated by hookup culture. She was going through a rocky patch when we met: her boyfriend of a year had just cheated on her, making out with another girl while drunk at a party, and she was conflicted over whether to break things off. She was often teary as we talked, describing ways she’d “lost herself” in their relationship. “I’m not saying that’s all a negative thing, though,” she added. “I’ve learned a lot about myself, too. I’ve learned that I have so much to me. I have a lot to give. Also I learned a lot about myself and vulnerability. I can love very deeply, and I think that’s a good thing. I’ve learned a lot about my body, about my mind—just being with someone else, hearing their views on things, being intimate. I’m still learning. I’m learning what it’s like to deal with heartbreak and someone you believed would never hurt you and he did. All of that.”

  On the college campuses I visited, hooking up was considered the ticket to a social life, to enjoyment, empowerment, even to a potential relationship. The girls who opted out, especially freshmen, could be left bored and lonely on a Saturday (or a Friday or a Tuesday) night. What fun was that? Their objections were usually not moral: they didn’t think that girls who hooked up were “sloppy” or indiscriminate so much as that casual sex seemed emotionally hollow, potentially unsafe, and, sometimes, unhygienic. Becca, for instance, a freshman at an East Coast private school, had been nicknamed Grandma by her friends because she was often in bed by nine. She’d hooked up plenty of times when she was younger—making out with boys at the private Jewish middle school she attended, performing oral sex for the first time in ninth grade, losing her virginity at fifteen in a haze of weed and alcohol. Those experiences left her feeling lousy. Since early senior year, she’d had a steady boyfriend with whom she was in love; she remained committed to him even though he was at school in another state. “My friends have said, ‘Bec, you shouldn’t have a boyfriend when you’re in college!’” she told me. “So, last night I went to a party and two separate people told me this sophomore guy wanted to fuck me. I was like, ‘Great. He doesn’t want to get to know me but he wants to fuck me?’ I have found someone I genuinely love and I’m not going to let that go to hook up with random people. I mean, you want me to hook up with a bunch of guys and get mono? I don’t understand.” (Becca, it is worth mentioning, was the only girl I interviewed on her campus who was not sick with a nasty upper respiratory infection that students called the Sludge.) Similar to Sam, the high school girl who wouldn’t spend time alone with her male friends, Becca also felt that the hookup culture was an obstacle to platonic relationships. “Like, I was hanging out at a frat house recently after a ‘darty’ [daytime party],” she said. “Just hanging out and talking to the guys, and one of the brothers was not shy in expressing his confusion over why I would do that, since I wasn’t hooking up with anyone.”

  Sierra had her share of hookups in high school, too, but found them similarly unfulfilling. A freshman in college when we met, she’d been with her current boyfriend for nearly a year. “I used to think the sexual stuff was how you got to the emotional connection,” she said. “But that’s not true. The emotional connection comes first. That’s what has made the sex so good. The first time we had sex, my subconscious was thinking, ‘He’s excited to do this not just for the sake of doing it, but to be doing it with me. To be doing it with someone he’s going to end up loving.’ He cares about how I am feeling. He texts me in the morning: ‘Good morning! How are you today?’ And if I text, ‘I’m tired,’ he texts back, ‘Great. But how are you today? Mentally? Are you stressed? Are you happy? Are you sad?’ It’s knowing that we got to know each other, to know what makes us pissed off or happy or sad. It’s that connection, that reassurance, that this isn’t a ‘hit and run.’ We live in the moment and love every second, but it is absolutely the emotional connection before the sexual stuff that has made it worth it.”

  At the other extreme, or so I initially thought, was a freshman at a midwestern college who regaled me with tales of her sexual swashbuckling for nearly two hours, telling me how she rejected boys whose penis sizes “didn’t meet my standards,” or who were too heavy (“I don’t like fat guys,” she said). Yet at the end of our conversation, when I asked if there was anything she’d like to add, she hesitated, and almost in a whisper said, “philophobia.”

  I looked at her questioningly. “It’s the fear of falling in love or being in love,” she explained. “I read about it in a book. Sometimes I feel that’s why I never get into an actual relationship. It’s so hard for me to have an emotional attachment to people. I don’t want to get hurt. So I just go from guy to guy, putting a barrier between me and others to keep that from ever happening.”

  I don’t want to idealize relationships. While some girls had found love and joy within them, others had experienced manipulation and devastation. Becca had undergone two depressive episodes after splitting up with high school boyfriends. Mackenzie cried until she vomited when she discovered her boyfriend’s recent betrayal, and had hardly eaten in days. Her schoolwork was suffering, too. More than half of physical and sexual abuse of teen girls by a romantic partner happens within a relationship, and those experiences prime girls to be victimized again in young adulthood. One girl I spoke with described how her tenth-grade boyfriend slapped her and flung her into a fence when she threatened to break up with him. Another girl, a sophomore in college, hadn’t realized she could be—and was—raped by her recent boyfriend. Encouraging girls to explore sexuality within mutually caring, emotionally connected relationships is one thing; insisting on it is another. That can turn sex into a commodity that girls barter for the “safety” of commitment, and implicitly condone the shaming of those who don’t comply.

  There was no consistent attitude toward either hookups or relationships among the girls I met. They all, however, had to negotiate the culture of casual sex, whether they participated in it or not. They all had to find comfortable ground in a culture that was simultaneously fun and antagonistic, carefree yet riddled with risk. The question to me, then, became less about whether hookups were “good” or “bad” for girls than about how to ensure reciprocity, respect, and agency regardless of the context of a sexual encounter. That meant understanding the contours of girls’ new freedom as well as the constraints, both physical and psychological, that remained.

  The Happy Hookup

  Holly, a Spanish and psychology major, revised her definition of “slut” for the first time when she was sixteen. She grew up in a mostly white, affluent, liberal East Coast suburb and attended a progressive, all-girls high school. Her mom told her to wait until marriage to have sex, but in Health class she learned about birth control and practiced putting a condom on a rubber model of a penis. (Again, though, the location of the clitoris, masturbation, and female orgasm went unmentioned.) In tent
h grade, some of her friends began performing oral sex on their boyfriends; within a year or so, they were having intercourse. “My opinion had very much been, ‘It’s only those skanky public school girls who are doing that sort of thing,’” Holly said. “But if my friends were having sex, it had to be okay, right? So I had to reevaluate. I thought, ‘That’s fine; they’ve been dating for a year. They’ve built trusting relationships.’”

  Holly, however, stayed both chaste and sober: a “good girl” who imagined she’d save sex for a loving relationship and alcohol until age twenty-one. When she did imagine having a boyfriend, her fantasies hewed to the romantic rather than the sexual—beaches and sunsets were usually involved. She entered college, she said, “very pure,” but campus life quickly changed her. Her fourth night at school, she made out at a party with a guy she barely knew. It was fun. A week after that, she gave the same guy a hand job, and he fondled her breasts. “It was a huge thing for me,” she recalled. “I touched a boy’s penis! He touched my boobs! I was slightly overwhelmed. Because three weeks before, I would have said no. But I wanted to be doing this, although nothing more than this.” By early October, she had happily hooked up with two more guys, making out on the dance floor and going back to their rooms. “I almost feel like I wanted the opportunity,” she said. “Because in high school I never had the opportunity to hook up with boys. And in college I have this endless opportunity to do it, so I felt like I could.”

  Holly met Connor, who lived on her floor, at a school football game, and the two bonded over their politics—which were more liberal than those of many of their peers—and a mutual passion for The Daily Show. They began texting, and one night Connor asked if Holly and her friends would take him to a frat party. Freshman year was tough for boys on campuses dominated by Greek life. In order to “preserve the ratio” of girls to boys at a party—keeping the odds in the hosts’ favor—frats limited the number of unaffiliated males allowed in. So unless a freshman guy was accompanied by a large enough group of women (three, four, sometimes more), he risked being turned away.

  Holly showed me a picture of herself on a recent night out that she’d posted to Instagram. She was dressed in what I came to think of as the sorority uniform: a tight black miniskirt, bare legs, crop top, and stilettos. Her hair was flat-ironed straight, and she wore red lipstick and dark eyeliner. She looked like a different person from the scrubbed-face girl before me. “There are few times that I feel more confident about my body than when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing and I’m wearing super high heels,” she told me. “I never feel more liberated than then. I’m proud of my body, and I like to show it off.”

  That phrase, “proud of my body,” continued to bedevil me. On one hand, I admired the young women’s bravado, their willingness to be overtly on the prowl, their refusal to be shamed for how they did or didn’t dress. At the same time, only certain bodies were allowed to be a source of “pride,” to be seen as sexual, to deflect shame, and Holly’s had not always been one of them. As a freshman, she was twenty-five pounds heavier than when we first met—she’d dieted and worked out all summer to lose the weight—and her wardrobe had been considerably more conservative. “I would never have worn anything skimpy because I wasn’t happy with how I looked,” she said. “Presenting myself in skimpy attire would have had a very negative impact on my mental state, because there would be those people, especially boys, who would say, ‘She’s fat and she should wear something else.’” It’s understandable that Holly would feel good about showing off the “right” body—it’s affirming to attract male approval and even female envy—but it’s hard to see her outfits as “liberating” when the threat of ridicule always lurks. One of her sorority sisters, for instance, had recently gained weight. “It’s not that she couldn’t wear skimpy clothes,” Holly said. “But she knows how she would feel if there were asshole-y boys who were like, ‘She’s a fat girl.’”

  On most of the campuses I visited, Greek life (or houses where athletes lived) was the center of the hookup scene. The twenty-six sororities in the National Panhellenic Conference are voluntarily dry. So it is the frats that host, control entry to, and provide alcohol for most parties. Fraternity pledges typically chauffeur groups of girls from freshman dorms or sorority houses to events (though not necessarily home again) that can offer endless variations on a single concept: young women as prostitutes. Themes include “CEOs and business hos,” “workout bros and yoga hos,” “lifeguard bros and surfer hos,” “GI Joes and army hos.” Girls who liked to party shrugged off those slights (similar to the way they ignored degrading lyrics in a favorite song) as a form of “boys will be boys,” unconnected to how most guys acted “in person.” Frats got in trouble only when their sexism became even more egregious or was mixed with racism: the Phi Sigma Kappa chapter at California Polytechnic was investigated in 2013 by the school’s administration for its “Colonial Bros and Nava-Hos” party. (No violations of university policies were found.) The Sigma Chi chapter at Harvard raised hackles with a similar bash, called “Conquistabros and Navajos.” Meanwhile, the Duke chapter of Kappa Sigma was suspended in 2013 after news broke of its racist “Asia Prime” party, whose invitation began, “Herro Nice Duke Peopre!!” (Duke frats have made headlines repeatedly in the past few years for such antics as inviting “all potential slam pieces” to a “Plan-B Pregame” party and sending an e-mail to female classmates requesting they arrive at a Halloween party dressed “like a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty school girl, or just total sluts.”) The Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter at Yale was banned from campus in 2010 after brothers gathered near the freshmen dorms and chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal!” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women and fill them with my semen.” Students protested in 2012 after the same frat’s Amherst chapter had a T-shirt printed up for its annual pig-roasting party depicting a woman clad in a bra and thong tied up and roasting on a spit, an apple jammed in her mouth, her sides bruised, and a pig standing beside her. Its caption read, “Roasting Fat Ones Since 1847.” In 2014 the Texas Tech chapter of Phi Delta Theta had its charter revoked for displaying a banner that read, “No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal!” at a party, along with a “vagina sprinkler” that shot water at guests. The members of all those houses, as in most of the Greek system, were primarily white and affluent; somehow they believed that racism and misogyny marked them as rebels rather than merely the latest recruits to an entrenched old guard.

  Young women are tacitly expected to repay their hosts’ generosity with sex, or at least the promise of its possibility. “Every girl knows that when you walk into a fraternity house, your most valuable asset is your sex appeal,” a junior at a private East Coast college told me. “Everyone knows you have to imply you’ll have sex with guys to get them to give you alcohol, drugs, rides, whatever. Everyone plays this game—and since at my school we’re all overachievers, we do it really well!”

  Girls who pledge sororities at Holly’s school were required to attend frat parties at least four nights a week. (There were “ragers” every night but Monday.) Before the main event, they would “pregame” with a different frat, socializing and drinking for an hour or two. Holly would typically have three or four beers at those occasions and sometimes also a couple of shots. The girls would then be picked up by a second round of pledge rides and driven to the real party. “In some houses, basically you get there, go down to the basement, grind with a guy, and go back with him. Just that fast. But at my favorite house, I talk to my friends, we play drinking games, we dance a little, we go back and smoke a little. Sometimes I’ll just dance with my sisters, and that’s a good time. And grinding is fun, too. It’s fun to have a guy holding on to you like that. You don’t have to hook up—and anyway, there’s more girls than guys at parties, so not everyone can. But it’s often a big hookup scene.”

  When I added it up, Holly was regularly downing three to six (or more) drinks in an evening. For w
omen, four qualifies as binge drinking. She didn’t consider herself a heavy drinker, and likely her friends wouldn’t, either. Alcohol is endemic to hookup culture. Hookups aren’t just lubricated by drinking; they are dependent on it, in order to create what Lisa Wade, an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College, calls “compulsory carelessness.” As a sophomore at an East Coast university told me, “It’s like the girls I know live dual lives. From Sunday night to Thursday afternoon we’re in the library all the time, working really hard. Then comes the weekend. We all rip back shots in our dorms before a frat’s pre-party. Like four to eight shots in about a half hour. That’s pretty normal. And then it’s normal to wake up next to some guy and not remember how you got there.”

  Alcohol, according to Wade, is how students signal to one another that the sex they’re having is meaningless. For her own research, she asked eighty-four freshmen to submit weekly journal entries over the course of a semester about sex and dating on campus. “They talked about having sex while sober in these reverent tones,” she said, “like it was an amazing unicorn: it was ‘meaningful’ in a way that drunk sex is not.” Drunkenness had replaced mutual attraction as the fuel for sexual interactions in college: “In a morning-after recap,” Wade continued, “it is a reason in itself to have had sex.”

  As with intercourse, the proportion of young people who drink has actually dropped over the past decade, but the amount that girls in particular (and white girls specifically) drink on each occasion has not. A 2013 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one out of four college women and one out of five high school girls had binged within the previous thirty days; they typically binged three times a month, downing an average of six drinks on each occasion. Other surveys have found that nearly two-thirds of college women and over 80 percent of men had episodes of binge drinking, and linked the practice with disordered eating—sometimes called “drunkorexia”—among girls who try to restrict food intake to reserve their calories for alcohol. Eighty-nine percent of college students get drunk before a random hookup, averaging four or more drinks each time. Three-quarters get drunk before hooking up with an acquaintance. They’re most likely to be the most drunk when the encounter includes some form of penetration: oral, vaginal, or anal; they’re also most likely to express regret after such experiences.