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(while society looked the other way) had to do so with women of ill re-pute.68 In the hooking-up era, men have many more women to choose from for potential sexual encounters. For better or worse, men also do not have to put forth the amount of effort (e.g., phone calls, flowers, expensive dates, etc.) that their grandfathers did for sexual interaction to take place. Men today also do not have to propose marriage or walk down the aisle in order to have regular access to sexual intercourse. Indeed, men can have sex without entering into a relationship at all. Thus, hooking up is a system whereby men can engage in sexual encounters without the pretext of a relationship and where no guarantee of an ongoing or future bond with the woman is required. In a sense, it can be argued that men are the ones who really benefited from the sexual revolution. Robert, a sophomore at Faith University, opined: Robert:It almost seems like [the hookup scene] is a guy’s paradise.
No real commitment, no real feelings involved, this is like a guy’s paradise. This age [era] that we are in I guess.
KB: So you think guys are pretty happy with the [hookup] system?
Robert:Yeah! I mean this is what guys have been wanting for many, many years. And women have always resisted, but now they are going along with it. It just seems like that is the trend.
Clearly, women’s rights activists who called for sexual equality with men did not intend to promote a form of interaction that would be considered a “guy’s paradise.”
Despite the increase in sexual freedom since the dating era, the hookup culture is not as out of control as some observers (and college students) believe. Hooking up is dominant on campus, but it represents a wide range in terms of level of participation and sexual behavior.
There are many students who do not take part in hooking up at all and others who, for various reasons (e.g., they are in a relationship), have only hooked up a few times.69 For those students who have engaged in hooking up, many encounters involved nothing more than kissing. Although a hookup can involve casual sex between two parties who just met that evening, a hookup could also mean two people kissing after having a crush on each other for a year. Likewise, a hookup encounter may happen only once or evolve into repeatedly hooking up or even become a relationship. The point is that hooking up can mean different 184
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things, and it is too often assumed, by scholars and commentators alike, that it refers to only the most promiscuous scenarios.
This is not to say that extreme behavior is not happening in the hookup culture. For some students, college life can become an endless spring break. These are the same students who consume a dispropor-tionate amount of alcohol on campus and hook up with different partners on a weekly basis. This behavior raises a variety of health concerns, particularly with regard to the level of binge drinking and the potential for STD transmission or rape. It is students caught up in the extremes of the hookup culture who, to the exclusion of their more moderate classmates, have captured the attention of critics. Although this behavior needs attention, it can also distort the reality of life on campus for the student body as a whole.
Acknowledging the variation in the hookup culture is important not only for students generally, but also for understanding differences between genders. Although I chose to highlight the differences between men and women throughout the preceding chapters, there is, no doubt, as much variation within gender as there is across it. Just as not all students fit the mold of the most raucous partiers, not all men want sex and not all women want relationships. I spoke with some men who preferred being in a relationship over hookup encounters with new partners. I also spoke to some women who enjoyed the freedom and experimentation of the hookup scene (at least during freshman year). Therefore, it would be unfair to oversimplify the behavior of the sexes.
However, I found that women’s interest in hookup encounters evolving into some semblance of a relationship and men’s interest in “playing the field” was a theme that fundamentally affects the dynamic between men and women in the hookup culture.
Given that there is a wide range of possibilities available to men and women coming of age in the hookup era, it would seem that there is an almost endless array of choices an individual can make. For example, if a student wants to go to parties and hook up every weekend, he or she can choose to do so. Likewise, if a student wants to be part of the hookup scene, but as a more moderate participant, he or she can do that too. However, in many ways, the hookup system creates an illusion of choice. Although students have many options about how they conduct themselves within the hookup culture, they cannot change the fact that hooking up is the dominant script on campus. An individual student may decide to abstain from hooking up altogether, but they are H O O K I N G U P A N D DAT I N G
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more or less on their own to figure out an alternative. In other words, no other script exists side-by-side with hooking up that students can opt to use instead. Emily, a sophomore at Faith University, put it this way: “If [hooking up] is not what you’re looking for, then I guess it is hard to escape it.”
Students who would prefer to go out on traditional dates every weekend cannot change the fact that they did not enter college during a time when that was the “in” thing to do. Thus, students can use their own moral compass to make personal decisions on how to use the hookup script, but their decisions are constrained by their environment and the time period. The modern college campus is conducive to hooking up, and no individual can change that.
It is my hope that readers have gained a better understanding of the hooking-up phenomenon. I believe that the stories of college students and young alumni presented here provide a look into the world of campus life and single life after college as many young people experience it today. The information in this book can be useful for those on the outside looking in at campus life, particularly college administrators and parents seeking to guide students through their college careers. I hope that they, and other commentators, will come away with an apprecia-tion for the systemic issues that impact individual experiences.
I also hope that my work will be useful to researchers who study social problems on the college campus, such as binge drinking, STD transmission, and sexual assault. Understanding the relationship between hooking up and these issues is crucial because, I believe, these campus problems grow out of a larger context of how students socialize and form sexual and romantic relationships. Without understanding this context, it would be difficult to find any effective solutions.
For recent graduates who are trying to make sense of a new singles scene, this book can provide insight into where they have been, where they are going, and why things change (almost overnight) after they leave the campus environment. Although hooking up ceases to play the dominant role in social life that it did in college, it has lasting effects for alumni. After college, individuals must learn to adapt to a new script (i.e., formal dating), yet prepare to switch back to the hookup script when circumstances make it possible to do so. I hope alumni readers will find the views of other twenty-something singles insightful.
Most importantly, I believe that college students who are learning to navigate the hookup system will find the information in this book 186
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helpful. Many students I interviewed spoke of having to find out how hooking up works as they made their way through college. By sharing their experiences of college life, they have given current students a point of reference on the hookup culture. Although students may not identify with all of the individuals in the preceding chapters, I think that the stories of some men and women will resonate with each reader.
Understanding others’ perspectives on hooking up will allow students to see how their intimate lives fit into the bigger picture. I hope
my work will give students the opportunity to reflect on what they are doing, why they are doing it, and will ultimately help them to make informed, and possibly better, decisions about their lives.
Methodological Appendix
In order to obtain interviews for the college portion of the study, I solicited professors at both Faith and State universities to ask for student volunteers to participate in the study. Some professors permitted me to contact their students via e-mail so a description of the project could be sent to them; however, most professors gave a handout to their students with a description of the project and information on how to contact me if they were interested in volunteering for the study. Importantly, only professors who had a diverse group of students in terms of gender, grade level, and major were asked to help me obtain interviewees. For the college portion of the study, I interviewed 33 women and 18 men. I also interviewed students of all grade levels, including 8
freshmen, 20 sophomores, 11 juniors, and 12 seniors. Given that many aspects of students’ social lives change throughout their college career, it was important to include the experience of students from freshmen through seniors.
I recruited interviewees through a number of means. For the college portion of the study, I asked professors from a variety of disciplines to hand out an interview solicitation in class. For the alumni portion of the study, I found interviewees via an alumni Web site as well as by mailing an invitation to participate in the study to homes of recent graduates within a two-hour radius of their undergraduate institution. I avoided snowball sampling because it might have led to misleading data. Snowballing would inevitably lead to interviewing people from the same crowd or clique. Since perception of the behavior of other members of the college community was a part of the college portion of the study, it was important to vary the type of students being interviewed.
To obtain alumni interviews at the faith-based university, I utilized a Web site containing alumni e-mail addresses. At the state university, I utilized the alumni office to reach graduates from the previous 10 years who lived in surrounding zip codes (i.e., within approximately 60
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miles). I contacted alumni ages 23–30 and asked if they would volunteer to meet me for an interview. For the alumni portion of the study, I interviewed 16 men and 9 women.1
The interview solicitations given to both college students and young alumni were deliberately vague. The terms “hooking up” and
“dating” did not appear in the solicitation. Instead, prospective volunteers were asked if they would be willing to be interviewed about “their experiences and observations of campus social life, particularly male/
female interaction on campus.” The alumni were asked the same, but for “their college and post-college years.” I utilized the phrase “male/
female interaction” in lieu of something more precise in hopes that a wider range of “types” would volunteer for the study. For example, I did not want only those who were completely immersed in the hookup culture to volunteer; I also wanted to talk to those who did not hook up or rarely did so. Importantly, I did not assume that students or alumni utilized any particular script to interact with the opposite sex. Instead, I asked them to describe how men and women typically get together and form relationships. Then, I asked them whether their experience was similar or different from what they believed was going on around them.
All potential interviewees were informed that the information they conveyed to me would be kept confidential and anonymous. To ensure privacy, I conducted most interviews in an office on campus or a private library study room.2 Furthermore, interviewees were assured that their real names would not appear on the audiotape or in the transcriptions.
Interviewees were also informed that they could stop the interview at any time or skip a question they did not wish to answer. The Institu-tional Review Boards at both of the universities in the study approved the study design, solicitation form, interview guide, and informed consent form.
I began data collection in November 2001 and continued through May 2006. The interview format was in-depth and semistructured. I au-diorecorded and transcribed all of the interviews, each of which ranged from approximately one to one and a half hours in length. After the first ten interviews, themes began to emerge. I recorded each theme and then used what I learned from these initial interviews to refine the interview guide. Despite using interview guide questions during each interview, the interviews took on a more conversational style. I found that this style allowed interviewees to open up about intimate aspects of M E T H O D O ll O G I C A ll A P P E N D I X
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TABLE 1
Breakdown of Interviewees by Institution and Sex Male
Female
Total
Faith U. undergrads
11
20
31
State U. undergrads
7
13
20
Faith U. alumni
7
6
13
State U. alumni
9
3
12
Total
34
42
76
their lives. I analyzed and coded the data utilizing Straus and Corbin’s grounded theory method.3 In other words, the data analysis is grounded in the experiences and perceptions of the interviewees. Data collection continued until I reached theoretical saturation.
LIMITATIONS
Although I attempted to interview a wide range of students and young alumni, my sample was not diverse in terms of race/ethnicity.4
As I indicated in chapter 1, the lack of diversity partially reflected the campuses I chose to study, but was also by design. Given that previous researchers have found that the script for interaction varies by race, it was virtually impossible for me to fully explore how “minority” men and women initiate sexual and romantic relationships without at least doubling the number of people I interviewed. Although I did interview a couple of African American students as well as a couple of people of Asian descent, several other racial/ethnic groups are left out entirely, such as Hispanics, Indians, and Native Americans. It seems likely that the intimate behavior of these groups vary not only from the dominant white culture, but also from one another. This makes studying them an even greater challenge, yet it is a challenge that I hope researchers will undertake soon.
In addition to the lack of racial diversity, interviewing students and alumni from two primarily residential four-year colleges inevitably reduces the social class diversity. Most of the students on the campuses I studied were middle or upper-middle class. This raises questions about how men and women interact and form relationships if they attend a commuter college or if they do not attend college at all. I suspect that 190
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hooking up still goes on, but to a much lesser degree (similar to what I found among alumni once they leave the college environment). However, this is only speculation and empirical research is needed to examine this issue. My study was also limited to universities on the East Coast of the United States. Although some national data on hooking up has been gathered, more is needed to see if there are regional variations in how the hookup script operates on campus.
I chose a qualitative methodology for this project because I believed it was the best way to capture what is really happening in the intimate lives of college students and young alumni. Hopefully, the richness of the data I collected came through in the many interview excerpts provided throughout the preceding chapters. Although my data were able to show what hooking up is, the range of experiences it encapsulates, and so on, my data cannot tell us how many students are engaging in various activities along the spectrum of hooking up. Therefore, more representative quantitative studies are needed to determine how often students are engaging in various behaviors
within the hookup script.
Finally, hooking up was the dominant script for forming sexual and romantic relationships on the campuses I studied, but not “everyone” was doing it. As I indicated in chapter 4, there were many groups or individuals who did not engage in the hookup culture. Although I attempted to have their voices heard, I realize that their stories were not completely captured. Future research should consider how students who abstain from hooking up navigate their sexual and romantic lives as well as how they are affected by the dominant hookup culture that surrounds them.
Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. Wolfe 2000, book jacket.
2. Bailey 1988.
3. See Miller and Gordon (1986) for a discussion of the decline of formal dating in high school.
4. Bianchi and Casper 2000.
5. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics 2001.
6. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics 2002.
7. The findings from this national study were presented in a report to the Independent Women’s Forum. Although the study was nationally representative and conducted by scholars, the findings, to my knowledge, have never been peer reviewed.
8. Glenn and Marquardt 2001, 4.
9. For evidence of the decline of dating on college campuses, see Horowitz 1987; Moffatt 1989; Murstein 1980; Strouse 1987.
10. For a discussion of the connection between hooking up and rape on the college campus, see Armstrong 2005, Sanday 2006. For an examination of the effects of divorce on college women’s involvement with hooking up, see Glenn and Marquardt 2001.
11. Sherman and Tocantins 2004; McPhee 2002.
12. See C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (1959) for his classic statement on seeing personal troubles as public issues.
13. The term “hooking up” has appeared in other studies using college student samples. However, these studies were focused on subject matter outside of consensual intimate interaction, for example, sexual assault on campus (Boswell and Spade 1996) and drug use among college women (Williams 1998). These studies, as well as two nonrepresentative studies that did focus directly on the subject of hooking up (Lambert, Kahn, and Apple 2003; Paul and Hayes 2002) will be discussed in later chapters.
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