Hooking Up

December 10, 2007
Hooking-up” is the term du jour, connoting a wide range of consensual sexual activities, with no pretense of starting a relationship, between young, mostly college-age students. This study by Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University—based on 76 interviews with mostly white college students and recent graduates from 2001 to 2006—gives a wide range of voices and opinions on hooking-up culture. While there are few surprises (women are still, for the most part, subjected to a punishing sexual double standard)—Bogle is a smart interviewer and gets her subjects to reveal intimate and often embarrassing details without being moralizing. She interrogates her subjects about alcohol use, the relationship of gay and lesbian students to hook-up culture, and opting out of hook-up culture. Bogle’s work is important because it offers a complex portrait of young people grappling the best way they know how with the sexual realities of a rapidly changing world. Although limited in scope, this evenhanded, sympathetic book on a topic that has received far too much sensational and shoddy coverage is an important addition to the contemporary literature on youth and sexuality.

February 15, 2008
Here are two rather different approaches to exploring contemporary sexual practices. In "America Unzipped", journalist Alexander travels the country meeting perfectly ordinary people who sell sex toys, create amateur porn, or immerse themselves in bondage or fetish cultures. Along the way, he takes a job at a sex superstore in Tempe, AZ; accompanies a Passion Parties consultant to house parties in Shawnee, KS; and (in a particularly explicit chapter that may disturb some readers) spends a day observing BDSM porn videos being created in San Francisco. Alexander notes the uneasy but possibly symbiotic coexistence of social/religious conservatism and sexual adventurousness, which both nurture their communities by self-defining as countercultural. Though himself a sex columnist (for MSNBC's "Sexploration"), Alexander identifies as "vanilla" and seems initially nonplussed at so much sex of such a kinky variety. His narrative persona may comfort some readers and annoy others, but his willingness to go where his research leads him (short of participation) is to be admired regardless.

Sociologist Bogel's is a qualitative, interview-based study of the sexual experiences of undergrads and recent alumni of two colleges. It contrasts the boy-asks-girl-out "dating script," once a mainstay of the collegiate social scene but now relegated to high school and adulthood, with the now-dominant practice of "hooking up" in which people in group settings such as bars and parties pair off for no-strings-attached experiences varying from kissing to intercourse. Bogle notes that hooking up benefits those interested primarily in immediate sexual gratification and not those looking for a sustained relationship. She concludes that despite many changes from the dating era to the hooking-up era, including increased sexual freedom for women, a double standard benefiting men continues to prevail. Contrasting with Alexander's informal findings, Bogle also notes that sexual activity on campus is less rampant and promiscuous than many observers (including college students) presume. So is everyone else really doing it, and how and with whom? We still don't know, but we know more than we did before. Both books are recommended; Bogle's is of greater interest in academic settings and Alexander's for tolerant general audiences. [For Alexander, see Prepub Alert, "LJ" 9/15/07.]Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Worthington Libs., OH

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