Hook Up Hypothesis

Of students who reported hooking up, 41 percent used words such as “regretful,” “empty,” “miserable,” “disgusted,” “ashamed,” “duped” and even “abused” to describe the experience. An additional 23 percent expressed ambivalence, and the remaining 36 percent said they were more or less “fine” with hookups — “fine” being the most common description.

Free-and-easy sex prides itself on being commitment free, no emotional ties attached. Today, this idea of leaving all emotions at the door is the supposedly, sophisticated choice on campus. It is now well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by “hooking up”- an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to oral sex to intercourse - all complete without the emotional entanglement of a real relationship. As times have changed, students begin to view a relationship as “too time consuming” and something that no longer takes priority amongst their busy, high achieving schedules. However, hooking up threatens the sexual, physical, and psychological health of college-age youth. Today’s youth may want to think twice before engaging in the prevalent hook-up culture. Despite the popularity of positive feelings, hookups can include negative outcomes including emotional and psychological injury, and even more concerning consequences such as unintended rape. In order to protect our generation, and more specifically our women, society must acknowledge the detrimental effects of a hook up culture to create a greater understanding surrounding this risky sexual behavior and ensure a more powerful, positive presence for women in our society. The combination of a society seeped in rape culture and an alcohol infused hookup culture creates a compromising sexual environment where women have limited control, opening the

From this, Kelly concludes that these elements “offer only the perception of freedom” (72). Hookup culture places a burden upon students. The sexist nature of this culture puts women at a disadvantage; and this can be extremely harmful in developmental years.

For our final book, I read American Hookup by Lisa Wade. In the book, Wade shines a light on the prominent hookup culture in universities today. From exploring changing dynamic from ‘calling’ to hook up culture, the experiences of enthusiasts that participate in hookup culture, and the reality for those who decide not to participate in hookup culture. In the end, Wade make several conclusions on the process of hookup culture like the participant is typically drunk or under the influence of some type of drug, girls and guys both look at their opinions of their friends when deciding whether or not to hook up, and that it’s most important be having ‘fun’ while sticking to the many unspoken rules of hookup culture.

The article supported their claim through collecting data from the website NevaEvaLand, a popular social media page used by girls in low-income areas such as Atlanta, Georgia, to display how different sexual scripts influenced the way girls acted on the internet. Stokes found that there were five groups that most girls would label themselves a part of the, “Freaks, Virgins, Down-Ass Chick, Pimpette, and Resisters” (Stokes 124). After analyzing the five different sexual scripts, the author described the attitude each person carried towards sex and how they acted on the internet. Her reasoning for why the girls acted in the manner they did online was because they were looking for different pleasures out of sexual partners. The Freaks and Down-Ass Chicks were more promiscuous and expressed that on their homepage, while those such as Virgins were finding someone who was fine with abstaining from sex. The data collected made her reasoning effective by providing credible support to her

In the book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, By Lisa Wade, she addresses the issues and concerns that she sees within the “hookup culture”. Lisa Wade’s book is a mixture of important statistics and personal accounts of what happens in the hookup culture on various college campuses. To define the hookup culture that Wade is addressing, we can look to the book as Lisa defines the hookup culture as essentially casual sex with no strings attached, another sociologist Kathleen Bogle described this as a “new norm” for campuses and that this an be very harmful for women especially (Wade, 2017, p.16). Michael Kimmel a well-known sociologist of masculinity was quoted saying that hooking up is “guys-sex” and that guys run the

Hooking up has become an increasingly studied culture by many sociologists around the country. These studies have been done to understand the shift from the old culture of dating to the new culture of hooking up that we experience now. Many people find it interesting that the kids of our generation have become so sexualized and carefree compared to the college days of our parents. Many people wonder how we got to this point and how the dynamics of hookups work, and why we continue to go on with them even sometimes at cost of our mental and physical help. One of these people was Kathleen A. Bogle, who wrote an entire book on the subject called, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, which is the focal point of this essay.

Kate Warrington interviewed students in the hookup culture and agree “there's pressure for men to hookup frequently, but the pressure for women lies in limiting their number of hookups.” This one key statement has been ignored by far too many sociologists and psychologists. They don’t seem to factor in other reasons women may be feeling depressed besides their openness to hookup in the

The results differed a little bit between the men and the women. Across previous research and including this current study it was found that alcohol and drug use were related to sexual risk behavior. These were the only two variables that seemed consistent for both sexes. For men, higher extraversion and lower agreeableness seemed to predict risky sexual behavior. For women it was higher sexual excitation and lower sexual inhibition that led to risky sexual behavior. They also looked at the Big Five personality traits but they found that they were not predictive of risky sexual behavior like some were in men. Their findings were consistent with the previous literature that is already published. It found that social desirability was related to risky sexual behavior in women, and the threat of sexual disclosure was related to risky sexual behavior in men. This was something that this study added to the literature out there. This study is hard to make predictions off of because it is only correlational, but it does give people insight to the type of people who are more likely to engage in risky sexual

However, once the questions became racier the difference between men’s and women’s responses was highlighted. In the experiment held only six percent of women said yes to a visit to a random man’s apartment, when about sixty-nine percent of men were eager to say yes. This also doesn’t seem to be a surprise because most guys feel safer going to a random girl’s apartment then vice versa. When the third question was asked and casual sex was requested, no women said yes, but about seventy-five percent of men accepted the proposal without second thought. The men who declined the offer all gave an excuse to justify the rejection such as stating they are married or currently is in a relationship. Women, on the contrary, denied the requests with quick responses such as “What is wrong with you?” or “leave me alone.” The results show that women become highly grossed out when asked the third question and not one felt the urge to say yes.

In the article the researchers were trying to challenge the sexual strategies theory. It seems as though sexual strategies theory is different genders having different preferences when choosing a mate, in the case of long and short term relationships. The hypothesis at first was that both boys and girls felt that attractiveness was important. Girls would be more inclined to date someone because of social status and that boys would be the complete opposite. They also expected that social status would only become important when the person is attractive and social status would be important no matter if the person is attractive on no for girls. The last thing that was tested was according to Ha (2009) “the potential moderator effects of

The majority of the time the person who is left longing for more than just a casual hookup is the female. Women, by nature, are more likely to become more emotionally attached, especially when it comes to sexual activities. However, most of the time, girls will be willing to play along with the game of hooking up. Perhaps, in hopes, that it will someday lead to something more. But, if and when it doesn’t, they can be left emotionally distraught. Girls will become attached to the person they are with and grow to have a sincere care for them. However, when it comes to picking a mate, boys are not as particular about the girl. A study, Age and gender differences in mate selection criteria for various involvement levels found that “men should be equally as selective as women with respect to long-term mates, but less selective than woman with respect to short-term mates criteria (Kenrick).” Boys are less likely to think about all aspects of girl when planning on hooking up with her, unlike girls. They are not as particular because they are just looking for

For these encounters a young person follows certain “rules” to arrange a successful hook up. To begin with, one contacts a possible partner and decides where and when to meet up and have sex. Then, after the

Orenstein began her quest for an honest account of today’s hook-up culture as her daughter approached adolescence. Prior to this point in her life, she had only heard from friends about how teenage girls were treated in today’s culture, now she needed to know if this type of culture really did exist. Since she had been chronicling girl’s lives for over twenty-five years, it was an obvious place to start (Orenstein, P., 2016). She interviewed girls, psychologists, sociologists, pediatricians, educators, and journalist to uncover the ugly truth.

The number of affairs was chosen to be the dependent variable. The alternative option to this choice is using a binary independent variable, “if women had at least one affair”. Number of affairs is preferred because, firstly, it is a more comprehensive measure of both genders whereas “if women had at least one affair” accounts for female only; and secondly, of all the responses received, only 31.5% of the participants have engaged in an extramarital affair. By using number of affairs, more information can be reviewed with reduced sample size.