Sex Myth 2 - Hooking up in college is bad for women

Do you think "Hooking up in college is bad for women" is a myth or truth

She got the text a little after midnight: “Want to hang out?” She knew what that meant. It was from her friend (with benefits), Jim. There was only one reason that he would be texting her late on a weekday during midterms. She and Jim were both majoring in tough disciplines and took their classes seriously. The hard work was paying off because they both had good grades. Unlike a lot of their classmates, they had their plans in place and knew what it would take to get into graduate school. So, there was no way that Jim wanted to go to one of the bars or fraternity parties. He had the same test she had in about 12 hours. She looked at the text again and noticed that her eyes were blurry from studying without a break for the last three hours. She was tired and needed sleep, but she also knew that she was keyed up and anxious about the test. She liked Jim. He was smart and occasionally funny. He was thin in the way that some people are thin despite horrible eating habits. Overall, she liked the way he looked. She knew that she was better looking than he – not to mention smarter and wittier – and that she could do better.

However, Mr. Better‐than‐Jim wasn’t texting her, Jim was. She thought that hooking up with Jim might be the perfect way to wind down. It would be fun and she would probably be asleep faster than if she just went home alone. So, she wrote back: “In library. Are you home?” She liked her phrasing because it made her intentions clear: There will be sex, and I will not be spending part of tomorrow washing sheets. His response was quick: “Come over.” So she did. Quite a bit has been written about the hook‐up culture among young adults and how it has replaced more traditional forms of courtship. This culture is especially prevalent on college campuses. I first realized the extent of the college hook‐up scene from the students in my undergraduate seminar. I was not so naive as to think that they were still using terms like “courtship” or “date.” Nevertheless, I had assumed that the change was one of semantics more than actual behavior. I asked my students to tell me the modern term for going on a date. Blank stares followed. So, I tried again.

OK, I said, “What words would you use to describe a young man asking a young woman to dinner and a movie?” This led the students to ask follow up questions. “Are they meeting friends there?” “No,” I said “it’s just the two of them.” “Are they in an exclusive relationship?” “No, this would be what we used to call a ‘first date.’” “Have they already hooked up?” Now I was the one with questions. “What?! No! This would be their first time together. For goodness sakes, he’s simply asking her to go to dinner and a movie. What does your generation call that?”

It was beginning to dawn on all of us that we were shouting to each other across a wide generation gap. As far as they were concerned, I may as well have been talking about “goin’ a courtin’ with a sword and pistol by my side” (from the 16th‐century song, “Frog Went A‐Courtin;” Wedderburn, 1549/1979). So it was that – for neither the first nor the last time – my students patiently explained the way things are to me, their professor. They told me that many college relationships begin with sexual behavior prior to getting to know the other person. Not necessarily sex, but anything from kissing to coitus. The sexual experiences may or may not be followed up with conversation and getting to know each other. Thus, my assumption that someone would ask another person to dinner and a movie seemed to reverse the order of current college courtship operations. Even if they know each other first, they will most likely move their relationship to a more intimate level first through sexual experiences and later through more emotional connections and nonsexual shared experiences. My students were quick to make three points. First, many of them, including both men and women (gay and straight), indicated that they didn’t like the change from (what I will call) dating culture to hook‐up culture. They seemed to like the idea of taking someone to dinner and a movie as a way to get to know the other person and to decide whether to engage in sexual activities together. The second thing that they wanted me to know was that they themselves didn’t engage in hook‐ups. Whether they were all lying or whether my class on intimate relationships drew more students who eschewed hooking up, I cannot say. Interestingly, they didn’t seem concerned about their own reputation or what their classmates (or I) thought of them. They seemed to be making the point that many students did not hook up on a regular basis and that the ones who were engaging in frequent casual sexual encounters were a particularly visible minority. Furthermore, they argued that the perception of the hook‐up culture was making it harder for those who longed for meaningful intimate relationships. Finally, the third point that the students made was that the hook‐up culture seemed to be good for some heterosexual men and not‐ so‐good for heterosexual women. Since my students educated me, much more has been written about hooking up and what it means for men and women. So, let’s look at the data.

Prevalence of sex in college 

Others have noticed the cultural changes that my students told me about. These changes have led to a great deal of attention from journalists and commentators who are writing about the prevalence and dangers of hooking up – especially for women. For example, Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (2007), wrote about the dangers that women expose themselves to when they engage in casual sex. In another example, Jill Weber, author of Having Sex, Wanting Intimacy: Why Women Settle for One‐Sided Relationships (2013), coins a new term, sextimacy, and defines it as “the effort to find emotional intimacy through sex” (p. ix). Several other journalists and authors have also written about the dangers of casual sex. Others have indicated that the problem is not that women are having casual sex; rather, the problems is the reaction of older generations to the apparent prevalence of casual sex (e.g., Valenti, 2009). A third group of authors has taken a different approach by writing about the shift in women appearing to be more and more interested in pleasing men than in worrying about their own sexual fulfillment. For example, Ariel Levy has written about this in Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005), noting that young women seem too concerned with how men view them than with concerns about themselves. As you can imagine, stories about the hook‐up culture on college campuses and other places where you find young men and women have garnered a great deal of media attention. This has led to some myths involving the prevalence of sex among young adults. Much of the reporting about the hook‐up culture has led, as Elizabeth Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England (2010) put it, to the impression that “young people are having more sex at earlier ages in more casual contexts than their Baby Boomer parents” (p. 23). Using data from the best resource for information on the sexual practices of Americans, the National Health and Social Life Survey, they note that Baby Boomers (those born after 1942) did have more sex and at younger ages than their parents’ generation. However, those born between 1963 and 1972 showed no increases in sexual activity and even a little decrease. Other data back the conclusion that the amount of sexual activity among adolescents and young adults is either stable or decreasing. However, it  seems that the handwringing in the media is not because sexual activity is increasing or that adolescents are starting to become sexually active at younger ages. Rather, it seems that the consternation of older generations is caused by the apparent casual nature of sexual behavior in this generation. Indeed, the rate of casual sex among college students has increased. Paula England, Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, and Alison Fogarty (2008) conducted a study of college students at more than 19 universities and found that 72% of both men and women reported having had at least one hook‐up by their senior year. This number is reasonably consistent with smaller samples (e.g., Garcia & Reiber, 2008). What may be lost in these raw numbers are the frequency and intensity of these hook‐ups. The large survey data revealed that college students don’t hook up as much as older generations think they do. By their senior year, when college students who indicated that they had hooked up were asked how often, 40% said they had done so three or fewer times, 40% said between four and nine times, and 20% said ten or more times; and 80% of students said they had done it less than once a semester. Therefore, it seems that some of the more provocative images and headlines that portray casual sex among college students as ubiquitous are off the mark. 

Beyond the frequency of casual sexual activity, the college students that England and colleagues surveyed indicated that the intensity of their experiences was less than what has been portrayed in the media. The respondents indicated that in their last hook‐up, one third of them had intercourse, one third didn’t go beyond oral sex, and one third didn’t go beyond kissing and non‐genital touching. In addition, hooking up with strangers was uncommon compared with repeated hook‐ups with the same person. These types of hook‐ups have various labels, such as “friends with benefits” or “fuck buddies,”1 and often involve socializing before or after sexual encounters. In all of this discussion about rates and descriptions of casual sexual experiences in college, it’s important to remember that 20% of college seniors report having never had penile– vaginal intercourse (Armstrong et al., 2010). In other words, for all of the handwringing about sexual behavior in college, the rates, frequency, and intensity of college sexual experiences is flat or declining, and a sizable minority of college students have eschewed sex outside of marriage altogether (see Myths 3 and 4 for rates of married couples who don’t have sex). Before getting to whether hooking up is bad for women, here are three other facts to keep in mind as you watch or read breathless stories about the hook‐up culture. First, casual sex isn’t new. The sexual revolution of the late 1960s, advances in the availability and effectiveness of birth control, and the decline of the paternalistic nature of college administrators (known as in loco parentis) all led to an increase in casual sex (Armstrong et al., 2010). The second point to remember is that hook‐ups haven’t replaced relationships. By their senior year, 69% of heterosexual college students reported having been in a relationship that lasted at least six months. Although there appears to be some fluidity between referring to someone as a boyfriend/girlfriend and a hook‐ up – with some relationships preceding or following hook‐up‐type relationships – it’s clear that college students are still engaging in relationships (England et al., 2008). Third, the tendency for women to engage in hook‐ups is somewhat stronger for White women and wealthier women. All of this seems to confirm that the students in my class were fairly typical of college students around the country, because many of them emphasized their desire for relationships, their distress about navigating the current social landscape, and they seemed to deemphasize the importance of multiple sexual experiences. That being said, my students and I agreed that something fundamental about the nature of intimate relationships had changed during the 20‐year gap between our collegiate experiences.

What’s bad about hooking up for women?

Having established what the hook‐up culture in college does and doesn’t entail, the question remains whether it’s good or bad for women. I focus on women because there are more potentially negative consequences for women compared to men, and because I haven’t seen or read books about the negative consequences of casual sex for men in college, as I have for women (see Stepp, 2007; Weber, 2013). As with some of the other myths in this book, this one is partially true. There are clearly some downsides for women hooking up. The most direct and dangerous consequences of hooking up are the increased likelihood of contracting a lifelong or life‐threatening disease and becoming a victim of violence. College men and women often feel invincible, and this includes discounting their chances of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). This partially explains why a quarter of all new HIV diagnoses are among women under age 25 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011), and nearly half of the newly diagnosed sexually transmitted diseases are among men and women under age 25 (Weinstock, Berman, & Cates, 2004). In addition to increasing vulnerability to disease, hooking up increases women’s chances of being victims of violence. In fact, women between the ages of 20 and 24 experience nonfatal intimate partner violence more than any other group, and casual sexual encounters create additional opportunities for such assaults (Catalano, 2007). These statistics were brought home for me in a discussion I had with a gynecologist who has a lot of college students as patients. She noted that she treats a lot of students for sexually transmitted diseases (mostly herpes, chlamydia, and gonorrhea as well as syphilis and HIV); moreover, she was shocked by how much violence her patients have experienced – both reported and unreported as well as acknowledged and unacknowledged (for more on intimate partner violence, see Myth 22). While increasing the likelihood of illness and violence may be direct consequences of sexual encounters, there are also indirect and psychological consequences. Armstrong et al. (2010) argue that the pervasiveness of the sexual double standard is behind some of the most commonly cited negative consequences for women engaging in casual sex. One of the women interviewed for their article noted that “guys can have sex with all the girls and it makes them more of a man, but if a girl does then all of a sudden she’s a ‘ho’ and she’s not as quality of a person” (p. 25). In addition, they note that the social stigma and labeling that comes with hook‐ups is often predicated on the erroneous assumption that most hook‐ups involve intercourse, with one of the women interviewed noting that she was called a “slut” when she was still a virgin. In addition to social stigma, many researchers have described the dangers of college campuses on which fraternities represent the primary venue for college students (especially underage ones) to access alcohol. This access provides the members of the fraternity with many opportunities for undermining women’s ability to provide consent for sexual activities, ranging from spiking drinks, to blocking exits, to refusing safe transportation upon departure; therefore, it’s no surprise that sexual assault is one of the risk factors associated with college hook‐up culture (see also Flanagan, 2014). To their credit, student activists, campus administrators, policy‐makers, researchers, and journalists are now paying attention to how the culture of a campus may further endanger women. Despite the serious potential consequences I’ve already outlined, in interviews of college women (for methodological details, see Hamilton & Armstrong, 2009), women’s biggest complaint about hook‐ups was that the sex wasn’t very good compared to sex in relationships. Indeed, follow‐up studies have demonstrated that women aren’t enjoying sex in hook‐ups as much as sex in relationships because men in hook‐ups are far less likely to sexually perform so as to pleasure the women. For example, in hook‐ups, women are more likely to perform oral sex than to receive it. As a result, women having relationship sex report enjoying sex more and having more orgasms than women having hook‐up sex (Armstrong, England, & Fogarty, 2012). This state of affairs (no pun intended) is also confirmed when men are interviewed. They report having much more concern about the sexual pleasure of their relationship partner than their hook‐up partner (Armstrong et al., 2010). Thus, it seems that one of the most common downsides of casual sex for women is that the sex is simply not as good as sex in a relationship.

What is good about hooking up for women?

So, if hook‐up sex is not as good as relationship sex, what’s in it for women? The answer seems to lie in the downside of relationships. Many of the women interviewed in the studies cited above and in an article for the New York Times (K. Taylor, 2013) talked about the costs and benefits of having a relationship in college and decided that the costs outweigh the benefits. In extensive interviews, women talked about the fact that relationships tend to be time sinks that they can’t afford. For example, one woman at the University of Pennsylvania interviewed in the New York Times said “I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too” (p. 1). In addition to time, there are other dark sides of relationships. Some women Hamilton and Armstrong interviewed indicated that they viewed college as a time to meet a diverse group of people, and they feared that being a relationship would detract from that goal. Other women complained about relationships having a negative impact on schoolwork and how their boyfriends were unsupportive of their work ethic in college. Still other women talked about the jealousy and abuse that can take place in relationships. Abuse in college relationships is far more common than many people realize, with one study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that 10% of students were hit or worse by their boyfriend or girlfriend in the last 12 months (see Myth 22 on violence in intimate relationships). Qualitative interviews with women in college who experienced abuse revealed that such abuse had profound consequences for their academic performance, their social and familial relationships, as well as their careers. To quote Armstrong, Hamilton, and England (Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 26): “The costs of bad hook‐ups tend to be less than the costs of bad relationships: bad hook‐ups are isolated events, but bad relationships wreak havoc with whole lives.” Given the costs of relationships to women in college, it’s easier to understand why it doesn’t seem to be the case that men are the only ones pressing for a culture of casual sex in college. In addition, there are now significantly more women in college than men, and that means that there are also women who wanted to have a relationship in college, but who haven’t done so. Some of these women talked about adapting to this reality and thinking that if they aren’t going to have a relationship in college, at least they can have some fun. After all, whereas hook‐up sex is not as good as relationship sex, 50% of women said they enjoyed the sexual aspects of their most recent hook‐up “very much.” That number jumped to 59% if their most recent hook‐up involved intercourse (Armstrong et al., 2012).

Conclusion 

In the end, the change in the norms of sexual activity among college students has been significant in terms of a greater willingness to have casual sex and at least some of this change seems to be the result of women initiating hook‐ups. This shift appears to be a consequence of the cost of relationships to young women, both in terms of time and risk. Therefore, a portion of college women have decided that the benefits of hooking up are preferable to the alternatives (despite the fact that sex in relationships is more pleasurable for women than sex in hook‐ups). Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that for all of the media attention that the hook‐up culture has received, nearly one‐third of college seniors have never hooked up, and 40% report either never having had intercourse or only having had one partner.