Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships

by Brenda Wilson
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105008712&ft=1&f=1001

Morning Edition, June 8, 2009 ¡P The hookup — that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students — is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating. It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.

Hooking Up

Check out the video: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/may-8-2009/hooking-up/2896/

Dr. Morse will be talking about it on Lutheran Public radio this week.

Confronting the Hook-Up Culture

by Robert P. George and John B. Londregan

A new approach is needed to support students in the hostile hook-up culture on college campuses.

In Tom Wolfe’s best-selling novel, the beautiful 18-year-old Charlotte Simmons leaves her home in the South to attend prestigious “DuPont University.” There she finds brilliant professors, gifted fellow students, extraordinary athletes, impressive gothic towers, impeccable lawns—and, of course, flowing kegs and plenty of utterly meaningless sex.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.03.17.001.pdart

“Finding True Love in a Hook-up World”

Written by: Sean McDowell

If you were like King Solomon in the Bible and could have any one wish come true, what would you wish for? When I pose this question to my students they often say things such as, “to be rich,” “to be famous,” or “to find the perfect mate.” But of all the responses I have heard, the words of Ashley, an 18-year-old high school senior, stand out most vividly in my mind. After I spoke on sexual purity at a Tuesday-night youth group, she came up to me with tears in her eyes and said, “If I could have one wish in life, it would be to go back four years ago and hear this same message. I might not have ruined my life.” Ashley simply said thanks, and then walked away.

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The long-term consequences of the hook-up culture

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Once confined to dorm-room gossip sessions, salacious details about the hook-up culture on today's college campuses have become fodder for serious sociological analysis.

No fewer than four books on the topic have been published this year alone. Among them are sociologist Kathleen Bogle's unflinching investigation of campus sexual norms in Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laura Sessions Stepp's alarming analysis of promiscuity's emotional costs in Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.

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Harvey Mansfield on the Hook-up Culture

Harvey Mansfield is the Harvard professor of government who organized the feminism conference I attended earlier this month. He has a book review about Sex and the Soul by Donna Frietas, on the campus hook-up culture in today's Wall Street Journal. The book in question surveys the hook-up culture at relgious colleges. Here is Mansfield's excellent bottom line.

Ms. Freitas is not afraid to use a word like "soul" because her method is qualitative, a welcome contrast to quantitative social science, with its neutral questions, narrow statistics and ignorance of philosophy. Ms. Freitas gets students to talk, listens to them and asks for their reasons for believing as they do. She passes along some interesting student phrases, too: "the walk of shame" (back to your dorm the morning after), "frugaling" (pairing off short of dating) and "yes girls" (no explanation needed).

Colleges find it risky, Ms. Freitas notes, to oppose the hook-up culture. They do not boast of it when parents visit, but they are happy to look the other way throughout the year. Their main concern is to be sure that they cannot be accused of treating men and women differently, and they do not care, or do not see, that the result of sexual liberation is a culture that does harm to the young people caught within it. "Sex and the Soul" doesn't offer an easy way out, because there isn't one. But it makes us eager for something better than the goings-on at colleges today

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Readers of my book, Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, know that I have a section called, "the walk of shame" in my chapter called, Why Recreational Sex is no Fun.
I would quibble with one thing in Mansfield's commentary: the colleges do not look the other way. Many, many colleges actively aid and abet the hook-up culture. That fact is worthy of a book on its own.