Unhooked

[lillibet]

Last week there was an article in the Globe about the book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which examines "hookup culture" among college-aged women.

A friend asked me what I thought of it and I said that it sounded like the latest "our teenagers are making bad choices!" hullaballoo and that my guess is that there's much more variety among people's experiences than books like this make out.

Today there's an article in Slate that gets at some of the issues I had with the Globe article (and what I can tell from these pieces about the book).

I'd be interested to hear from folks currently in that demographic, or working with same, about how prevalent this "culture" really is and what opinions you have of the phenomenon.

Comments

[joyeous.livejournal.com]

It makes me a little self-conscious to admit that yeah, I probably fell into that demographic and...well, probably still do.

Very few people I knew in college had boyfriends or girlfriends. I never had a boyfriend my entire time in high school or college. I still have a very hard time finding people to date. For me, hook-ups were/are better than nothing. I think both articles do have grains of truth to them. I haven't read the book, so it's tough to slam the first article too much. I think I'd just end up getting depressed or angry by reading the book though, by feeling that it was somehow judging me.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I think I'd just end up getting depressed or angry by reading the book though, by feeling that it was somehow judging me.

Yeah, it sounds like that might well be the case for me, as well.

It's kind of funny, because I didn't meet J. until I was 28 and that felt positively ancient at the time, but now doesn't seem that late to me. But here I am just having my first kid ten years later, so it's hard to say. As with all aspects of life, we're all on our own schedules.