Moral Panic Comes 'Unhooked' (AlterNet)

[marmar]

Moral Panic Comes 'Unhooked'

By Ann Friedman, Campus Progress. Posted March 24, 2007.



Author Laura Sessions Stepp shows unnecessary alarm over college "hookup culture" in her new book.

This Valentine's Day, as conservative groups lamented the supposed death of romance on college campuses due to the popularity of The Vagina Monologues, they found an ally in the mainstream media. In the Washington Post Style section, reporter Laura Sessions Stepp weighed in with a lengthy piece about how women just don't care about finding love anymore.

It was an excerpt from her new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which explains the purportedly disastrous effects of the "hookup" on high school and college women.

According to Stepp, a hookup is anything from making out to sex to passing out partially clothed in the same bed. For the past 10 years, Stepp has taken a shocked-and-appalled "kids these days!" tone in explaining the youth dating scene to the Post's baby-boomer (and older) readership. (She penned a cutting-edge expose of the "wingman" phenomenon last year, as if friends haven't been helping friends get dates for millennia.) After mining some of her contacts from reporting that story and sending letters to campus administrators, Stepp found a handful of high school- and college-aged girls who were willing to share with her the details of their sex lives for the better part of a year. Their stories make up the bulk of the book.

While this type of in-depth interviewing doesn't really allow for a representative sample under even the best circumstances, Stepp doesn't even make a minimal effort at statistical integrity. She interviewed six college students who attend two primarily white, upper-class, Greek-heavy private schools: Duke University in Durham, N.C., and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. These girls aren't just "privileged" in the sense that they can afford to attend private universities. One drove to school in a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, a high school graduation present from her father. Another girl's mother took her on a Caribbean vacation when she was feeling a bit down after a breakup. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/49694/