Lisa Wade’s American Hookup is one of the more thoughtful books about the sexual lives of young people in the US today. Her basic message is that students on campus are very conscious of their reputations and experience peer pressure to engage in sexual interactions with each other, but they are scared of intimacy and real relationships, so they get drunk in order to make it socially acceptable to hook up. She bases her survey both on interviews with college students she had in her classes, and also on other results from researchers. She argues that for the most part this continues a tradition of young women lacking power in their lives, and that it does not help men that much either. She considers the claims by some feminists that hookup culture is a way for young women to get sexual pleasure and still have time to pursue their careers, but she is not fully convinced. Wade argues that the current situation is not actually as hedonistic and wild as many portray it: statistics show that young people are having less sex than they often imagine their peers are. She also notes that there’s a diversity of experience, with some people abstaining from sex altogether, and others engaging in a variety of kinds of sexual experience.

American Hookup was released a month ago, and so far it has received little of the attention that Mary Jo Sales’ sensationalistic American Girls or Peggy Orenstein’s more sensible Girls & Sex got. Maybe it is because the topic has been exhausted or that people are now obsessed by the current political debacle, but it is a shame, since Wade’s book is more useful than many similar ones.  Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College, and while this book is very much for a general readership, it is informed by facts and argument worth investigating.

© 2017 Christian Perring

Christian Perring  has in the past regularly taught a course in the philosophy of sex and love.