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Do You Know Where Your Parents Are?

Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, Laura Sessions Stepp, Riverhead, 304 pages

According to her critics, Laura Sessions Stepp wants to lead young women back to Stepford. Salon blasted Stepp’s new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, as a “’50s-style handbook on appropriate femininity.” “Unhooked makes sex into a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous thing than it already is,” writes Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke, condemning Stepp’s “alarmism.” In the Washington Post, Kathy Dobie charged Stepp with trying “to instill sexual shame” in young women. By refusing to make sex “precious,” Dobie asserts, today’s young women put “simple humanity back into sex.”


These charges are ironic since Stepp’s book is, above all, a plea for more humanity in sexual relations. The sex described in Unhooked resembles nothing so much as a Hobbesean “war of all against all.” One male college student boasts to Stepp that he keeps a tally of his sex partners in his wallet along with a note: “Toss the bitches.” Young women don’t seem to mind this attitude. “Sex is just something you should experience, like drugs,” one high schooler, Anna, tells Stepp. Women rack up conquests just as callously as men do. It’s “all about getting/hooking up with the hottest, most well-known guys, and girls will spend a lot of time strategizing and manipulating their way into getting those guys,” says Sienna, another high schooler. Anna tells Stepp she is careful not to divulge her crushes even to her friends: “If you mention you think a guy is hot, your friend may be, ‘Oh, he is hot. I’m gonna go get with him.’”


For anyone who has been living under a rock for the last two decades, “hooking up” denotes anything from kissing to intercourse. In one of the more amusing sections of her book, Stepp asks college students to define this deliberately ambiguous term. One student suggests “random oral sex,” which leaves her professor aghast. “What the hell does that mean?” he asks Stepp after class. “You walk into the student union and say ‘I’ll pick every third boy or girl I see’?” Judging from the collected anecdotes in Unhooked, the answer is yes.

Stepp, a reporter at the Washington Post, follows three high-school girls and six college women through a year in their lives, recording their sexual behavior. Given the denunciations of her critics, you’d think Stepp uncovered something new or controversial. But the hook-up culture is old news. Two years ago, Ariel Levy’s broadside against “raunch culture,” Female Chauvinist Pigs, argued that feminism—with its idea of promiscuity as “sexual empowerment”—has freed women to become as coarse as men. And they’ve taken up the invitation. Girls pride themselves on being “lady pimps,” calling boys “my bitch” or “my plaything.” They pose for revealing pictures on websites like drunkuniversity.com and flash cameramen at “Girls Gone Wild” bar nights.


Unhooked chronicles much the same sort of behavior. But Stepp, an older mother of three, lacks Levy’s hipster cred, which might account for the cooler reaction to her book. Some of it, one must say, is deserved. Stepp often tries to liven her prose with teenage slang, resulting in cringe-inducing sentences like “In a smorgasbord of booty, all the hot dishes start looking like they’ve been on the warming table too long.” Or this: “Losing one’s virginity … is not like losing one’s cell phone or car keys. They can’t pick up another ‘V-Card’ in a kiosk at the mall.”


Awkward as she may be at times, Stepp adds to an already well documented social trend—making charges of “alarmism” less than credible. Moreover, far from trying to shame the young women she encounters, Stepp is altogether too forgiving of her subjects. These privileged young women—who, Stepp repeatedly assures us, are brainy, beautiful, and confident as well as top students and athletes—are actually incredibly stupid and shallow.


The aforementioned Anna likes to think of herself as independent but mindlessly follows her peers around, even giving one boy a “hand job” so as not to seem “weird.” Then there’s the vapid Sienna—a high-school sophomore and spoiled brat—who boasts, “One guy told me I am one of the top five hottest girls in high school. I might suck at school. But I’m hot.”


Stepp also introduces us to Shaida, a college sophomore and campus provocateur who thinks her Naomi Wolf-esque writings about her sex life make her “serious.” Ascribing great political significance to her numerous sexual pairings, Shadia is sillier than the rest of the book’s subjects. But her story is sadder too. She spends most of her time at college mooning over two men who dump her once they’ve had sex with her, and she is later date-raped by another student.


At one point in the book, Shaida invites her mother Nasim to attend a college production of “The Vagina Monologues” in which she has a part. Nasim watches in agony as Shaida pretends to masturbate onstage. Nasim confides her misgivings to Stepp but not to her daughter. Instead, as they walk back to Shaida’s dorm, Shaida takes on the parental role, telling her mother how “proud” she is of her for attending the play: “This could not have been easy for you to watch, but you really supported me.”


This is a good example of a recurring theme throughout the book—the young women (and men) have been left to raise themselves. Indeed, the only people more clueless than the girls Stepp profiles are the adults around them. During sex-ed classes, teachers address such questions as whether a condom will melt when used in a hot tub. The high schoolers Stepp interviews describe attending drunken bacchanals held at friends’ houses while their parents were away. At one party that the parents actually did chaperone, mom and dad spent the night dutifully separating drunken, lascivious couples again and again rather than calling the party off.


If young people have abandoned meaningful relationships for hook-ups, it’s because they don’t know what else to do. One student writes in his school newspaper about the need for a “three-credit class on forming, sustaining, and terminating romantic relationships.” Parents provide no guidance.


Daphne, a mother of two girls, explains how she would never let her daughters play in the front yard without supervision, but she never talks to them about love or relationships. A full-time attorney, Daphne is more concerned about her daughters’ professional success. She sends them articles about female CEOs and copies of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Before they leave for college, she tapes a note to their computers: “How much you earn is determined by how much you learn.” Daphne encourages her daughters not to settle down with one man, telling them that even after she first met their father, she didn’t deny herself “companionship” while they were apart. It’s no wonder that both girls view their parents’ marriage as loveless, as “at best, a manageable service contract.”


At least partly to blame for the hook-up culture is the newly regnant culture of overachieving and careerism. Sex is just a way to blow off steam between all-night cram sessions and swim practice. As Stepp explains, “Hooking up enables a young woman to practice a piece of a relationship, the physical, while devoting most of her energy to staying on the honor roll … playing lacrosse … and applying to graduate programs in engineering.” Today’s young women and their parents are focused on meritocratic striving and professional success and see an undue focus on personal fulfillment as an obstacle to that sort of achievement.


When kids are left to figure out love on their own, something like the hook-up culture shouldn’t be so surprising. And Stepp brilliantly captures the degree to which parents abdicate responsibility. We are told, for example, that Beth, Sienna’s mother, is an old-fashioned, church-going Southern woman. Yet Beth sits quietly and listens as her daughter explains to Stepp the rituals of modern courtship: “First, you give a guy head, and then you decide if you like him, and he decides if he likes you.”


Later, Beth discovers a trove of her daughter’s e-mails detailing an overactive social life of binge-drinking, recreational drug use, and oral sex. Beth does ground Sienna for a brief time, but Sienna quickly returns to her late-night parties without adult supervision. Stepp, without a hint of irony, praises Beth for raising a 16-year-old daughter who’s still a “virgin.” That may be something of an achievement, but given Sienna’s social activities, it seems to be a purely technical description.


Nonetheless, the critics are probably right that the women Stepp interviewed are likely to emerge mostly unscathed from their time at college (except, perhaps, the three who are raped). They have indulgent, wealthy parents and elite educations. Irresponsibility has very mild consequences for them given all their sources of support.


Not so for Mieka, an African-American high-school student from southwest Washington, D.C., raised by a single mother who was pregnant with Mieka’s older sister at 15. Mieka hardly sees her father, who insisted on a paternity test before he agreed to pay any child support. Her mother is working most of the time—at McDonald’s and a nursing facility—to support the family. When the other girls jaunt off to Europe for the summer after college, Mieka is stuck at home with her philandering (and sometimes violent) boyfriend. She’s not going to Europe—or anywhere else. Her peers get pregnant, and the hook-up culture leaves them without any support.


Most of Stepp’s feminist critics seize on the same line, Stepp’s maxim that, “Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods.” For Stepp, this is illustrative of the kind of advice a mother should give her daughter regarding relationships. Even if one rejects the idea of girls’ passing out cookies to win male affection, it seems far more dignified than passing out sexual favors for the same purpose. Stepp’s motherly advice might be a little trite, but modern feminists should ask themselves whether it is really wiser to tell their daughters nothing at all. 
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Cheryl Miller is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

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