Just Sex

Casual sex typically isn't about love. But what if it's not even about lust? Sociologist Lisa Wade studies "hookup culture," and believes the rules and expectations around sex and relationships are different for college students today than they were for previous generations. This week we revisit our 2017 conversation with Wade, and consider how the pandemic may be changing students' views on hookups and intimacy.

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Just Sex

By Shankar Vedantam

/ September 26, 2017

We all know casual sex isn’t about love. But what if it’s not even about lust? Sociologist Lisa Wade believes the pervasive hookup culture on campuses today is different from that faced by previous generations. This week on Hidden Brain, we revisit a favorite episode exploring what this culture means for those who choose to participate, and for those who opt out.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST: Hey there, Shankar here. A quick word before we begin. We just hit the two-year mark of the podcast. We've learned a lot, changed a lot and grown a lot in these two years. The one constant has been you. I'm so grateful for all the social media shout outs, the emails and the outpouring of love. I know people say this all the time, but I really mean it. We couldn't have done it without you. Thank you. This week, we're working on a bunch of new episodes, as well as the launch of our new radio show, which is coming to public radio stations across the country next week.Today, we thought we'd share a favorite episode that feels timely as college students start the academic year. It's a show about sex and how hookup culture affects young people. If you know someone in college, please give this a listen and share it with others who might need to hear it. And this goes without saying, but if you have small kids with you, please save this one for later.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Parties were huge, hookups were huge. Everyone just seemed to be doing everything with each other. And yet, I always kind of felt like I wasn't doing it right.VEDANTAM: There are certain ideas that send the media into a panic. One of them is hookup culture.(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS MONTAGE)UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: College students are quote, unquote, "hooking up."UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Hookup.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Hookup.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Hookup.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Hookup.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: Hookup culture.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #5: Where people can just be sitting in a cafe and find someone to hook up with. Are you buying this? Kids are more sexual than ever.VEDANTAM: Stories about casual sex on college campuses have long been a staple of cable news. But the truth is more nuanced. College students are actually not having more sex than their parents did a generation ago. But something has changed, not just in what students do or what they don't do but in how they think.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #6: I have students who have had sex many times drunk but have never held someone's hand.VEDANTAM: If casual sex was taboo a generation ago, emotional intimacy has become taboo today. It's something to be explored in secret, maybe even something to be ashamed about.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: I think it feels bad to be used. But I think the alternative is that nobody wants to use you. And I think that that's worse.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Occidental College. In her book "American Hookup: The New Culture Of Sex On Campus," Lisa interviews college students and finds that hookup culture has a complex set of social rules. She says these rules threaten the emotional well-being of students, those who embrace the culture and those who want nothing to do with it. Lisa, thanks for joining me on HIDDEN BRAIN today.LISA WADE: Thank you so much for having me.VEDANTAM: We spoke with several students in your book, Lisa, and we're going to hear from them in this conversation. One of the things that kept coming up was that there's no one definition of what hooking up actually is. It can mean a variety of things, from making out to having sex. But for all the ambiguity, there does seem to be a clear set of guidelines when it comes to how students should hookup.WADE: You know, it's funny because the ideology around hookups is that they're supposed to be spontaneous. And the fact is that there's a pretty rigid set of rules for how hookups happen. Many of them, probably most of them, start at parties where there's drinking. And the way to initiate it is through dancing. And so usually in these heterosexual encounters, women will initiate the dancing by going into the middle of the dance floor and then in a very sort of gender traditional way, hope that someone picks her and comes up along behind her.Sometimes the woman doesn't even know who is behind her, which creates a conundrum because part of hooking up is trying to hook up with people that your friends approve of and think are, like, a good catch. And so often she's dancing, someone comes up behind her and then what she'll do is she'll look across the circle to one of her girlfriends and try to get some indication as to whether or not she should continue.VEDANTAM: Let's talk some more about this idea that hookups are a way to win the approval of your friends. You're saying that some hookups move you up the social pecking order and others move you down?WADE: Hookups are decidedly not about finding any sort of romantic connection and suggesting that it should be or that one is doing it for that reason is tantamount to breaking a social rule. They're often not so much about pleasure in particular for women. They're very much about status. So the idea is to be able to brag about or having sort of gotten someone who other people might also wish they could have gotten.So it's all about being able to say, I got that guy over there or that person that everyone's looking for, I managed to be the one who hooked up with him tonight.VEDANTAM: One of the unspoken rules you talk about in "Hookup Culture" is that it's really important that the hookup be meaningless. One of the young men we spoke with described a situation that almost seems Kafkaesque.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: We really liked each other, but she would not have sex with me. But I also knew that she was hooking up with someone. And this was such a confusing concept, which is that people will have sex with people that they don't like but won't have sex with people that they do like.VEDANTAM: And, of course, what this young man is saying, he can't understand why this young woman who likes him and that he likes is having sex with someone else whom she doesn't like but won't have sex with him.WADE: What the students are confronted with is this artificial binary between careless and careful sex. On the one hand, we have this idea that when we get into romantic relationships, we're supposed to be loving and kind. And the sex that happens in those kinds of relationships is very committed. And on the other hand, we have this concept of casual sex, which is the opposite of that. And that means that all of the kindnesses that go along with romantic relationships are considered off script once casual sex is on the table. So if two students are going to hook up together and they want it to be meaningless, then they have to do some work to make sure that both they and everyone else understands that we're over in this meaningless camp and not this powerfully meaningful one.And so to sort of convince themselves and other people or to show themselves and other people that it was meaningless, they have to find a way to perform meaningless. It's not automatic. And they do that by, for example, making sure that they're drunk or they appear to be drunk when they hook up. So my students actually speak in pretty hushed tones about sober sex. Sober sex is very serious. But if the students have been drinking, then that helps send the message that it's meaningless. Another way is to make sure that they don't hook up with the same person very many times. So if they really don't like the person in a romantic way, just hook up once, maybe twice and then cut it off.And then the third thing they have to do to try to establish this meaninglessness is to

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