Description
A revelatory account of the brand new culture of sex that has come to dominate the American college experience.
The hookup is now a part of college life. Yet the drunken encounter we at all times hear about tells just a fraction of the story. Rising above misinformation and moralizing, Lisa Wade offers the definitive account of this new sexual culture and demonstrates that in reality both more heartening and more harrowing than we thought.
Offering invaluable insights for parents, educators, and students, Wade situates hookup culture throughout the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education, and the unfinished feminist revolution. The use of new research, she maps out a punishing emotional landscape marked by unequal pleasures, competition for status, and sexual violence. She discovers that essentially the most privileged students have a tendency to like hookup culture essentially the most, and she considers its effects on racial and sexual minorities, students who “opt out,” and people who participate ambivalently.
Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and brutally honest, American Hookup explains where we are and how we got here, asking not “How do we go back?” but “Where do we go from here?”