Colleen Carroll Campbell writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Once confined to dorm-room
gossip sessions, salacious details about the hook-up culture on today's
college campuses have become fodder for serious sociological analysis.
No fewer than four books on the topic have been published this year alone. Among them are sociologist Kathleen Bogle's unflinching investigation of campus sexual norms in "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laura Sessions Stepp's alarming analysis of promiscuity's emotional costs in "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both."
In another -- "Sex and the Soul" -- Boston University religion professor Donna Freitas probes the disturbing disconnect between students' religious convictions and sexual choices. And in "Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting Our Children," obstetrician/gynecologists Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush survey the scientific evidence for psychological scars linked to supposedly strings-free sex.
These authors often differ in their analyses of the hook-up culture's root causes and costs. Yet the proliferation of similar studies in recent years suggests an emerging consensus among experts that today's anything-goes campus sexual mores carry lasting consequences we only have begun to understand. And those consequences extend well beyond unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. [More]
No fewer than four books on the topic have been published this year alone. Among them are sociologist Kathleen Bogle's unflinching investigation of campus sexual norms in "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laura Sessions Stepp's alarming analysis of promiscuity's emotional costs in "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both."
In another -- "Sex and the Soul" -- Boston University religion professor Donna Freitas probes the disturbing disconnect between students' religious convictions and sexual choices. And in "Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting Our Children," obstetrician/gynecologists Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush survey the scientific evidence for psychological scars linked to supposedly strings-free sex.
These authors often differ in their analyses of the hook-up culture's root causes and costs. Yet the proliferation of similar studies in recent years suggests an emerging consensus among experts that today's anything-goes campus sexual mores carry lasting consequences we only have begun to understand. And those consequences extend well beyond unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. [More]