Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus

Hooking-up” is the term du jour, connoting a wide range of consensual sexual activities, with no pretense of starting a relationship, between young, mostly college-age students. This study by Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University—based on 76 interviews with mostly white college students and recent graduates from 2001 to 2006—gives a wide range of voices and opinions on hooking-up culture. While there are few surprises (women are still, for the most part, subjected to a punishing sexual double standard)—Bogle is a smart interviewer and gets her subjects to reveal intimate and often embarrassing details without being moralizing. She interrogates her subjects about alcohol use, the relationship of gay and lesbian students to hook-up culture, and opting out of hook-up culture. Bogle’s work is important because it offers a complex portrait of young people grappling the best way they know how with the sexual realities of a rapidly changing world. Although limited in scope, this evenhanded, sympathetic book on a topic that has received far too much sensational and shoddy coverage is an important addition to the contemporary literature on youth and sexuality. (Feb.)