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Parenting in the Screen Age - The Screenagers Podcast
What Does "Hookup Culture" Actually Mean? Answers for Parents and Teens (encore)
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- [00:00]
A
I feel like more often than not, people are kind of left the next day feeling maybe a little bit regretful, kind of embarrassed, awkward. Hello, I'm Delaney Rustin, physician of Tweens on up, creator of the four Screenagers movies. And this is the Screenagers podcast, a show about discovering the best ways to help our youth and ourselves navigate our rapidly changing digital world. When you hear teens talking about so and so hooked up the other night, what do they mean? And when you hear the term hookup culture, what exactly does that mean? I had these and many other questions, so I read the book American Hookup, and it was fascinating. And I'm really jazzed that today on the show, we have the author of the book, Lisa Wade. Lisa is a longtime researcher of young adult relationships and sexuality, and she's an associate professor at Tulane University in sociology, gender, and sexual studies. And today, Lisa shares her research and extensive knowledge about hookup culture. And let me tell you that this is a complicated topic, and there's a lot of misunderstandings. Let me just say this episode is not as risque as you think it might be. So it really is okay to listen to this with teenagers in your life. Now let's hear from some college students
- [01:21]
B
for men. I feel like a big part of hookup culture is pressure from friends. And putting pressure on yourself to have hookups can really make people feel terrible about themselves if they're not hooking up. You go meet someone, you're probably drunk, you hook up, and there's not much, like, exchange of, like, emotion or feeling.
- [01:45]
C
Personally, I haven't been that involved with the hookup culture, but I do know people who are a part of that. I think there's some pros and cons to the culture. A positive could be people experimenting, figuring out what they do like or don't like. And of course, there are negatives, such as the peer pressure of being a part of hookup culture or having, like, a high body count. And that refers to, like, how many people a single person has had sexual relations with. And it's kind of a way to brag. I don't quite like, because I feel like it kind of portrays, like, the idea that if you have a high body count, you're more worth something. And if you have a low body count or if you're. You haven't even had any sexual relations with anyone, then you're not worth as much. Basically. I don't feel like that is true at all.
- [02:57]
B
Text is definitely part of, like, hookup culture and kind of how you communicate and how you kind of gauge how someone's feeling. If you hook up with someone and they're sending you one word responses, if you're texting them, you ask them a question like, how are you doing? Or what are you doing this weekend? And they're just like, I'm fine, or nothing much. Hookup culture like that is a way of communication, like, to figure out what is this person feeling, if they like you or not.
- [03:22]
A
So now let's turn to my conversation with Dr. Lisa Wade. Lisa, it's fantastic to have you on show today.
- [03:28]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [03:30]
A
You've been studying sex relationships for many years. About how long?
- [03:34]
C
I would say I've been studying hookup culture on college campuses since 2010. I guess just about 15 years.
- [03:41]
A
And your book, American Hookup is just such an incredible read today. I really want to focus on your data around what's happening on college campuses. Even though a lot of their listeners are parents for middle school, high schoolers, a lot of these kids are gonna go to college. And so this is some really important things we're talking about that, of course, does apply to high school and whatnot. We're gonna be talking about your research that looked at writings by students as well as big data sets. When we're saying sex, we don't always mean that it's full sex in the way that people think about it.
- [04:17]
C
Yeah, that's right. So my data for American Hookup was based on 101 students who wrote diaries in their first year of college. And so I have this very rich mini longitudinal data from them. And then there was at the time a pretty large data set with about 21,000 student responses. That was a survey. We did have at least this big survey. So there was plenty of quantitative data to use too.
- [04:42]
A
Fantastic. And before we talk about hookup culture, when we say hookup, it's a vague term.
- [04:49]
C
Yes. One sociologist, Danielle Currier, she calls it strategically ambiguous. So the word or phrase, depending on it's a verb or a noun. Believe it or not, it refers to some kind of sexual encounter that can range pretty broadly, starting with kissing all the way up to whatever you think is the most advanced. And the implication is that there's no romantic intent. That may not be true, but the. But it's implied. It's assumed that there's no romantic intent, so it's some kind of sexual encounter.
- [05:22]
A
And I like that point. It's ambiguous. And so as parents, if we hear hookup, we don't know. And often the young People who are talking about they heard so and so hooked up, they definitely might not know either.
- [05:33]
C
They might not know either. But for, for the parents, it almost certainly doesn't mean we hung out.
- [05:39]
A
Okay.
- [05:39]
C
And hung out probably means hooked up, by the way.
- [05:42]
A
Oh, good point. But if they're talking about friends who hooked up or whatever, they don't even know. That's not like they all have this secret language. It's confusing among high schoolers and college age kids when a term comes up.
- [05:55]
C
Absolutely.
- [05:58]
A
Now let's turn to hookup culture. Can you explain what that means?
- [06:03]
C
Sure. Probably as long as we have been humans and maybe since before, people have had sexual encounters that weren't necessarily romantic. There's nothing new about that. Nothing new about that in college for sure. But I think that the hookup culture in college is quite new and I trace it back to the mid-1990s. And we can talk about why if you want. But a hookup culture is an environment where hooking up isn't just happening, rather it is ideologically dominant. So the idea that everyone should be hooking up is pretty common and widespread and widely believed. Also, there's a very clear sexual script for doing it. So people, students learn, like how they're supposed to do it, who's supposed to do what, how you're supposed to feel throughout and after and what to do after. And it's institutionalized in higher education. So the actual institutions of higher education are facilitating hookup culture through the rhythm of higher education and the architecture of higher education, the kinds of people that have power, like if there's fraternities and sororities. So it's become sort of part of how colleges operate.
- [07:13]
A
Can you tell me the ingredients that make up the hookup culture? What is the expectation and what you found in your research? For sure, alcohol is involved. And in fact, in the third screenagers movie screenagers under the influence, we looked at alcohol and I specifically wanted to include drinking and college life. And one of the big ones is the fact that so much sexual encounters happen under the influence of alcohol that people regret that's risky, that they're more likely to have problems when alcohol is on board.
- [07:49]
C
So most hookups are initiated in some sort of party scene. So probably there's drinking, maybe dancing too. One of the ways in which students differentiate casual hooking up sex from romantic sex is whether or not there's alcohol involved. So sober sex is by definition meaningful and drunk sex is by definition meaningless, therefore just a hookup. So that's very important. It's a very important ingredient, more than just loosening inhibitions, that kind of thing. It's specifically a definitional part of it, how we define hookup versus not hookup. So, yeah, they're at a party, there's drinking, maybe dancing. Someone will approach, probably a stranger or an acquaintance, probably not a friend, and initiate some kind of sexual encounter. Maybe it'll just be like a dance floor makeout, and that maybe counts as a hookup. Or maybe they will go somewhere else and do something more advanced sexually. The rules are to make sure everybody understands that this isn't romantic, which means not being warm during that hookup, no particularly tender things in the sex itself. So prolonged eye contact or caressing or cuddling or anything like that. And once the sexual encounter is over, it's over. And usually there's no staying over. And then the next day, some kind of distance needs to be initiated. If you were acquaintances before, you just ignore them altogether. And you're not as friendly because it's very important for. To reinstill the fact that whatever happened yesterday doesn't mean anything. So I'm not going to be particularly nice to you. I might even be a little meaner to you for a little while until the threat of this appearing romantic has passed.
- [09:34]
B
If you hook up with someone and you're like, oh, what? Maybe we have a connection. That was a nice night. And you go home if you don't text them when you get home safe, or vice versa, or they don't text you the next morning saying, I enjoyed the night, or let's hang out. And if they totally ghost, you don't say anything like that can be pretty hurtful.
- [09:55]
C
I have seen that miscommunication can lead to, like, a lot of problems in the future or just not feeling 100% comfortable in different situations that you could be in.
- [10:09]
B
With hookup culture, I think you can figure out how people, like, think or how they feel through their texts, which is kind of interesting because it's such a. Can be such a little amount of information. Like if you're texting someone and they send you a lowercase, okay, you could be like, oh, they're upset. If it's not just an uppercase. Okay.
- [10:33]
A
The myth that everyone is doing it and that everyone is cool with it.
- [10:38]
C
So, yeah, so that's part of what makes it cultural, right? Is that everybody thinks everybody is doing it, that everybody loves it and wants to do it all the time. And that's not true. There's been lots of different studies about this, and they come Back with kind of similar numbers. Somewhere around a quarter of students, they have a great time.
- [10:54]
A
I thought it was 15% of males and females were really cool with it. But you were saying it's maybe as much as 25%.
- [11:01]
C
It depends on the study you look at. And also, people tend to get less interested over time. Yes. So there's a lot more students becoming less agreeable to it than becoming more agreeable to it over time. So it's something like 25% at the beginning and 15% at the end. And then somewhere about 30% of students, they will never do it. They don't do it their entire time in college. Not a single dance floor make out for these kids. Overwhelmingly at most schools, unless they're particularly religious institutions, they would like to have sex. They're not abstaining because they, you know, want to stay abstinent, but they just don't want to do it like this. They don't want to hook up. And then there's always going to be a handful of students, probably less than 10%, who try and fail to hook up. So they want to, but they're being aggressively rejected by everyone they come across, and they feel it as like being cut out entirely from hooking up. And then the plurality of students, we're talking about 40%, they're participating, but they're doing it with mixed experiences and mixed emotions.
- [12:07]
A
And how do we know so many are unhappy with it? We say somewhere around 25% are okay with it. Are we saying 75% of them then aren't okay with it?
- [12:16]
C
Yeah, I think that's right. For various reasons. Not all for the same reason and not as frustrated. There's a lot of variation in how frustrated and whether they're just disappointed versus traumatized and whether they opt out or sometimes participate aggressively despite having these really terrible experiences and then turning around and giving other people terrible experiences? That 75% is like a very diverse group that is participating or not in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of students that would like a menu of options about how to explore their sexuality or not in college. They would love it if their college had a dating culture and something that was more conducive to just not partying and having sex at all.
- [12:58]
A
Yeah. And your data showing that a lot of them wish there were more ways to hang out socially apart from bars and parties.
- [13:05]
C
Absolutely.
- [13:11]
A
I'm thinking about your data that's pretty amazing that actually more males and females say that they prefer to be in a committed relationship. 73% of males and 70% of females.
- [13:24]
C
I think that's very important. Right. So the vast majority of men and women on call college campuses are interested in a romantic relationship.
- [13:31]
A
But I'm trying to now make that go with the data that you just said, 25% really are okay with it or actually enjoy, want that. So how do you figure that out?
- [13:42]
C
So they can be both. But it is important to notice that a lot of people do, because that's one thing students misunderstand. They think everyone wants to hook up, but nobody wants a relationship. And that's how hooking up has become this culture on campus and is like shaping how students think about what their peers think too.
- [14:00]
A
Do we know how much more likely females are to be less comfortable with sexual encounters? What does the data show about that? Of that 25% who are saying, yeah, that can work sometimes for me, or I like it, that's equal male and
- [14:14]
C
female in my data, pretty much. And it may be that overall men are more comfortable than women. I think what I find is that when students don't like it, the men are annoyed, frustrated, disappointed, and the women are traumatized and pissed. It's not necessarily the number of them that like it or don't like it, but it's just how they. The intensity of their reaction to it can vary. Because for men, it's, oh, I'd love to have a partner, but I guess in the meantime, it's not so bad. Yeah. And for women, it's, oh, I'd love to have a partner. And I'm getting, like, disrespected constantly by these jerks. And the experience varies less so by whether or not it's their ideal situation than, like I said, the intensity of their reaction.
- [14:58]
A
Yeah, I feel like guys seem to enjoy it more because they don't have to deal with, like, the emotional needs of the woman, because women are stereotypically more emotional, where I feel like women kind of don't benefit from it as much just because I feel like we kind of sometimes care more about, like, emotional intimacy and a connection. But at the same time, that's also a very, like, blanket statement. And I have female friends that, like, have no issue with, like, hooking up. I feel like most of the time it's, like, not a fun experience. Like, sometimes it's great, but I feel like more often than not, people are kind of left the next day feeling maybe a little bit regretful, kind of embarrassed, awkward. The numbers for hooking up in college are quite low. If you look over the four Years. Can you speak to that? Because, again, this myth of quote, everyone's doing it.
- [15:51]
C
Yeah. Here's a couple ways of thinking about that. One is that, yes, the most hooking up tends to happen at the very beginning of freshman year. And then that declines over the semester as people start to get busy with classes and stuff pops up again at the beginning of second semester. And it kind of has this pattern where it goes up and then down and up again, but not quite as high. And at the beginning of sophomore year, up again, but not quite as high and dwindles over the course of the four years. But it's also true that this generation is having less sex than the previous two generations. And I think that's also a product of hookup culture, because hookup culture compared to the 1950s. Right. So the 1950s, you had a crush on someone, you got together, you went steady, you spent time together, you started necking and petting. You had time for, like. Like your emotions to develop. Hookup culture is just get in the deep end. Just have some kind of sexual encounter with someone you don't really know. And so it's just. I think hookup culture itself is suppressing how sexual young people are being, which is really ironic. And it's a really. It's one of those. Those clear indications that it's cultural, because we have the perception that it dominates, even though it's actually suppressing the number of sexual partners and how much sex young people are having.
- [17:09]
A
And also, of course, young people are on devices and not spending time together in person. So that's another reason why sexual intimacy has declined.
- [17:19]
C
Yeah, that's another theory.
- [17:26]
A
It's such a skill for young people to start to have real relationships, and it is worrisome when that goes down. Although my son, who's just finished college, not that long ago, many of his friends were in partnerships, and I talked to other people in college who say, no, none of my friends have relationships. And I'm very strongly letting young people know that there are many people who still who are in relationships and trying to have them and learning through the complexity of relationships and really think it's detrimental to. To propagate this idea that this isn't happening.
- [18:07]
C
About 2/3 of students in college, according to that big data set I talked about earlier, will get into a romantic relationship with someone in college, but they're getting into those relationships via hooking up. So they have to go through this process of being sexual with someone and pretending not to be interested in them or not being interested in Them for real. A person will hook up with someone, hook up with them again, and then they're hooking up, and it becomes a thing. And then gingerly expressing feelings, breaking the rules a little bit, doing one little caress, and seeing how that goes. So most relationships are coming through hookup culture, and that's. That's so frustrating for that 30% who don't want to hook up at all. They might want a relationship, but their one pathway to getting one is one there that is distasteful to them. And unfortunately, the ones who don't hook up are also so highly unlikely to get into relationships.
- [19:07]
A
Gosh, wait a sec. I just gotta pull that back a little bit. There are clearly people who start doing study hall together. They're studying for a test, they're getting to know each other. Hey, do you wanna go get some food together? And then they say, hey, let's go to a movie. And they actually kiss a little after the movie. There are people who don't just do hookup into a relationship in college. Am I wrong? I know I'm right. But your point is, Delaney, that is pretty small.
- [19:35]
C
Yeah, I think that's pretty unusual compared to the other pathway via hookup culture. Or they're friends and they just hook up together, but they're still pretending like it doesn't mean anything. So that even that scenario, you could imagine that they start hooking up, but they still tell each other that this isn't a meaningful thing.
- [19:55]
A
Do we know numbers for high school in terms of those reporting that they've had some sort of a relationship with somebody, a romantic relationship?
- [20:05]
C
We don't really know. We have quite a very little amount of information about that. My own students went, by the time they're in college, when I talk to them, some of them report very vibrant hookup cultures in their high schools and sometimes even middle schools, and some of them don't. And what I've noticed as a trend is that those who encounter hookup cultures in high school are much more sophisticated about it when they get to college. Meaning? Meaning that they have a better understanding of what's going on and whether or not they like it, want to participate. Whereas people who have very little exposure to it in high school get to college, and they're like a deer in headlights with all these new sexual opportunities, and they have to learn a little bit later.
- [20:48]
A
Yeah. So what are some of the pointers you give to parents of discussion topics we can be having with our kids?
- [20:58]
C
Yeah. So I would say, to begin, the point you made earlier, that Most people in college are interested in a romantic relationship, and it's not true that nobody wants one. I would say, number two, they should ask for what they want. It's terrifying in a culture that says no one wants to be in a relationship and you're pathetic if you do, like, weak and needy and clingy or thirsty. Right. It's terrifying to actually say that you are interested in someone in a romantic way, but it's the only way for them to get what they want and to reframe any kind of rejection that comes as a result as dodging a bullet instead of being rejected.
- [21:39]
A
Say that again. Explain that more.
- [21:41]
C
If you say that you're interested in someone romantically and they're like, ew, no, I'm not interested. Go away. It's easy for a young person to think, oh, I'm not lovable, I'm pathetic. I made the wrong move. I'm doing all this wrong. I'm supposed to be having sex anyway and not falling in love to blame oneself. But. But. But to reframe that as okay, that's not the right person then, because they didn't want what I want. So it was never going to work out for me anyway. So dodging a bullet rather than being rejected and then one that's very important is to tell young people that they deserve to be treated nicely. Not everybody's gonna love them. Not everybody has to treat them like they are, like the most important person in the world to them. But it is never okay to be treated. Call unkindly. Absolutely not. So that they. Because it has become normalized in hookup culture that you treat the other person like they mean nothing to you, and that's not acceptable. You can be perfectly nice to someone that you have sex with only once and then go home. And so that, I think, is so important because I think students mix up in their heads, oh, I can't expect them to feelings for me, therefore, I can't expect them to be nice to me. Really? Just red flagging that. That's always unacceptable to be treated unkindly. I've had students who've been blocked before they left the room just as a clear signal that this is not going to happen again. It violates the rules of hookup culture to text them after and to say anything at all.
- [23:17]
A
My jaw just dropped.
- [23:18]
C
When that happens to them, then they feel bad, like any human would feel bad. And then they're like, why am I so emotional? They blame themselves. Right? And this is what I meant about you deserve to be Treated kindly and should feel entitled to that.
- [23:31]
A
And also my goal is that relationships can start not through hookups and starting to have these conversations with our middle and high schoolers about how to enter into relationships and how hard it is to ask people out. It's super challenging to ask someone out. I would say to my kids, if you get rejected, yes, we're gonna go celebrate. Cause you asked somebody out.
- [23:55]
C
One of my students said something like dinner, going to dinner. And he like, it was the most horrifying thing he could think of. And. And he goes on and on about sitting across from another person that you don't know, and then you don't know what's going to happen or what to say or what they're going to say. Absolute mortification at the idea. And it wasn't just him. There's a lot of students who find this idea of sitting down with someone they don't know and without clear script, because that's one thing that makes hip hop culture very appealing, is that it's very rigidly scripted so you know what's going to happen and you don't have to be prepared for anything much of the time. And so dinner was like fully different from them. In my experience, a good proportion of young people are pretty frightened of the idea of going on a date. Yeah.
- [24:45]
A
So when I was in college, and this is the last question, when I was in college in the middle of mid-80s, that was heading to that early 90s time. Do we think, though, in the mid-80s it was more likely to people to have relationships than later in the 90s it was less hookups. But we don't maybe don't know about romantic relationships.
- [25:05]
C
Yeah, I think that we were pretty much still going steady in the 1980s, or at least lots of people were hooking up, but it wasn't the culture. I see in the 1980s, a person might have gone on a date in the hopes of getting sexual. They had to pretend to be going on a date, being romantically interested. And today they're having sex in the hopes of getting a romantic relationship, but pretending to be interested only in sex. So it's not necessarily like what people have want has changed, but definitely the implied purpose of the event has changed. But yeah, I think in the 1980s, hooking up was happening, but it wasn't the culture.
- [25:38]
A
I asked the students if they had any advice to offer around all of this.
- [25:43]
C
Trust is super important. And so like, if you're not able to trust someone, it might end up being like a really bad experience. Versus when there's, like, trust and, like, communication there. I have, like, friends who they'll have hooked up with someone and, like, not have been able to communicate their needs and feel, like, really uncomfortable about what happened. And it didn't even have to be sexual assault or, like, her harassment even,
- [26:07]
A
or, like, anything that was, like, blatantly bad. But it's just when you don't have the trust and communication, like, bad things can happen.
- [26:15]
B
A big part of how hookup culture can be, like, controlling of your mind is like that chase of hooking up. Like, oh, I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna meet someone, I'm gonna hook up with them. Like, wow, that's such a great thing. And then you do it. You meet this person you probably don't like that much, or they don't like you that much. It doesn't pay off, as one might expect. So I think not putting pressure on yourself to, like, achieve something through hooking up is not to put too much pressure on yourself to hook up with people, because most of the time it's not that rewarding. Because the end all, be all goal is to, I think, is to, like, find someone who gets you and understands you, to have a person. No one wants to be lonely. And if you're just hooking up to someone, you're going to be lonely.
- [27:08]
A
Back to my discussion with Lisa Wade, and just to reiterate the culture concept of it is this manifested belief, which isn't actually data driven, but that everyone's doing it, you should do it, and you're a little bit off if you're not doing it. And that's why actually got you interested in writing the book was that many people see it as what they're supposed to do, and yet many people are miserable or unsatisfied with it.
- [27:34]
C
I think that's a very interesting phenomenon, and I'm very interested in how it persists despite there being so much dissatisfaction. I think the answer has to do with something a lot bigger than these young people and their lives. I think it has to do with our wider culture and what kind of youth culture, youth sexual culture it supports.
- [27:54]
A
Wonderful, Lisa. This has been fantastic. So much good information, and I can't thank you enough.
- [28:00]
C
Oh, thank you for having me. It was a delight.
- [28:03]
A
I just want to end by saying I feel so strongly that this is such an important topic and that we really ought to be discussing these things with teens in our life. It can be really helpful to share this episode with them and let them know the data it's complicated out there and we want them to have time to hear different perspectives and to talk about things. If you appreciated this podcast episode, consider checking out one called Teen Hookups and How to Talk About it all. Or perhaps my blog titled Innocent or Flirting on Social Media. I want to thank all the college students we heard from and to Malia Silverstein for being our field producer for this episode and doing those interviews. And finally, I want to thank Dr. Lisa Wade, Associate professor at Tulane University and author of American Hookup. You can learn more about her important work in the show. Notes what a gift that you tuned into the show today. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast to get each episode episode automatically and the more subscribers, the easier it is for others to find us. And if you give it a like and write a review, even just one sentence, that helps even more. Check out screenagersmovie.com to get resources for each episode and loads of other resources. Learn about our four Screenagers films and find my weekly parenting blog, TechTalkTuesdays. And be sure to use the search bar to find many topics you might be wondering about among hundreds of my past blogs. Finally, I love hearing from you, so email me at delaneyqueenagersmovie.com what ideas do you want to hear for future episodes? Today's show was produced by the following people Me, your host, Delaney Rustin, Lisa Tabb, Rebecca Tolan and sound editing was done by Alan Gofinski.