Is Dating Dead? Yes. 'Hanging out' and 'hooking up' are in

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A nationwide study of 1,000 college women suggests that virgins are more prevalent than many would expect, while the traditional courtship rites appear to be disappearing.

But the survey also says that many college women prefer so-called "hook-ups" to dating. Hook-ups are defined as encounters ranging from kissing to sexual intercourse where both participants expect nothing further afterward.

More than a third -- 39 percent -- of respondents described themselves as virgins, and 40 percent said they had had hook-ups. Ten percent of college women responding to the poll said they had hooked up more than six times.

According to the survey, the traditional dating culture is less prevalent. Women said they are rarely asked out on dates and instead experience romantic encounters during informal gatherings of male and female friends, referred to as "hanging out."

The poll says 91 percent of college women reported what was described as a rampant "hook-up culture" on their campuses.

"The common thread throughout all of this is the presence of alcohol," said Kate Kennedy of the Independent Women's Forum, which commissioned the survey.

"There's this group-think mentality in which people go out in packs because it's the comfortable thing to do." Kennedy said that when she was dating not long ago in college, "it was so nerve-wracking. It was almost like taking a final exam. What was the point of doing it? It wasn't fun. Let's just hang out with our friends, it's so much easier."

-- Fifty-three percent said that "it is a good idea to live with someone before deciding to marry him."

-- Ninety-nine percent said, "I believe that when the time is right I will find the right person to marry."

-- Sixty-three percent said they would like to meet their future husbands in college.

The survey -- which was completed over an 18-month period -- was sponsored by the Independent Women's Forum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational group founded in 1992.

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 26, 2001; Page A03

A conservative women's group will issue a report today contending that while most college women embrace marriage as a life goal, their pursuit of that objective is undermined by the prevalence of relationships on college campuses that feature sex without commitment.

The college dating scene leaves many women with two choices when it comes to men: launch intense but vague relationships, or "hook up" for casual physical encounters, according to the report conducted for the Independent Women's Forum, which has gained attention in recent years with its critique of contemporary feminism.

"The social scene on college campuses does not support the aspirations for long-term relationships and marriage that these women say they have," said Elizabeth Marquardt, co-author of the report and an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values. "Women say they wish there was something in the middle. . . . They wish they could really get to know a guy without necessarily having a sexual relationship."

The New York-based Institute, a non-profit group that promotes the importance of family and fatherhood, conducted the report for the women's forum by surveying 1,000 women enrolled at secular four-year colleges. The report's authors said the telephone survey was aimed at filling a void in the national debate about marriage.

The study raises pointed questions about the social landscape on college campuses, which the authors say is bewildering and unfulfilling to many women. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s swept away a concept of dating in which there was an implicit understanding that each party was shopping for a mate and not just for sex, according to the report.

With 100 women on college campuses for every 79 men, women are more apt to initiate relationships with men and are more willing to experiment with casual relationships, even when they know such liaisons leave them emotionally empty, the survey found.

Where college students once abided by well-known, if constricting, rules of dating, the survey found that those rules are more vague than ever. College women are more likely to "hook up" with male partners -- meaning engage in physical relationships often fueled by alcohol that are devoid of commitment and sometimes even of affection.

These hook-ups range from kissing to oral sex to intercourse, the report said. In the survey, 40 percent of the women said they had hooked up with men, and 1 in 10 had done so at least six times.

If women are not hooking up, the report said, they frequently fall into fast-moving, "joined-at-the-hip" relationships with men, spending nights in one another's rooms and effectively stifling all other relationships.

"Young women are trying more and more to act like men," said Nancy Pfotenhauer, president of the Independent Women's Forum. "But the problem is they don't react like men."

A report released two years ago by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University found that Americans are less likely to marry than ever and that fewer people who do marry reported being "very happy" in their relationships.

Roughly 85 percent of Americans get married, and they are doing so later in life. The median age of marriage for women is 25.1; in 1970 it was 20.8.

While authors of the new report often refer to the 1950s and early 1960s as a time when the rules of courtship were clearer, they stop short of saying courting proved any more fulfilling then.

"Back in the 1950s, we got to know one another under artificial circumstances," said Norval Glenn, a University of Texas sociologist who co-authored the report.

"You were well dressed; you put your best foot forward. That is not the best way for people to get to know one another. But at the same time, you sure don't get to know anybody well by hooking up."

An Encounter of the No-Strings-Attached, 5,000-Volt Kind

Sexual permissiveness has been a hallmark of college campuses for decades. But yesterday's one-night stand has evolved into today's "hooking up," a slang term that describes casual sex in the extreme. Although hooking up is used to describe brief, spontaneous sexual encounters between two people, the term is somewhat ambiguous.

As one local college student explains, context matters. "If I say, 'I am going to hook up with my friends at a club later, it means we are going to meet up," said Melanie Crew, a 22-year-old Santa Monica College student. "But if I say, 'Oh, I hooked up with this guy last night,' it means something physical happened."

Defined in the sexual sense, hooking up is an unplanned sexual encounter between strangers or acquaintances ranging from a kiss to intercourse. It doesn't usually include spending the night together and rarely extends beyond a single encounter. The behavior that occurs during a hookup and a one-night stand may seem to be the same, said Elizabeth J. Paul, an associate professor of psychology at the College of New Jersey, who has conducted two studies on the phenomenon. But hookups, unlike one-night stands of the past, have become a primary way that college undergraduates connect sexually, a no-strings-attached physical charge that has become the norm at secular colleges across the nation, she said.

"Hooking up is a way for students to feel connected in a culture that is increasingly distrusting of emotional relationships," said Paul, whose students, abuzz with talk of hooking up, inspired her to explore the phenomenon five years ago. "What my students say to me is, 'I don't want all the baggage of an emotional relationship, I want the charge without the argument over which way I put the roll of toilet paper on."'

Hooking up appears to be occurring on campus more than casual sex used to, Paul said. Not surprisingly, intoxication from alcohol or drugs advances the likelihood that a hookup will culminate in sexual intercourse. Perhaps most alarming, she said, hookup partners usually don't talk about sexual histories or take precautions against STDs or pregnancy. There is often no discussion about what is happening, and there is little interaction afterward.

"A lot of people will hook up at parties, especially when alcohol is involved, and it doesn't usually go beyond petting," said Allegra Hill, a 19-year-old San Jose State University student, who noted that "dating" in the old-fashioned sense is nonexistent there. "Hooking up is so accepted, it is not considered a big deal. One of my friends hooked up with this guy, and I had taken a picture of him. She was so happy because she couldn't remember him or his name. She was hoping she would remember him when she saw his photograph."

Last year, the Journal of Sex Research published a study on hooking up conducted by Paul and her colleagues. They wrote that 75% of 550 (mostly heterosexual) undergraduates reported having experienced a hookup. One-third reported they'd had intercourse with a stranger or acquaintance. In another unpublished study of 187 students that explored students' views of best and worst hookups, Paul found that 70% reported hooking up at least once, with the most "experienced participants" reporting an average of 10 hookups in their college career.

A more conservative number emerged from a recently published survey of 1,000 college women conducted by the Institute for American Values, a New York-based nonprofit think tank that promotes the importance of family and fatherhood. The survey, commissioned by the conservative Independent Women's Forum, a critic of contemporary feminism, found that 40% of women undergraduates said they had hooked up with a man at least once, and 1 in 10 said they had done so at least six times.

Contributing to the campus hookup culture, said demographer Norval Glenn, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the Institute for American Values study, is the unequal ratio of women to men. There are, on average, 100 women for every 79 men on American campuses, said Glenn. "Men have the upper hand," he said flatly.

"Men are pretty passive. They don't have to do very much to get what they want. One comment in our study from a female student at Colby College in Maine was that men wouldn't even go from one end of the dorm to the other to establish a relationship because they didn't need to."

Miquel Moore, a 22-year-old Southern Illinois University undergraduate agreed. "All a guy has to do is say, 'Hey, I like you. Here is my dorm room number,"' said Moore. "There is a lot of casual sex. If I have a girl I hook up with, we agree to have sex and there is no connection or title [such as girlfriend or boyfriend]. It gets dangerous when emotions come into play."

Paul and Glenn, the researchers, are alarmed on a number of fronts. The first is that partners who hook up are less likely to use protection against STDs or pregnancy (in one study of hooking up, said Paul, only 13% of participants reported using protection).

Second, hooking up is a lousy replacement for cultural courtship rituals and is not likely to foster the emotional and social maturity required to forge solid relationships later. Third, hookups are void of emotional connection.

"I don't think casual sex is always casual sex," said Paul. "The people throughout my latest report say that these are very intense emotional experiences, even if they last only an hour or a couple of hours. We focus on the physical ramifications of sex, but we also need to focus on the emotional ones."

Source:
July 26, 2001 Posted: 10:24 AM EDT (1424 GMT)
http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-000063792aug06.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dliving

Next week: The emotional fallout of hooking up.

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