Is casual sex on college campuses really...
Is casual sex on college campuses really casual?
Mostly, no, said Elizabeth Paul, an associate professor of psychology at New Jersey College, who has studied the phenomenon of “hooking up,” slang for brief, spontaneous sexual encounters with strangers, acquaintances and friends that range from kissing to intercourse.
“Casual sex is not casual,” insisted Paul, referring to an unpublished study of 187 college undergraduates’ descriptions of their “worst” and “best” hookups. “Very few people are coming out unscathed. ... I certainly am not saying that all hookups are bad. Some were fine, experimental kind of experiences, but they are complex and personally involving. They are not impersonal.”
The majority of undergraduates described experiencing a mix of negative and positive emotions during and after hookups, said Paul. Women generally reported more regret and painful emotions after hookups than men, who reported more positive feelings.
In a separate study published in the Journal of Sex Research last year, researchers wrote that, after hooking up, men reported feelings of high self-esteem, and women reported feelings of low self-esteem.
But feelings of “lowered self-worth” as well as pride and increased self-confidence were also reported by both genders, said Paul. “People really have a mixture of good and bad feelings after a hookup,” she said. “One woman said, ‘For 10 minutes I felt attractive.’ They may feel like they belong and fit in or they may feel sexually satisfied. But they may also feel confusion and regret.”
Although studies have reported varying rates of hooking up on college campuses (ranging from about 40% to 74%), Paul, who has studied hooking up for the last five years, is sure it has become standard behavior on American college campuses. Many college students agree.
“Hooking up is not seen as a terrible thing to do,” said Allegra Hill, a San Jose State student who added that she defines a good hookup as one that turns into a relationship. “On one hand, it is the norm, and on the other, it is shameful,” said Hill. “It is not something you want everyone on campus to know.”
This may sound like the emotional landscape women and men have always negotiated in intimate relationships--women want commitment, and men want sex. And though women, in particular, enjoy much greater sexual liberty today as compared with, say, 40 years ago, behavior is still interpreted through cultural attitudes about what is acceptable. And those attitudes remain relatively unchanged.
“The cultural filter says that ‘good girls don’t,’ so [some women feel] they shouldn’t feel good about what happened,” said Paul. “The double standard still condemns women for sexual pleasure, and it condemns men to try to live up to the Casanova [stereotype]...,” which, she added, can be “even more restrictive emotionally.”
Amy Durisin, a 22-year-old UCLA student, agreed that hookups are not emotionless experiences for women. “I don’t think I know any women who can do a hookup and not get emotionally involved,” said Durisin. “They will say they don’t care, but then they wonder why he didn’t call the next day and they try to talk it off as ‘I can do this as well as any man can.’ But I think, in reality, they get their feelings hurt.”
Still, a few women report that hookups provide release, sexual empowerment and fill a void, according to Elizabeth Marquardt, co-author of a survey of 1,000 college women by the Institute of American Values, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization. But a more typical response is that hooking up avoids intimacy.
“People are really weirded out by each other ..., “ said a Colby College student who is quoted in the Institute of American Values study.
“Neither of the people are willing at all to talk about their feelings
For women who want more, Marquardt said, hookups create self-doubt.
“Women who have expectations ... try to do this and have emotions,” she said. “Then they say, ‘I must be too emotional.’ It doesn’t bode well for forming intimacy and trust in relationships later on.”
The majority of “best” hookups described in Paul’s study happened in the absence of intoxication.
But not always. One woman wrote of her “best” hookup, “I was pretty happy, a little drunk, enjoying the fact that the hottest guy at the party was kissing me. I felt like I had just won a game or something. I felt very confident. ... “
One man wrote that “it felt good, but I’m glad that I’m not going out with a girl who is slutty like that.”
Other men described hookups that left them unsettled: “She was a gorgeous girl, a great person who was cool about the whole thing. I felt confused after because I liked her.”
This kind of confusion, said Paul, seems to stem from students expecting that they won’t feel anything. “They think, ‘I really like this person, maybe I want more.’ ”
For women, “worst” hookups were marked by regret, sometimes because they allowed themselves to do something they didn’t want to do or because they were drunk.
Men’s typical “worst” hookup had to do with having been with a woman who isn’t perceived as alluring after he sobers up (the “beer-goggles effect,” as some joke) or choosing a woman who was perceived as promiscuous.
“There was no alcohol,” reported one young woman. “I just had low self-esteem at the time. I just let it happen. We had sex with no protection. ... I didn’t want to be there. I felt dirty. ... I didn’t tell anyone because I felt very ashamed.”
A man, describing his “worst,” wrote, “I was drunk at a party. I cheated on my girlfriend. ... I did not even know what she looked like until afterwards. I would never have been with her if I were sober.”
What troubles Paul about these experiences is that students rarely discuss them, which means opportunities for personal growth are missed.
“No one wants to talk about the worst hookups because they think the norm is good hookups,” said Paul. “They think, ‘How am I going to talk about this when it makes me a freak and different?’ There were also ambivalent feelings like, ‘I wanted pleasure but not in that way.”’
What is clear, Paul said, is that sexual experimentation is normal for college undergraduates. The question is, what is healthy and what crosses the line?
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Next week on “hooking up”: What is healthy sexual experimentation?
