Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both

by Laura Sessions Stepp

Book Overview

Features a new Afterword for this edition. A controversial look at today's sexual hook-up culture, and " a] book...you won't stop talking about."-Patricia Cornwell

From the front lines of today's sexual battlefield comes an eye-opening examination of the hookup culture, seen through the personal experiences of the teenage girls and young women who live it-and who are left unprepared for its consequences. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594482845
• ISBN13: 9781594482847
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Unhooked: An Amazing Book

There is so much in this book thats true, open and honest. Girls say that hooking up doesn't affect them at all, that its boys fault that we pursue such relationships. Truth is women do the same exact thing. In some cases they can even pursue the situation harder and longer than most men. There is one astonishing quote from the book in particular involving women and relationships.... "One particularly interesting finding was that while two out of every three young men said it was better to get married than go through life single, fewer than half the young women felt that way." As one person in the book said "Love is an old person's emotion." Therefore are we left to wonder why their are so many emotionally crippled 20somethings out there who have to go on the internet to websites like [...] and eharmony to try and create a romantic relationship that they never had. Its small wonder why such websites as those prosper, with 20somethings so lost and unable to understand the difference between an actual adult romantic relationship and a juvenile high school hooking up relationship. I would recommend this book to any parent, college student, and anyone interested in reading this, for pleasure or school. I myself am in college for dual major psychology/sociology and I found it utterly enrapturing and completely fascinating.

A Must Read

This book is a must read for everyone, but especially all girls and women. It came recommended to me by a friend and I have sent copies to many friends an family members. Stepp is honest, straightforward, and pragmatic. The girls she interviewed could easily be me and my friends. But to see it written in a book makes the experience real and allows girls and women to take an honest look one of the most important topics in our lives. I can't stress how much I recommend that everyone read this book. Laura Stepp, thank you!

A very accurate view on today's young women

I can't stress enough how accurate a portrayal this book is of most modern young women. As a 28-year old woman who has just finished medical school but never had a lasting relationship because I always felt my studies should come first (and so I've been told all my life), this book hit very close to home. I always figured it was something wrong with ME. I wasn't able to take a step back and gain broader perspective on the messages that have surrounded me almost from birth. No, I'm not trying to sound like a victim, but it's crucial to know how many seemingly small factors can come together to form a larger problem. And I know it's not just me... For example, my best friend (who recently got her MBA) was sitting a bar and chatting with this guy she was really interested in, both physically & mentally, for hours. He hinted that she should come back to his apartment with her, but she didn't take the hints (or says she didn't). The next day she came to me, asking, "Why couldn't I just have sex with him??" There is a lot of confusion in young women today... Not only in terms of balancing academic/career/extracurricular goals with personal relationships, but also the pressure to BE overtly sexual and treat men disposably while at the same time really desiring a deeper emotional connection. I think Stepp is right... Some of us, through a combination of factors, aren't equipped with the tools (due to lack of experience, and being actively influenced away from experience with messages like "There'll be plenty of time to date after is done.") to adequately integrate a loving relationship into our lives. There are quotes in this book, much like the above, that I have heard since early adolescence. There are other lines that I have used almost verbatim as excuses to guys as to why I couldn't have an emotionally vulnerable relationship with them. I can see how many people will think I'm over-exaggerating. Or how Stepp is overstating either the prevalence of the hooking up culture or the factors that contribute to it. But I promise you, she's not. Of course, what you read won't apply to ALL young women (there are no universalities), but for a great many of us, it's completely accurate. I can't tell you how helpful it's been to me to realize that I'm not alone in this.

Compelling and informative

Good non-fiction, to my mind, should be 1) fun and engaging to read, much like a good novel, and 2) informative and enlightening. _Unhooked_ more than satisfies both of these requirements. The stories are told in a way that compels you to keep reading; each has a plot. And I learned so much from this book about a campus culture that was just beginning to develop when I graduated from college in 1993. I was particularly struck by Stepp's dead-on observation that young women have been taught to put achievement first and not to value relationships -- that "love can wait." But of course they still have sex, so sex becomes unconnected from relationships. Stepp's commentary, I believe, adds to rather than takes away from the stories, providing very needed context. One of the best books I have read this year.

Yikes! From feminists to Paris Hilton in one generation

Stepps's "Unhooked" could hardly be scarier. She was the reporter for a story about 8th grade students where "as many as a dozen girls had been performing oral sex on two or three boys for most of the school year" (p 1). And not only was she the reporter, but "the school was my son's"(p 1). She began digging deeper into the mores of this generation, and what she found was young women who were the beneficiaries of all that feminism from the 70's. Not to mention the endless smutty jokes on TV, Cosmo magazine, Madonna, and free condoms thrown from every school window. It seems amazing to this generation that there was actually a debate back in the 50's about whether Lucy on "I Love Lucy" could use the word "pregnant". That there are people alive today who can remember a time when courtship was standard practice, when young men took girls on dates, after being warned by her parents to bring her back before 11 or the wolf pack would be released. Yeah, things have changed. But few older adults realize just how deeply the changes have gone. The girls--yes, they are back to calling themselves girls--seem stuck in perpetual childishness. Rootless. Marriage, taking care of a baby, and the slow growth of learning to love and understand your mate, all are postponed. So is real adulthood. So, it can be argued, is character. They are a sad lot, with blunted emotions, and many seem incapable of forming deep attachments to anyone. What is left is sex. Sex without love. Lesbian sex. Sex while drunk. Hooking up, the way to describe engaging in some sort of sex with a total stranger one doesn't expect to see again. Parties that are more like orgies than social events. Dating is now as dated as the horse and buggy on colleges, where pointless hook ups are all that is left. When one professor asked his class at Duke, "'Tell me, how do you go from hooking up to wedding vows?'" Not a hand went up" (p 20). Apparently no one had thought of how to make an easy transition between the two. These are some of the brightest students in the country. Yet even for them the connection between hooking up and marriage seemed obscure. In Germany, as many as 40% of college educated women never marry. The statistics here are lurching in that direction as well. In fact, we walked off the cliff a long time ago. There is not a single major civilization in written human history with an illegitimacy rate of over 30%. and where the divorce rate is 50%, and where most young children will experience part of their childhood with only one parent, with all the attendant problems with drug abuse, school problems and emotional disturbances. Can our civilization continue like this? Who knows? And what will happen to most of those young women who experience one sexual encounter after another? Will they ever be able to form a deep attachment to any one person? Right now, stable families are a shrinking group. Sexual disease is rampant.