Hidden Brain - Just Sex

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Casual sex typically isn't about love. But what if it's not even about lust? Sociologist Lisa Wade studies "hookup culture," and believes the rules and expectations around sex and relationships are different for college students today than they were for previous generations. This week we revisit our 2017 conversation with Wade, and consider how the pandemic may be changing students' views on hookups and intimacy.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This episode explores explicit themes. If you're listening with small kids, you may want to save this for later. Parties were huge, hookups were huge. Everyone just seemed to be doing everything with each other. And yet I always kind of felt like I wasn't doing it right. There are certain ideas that send the media into a panic. One of them is hook-up culture.

College students are quote unquote, hooking up. Hook-up, hook-up. Hook-up. Hook-up culture. Yeah, I wonder where people can just be sitting in a cafe and find someone to hook up with. Are you buying this? Kids are more sexual than ever.

Stories about casual sex on college campuses have long been a staple of cable news, but the truth is more nuanced. College students are actually not having more sex than their parents did a generation ago, but something has changed. Not just in what students do or what they don't do, but in how they think. I have students who have had sex many times drunk, but have never held someone's hand. If casual sex was taboo a generation ago, emotional intimacy has become taboo today. It's something to be explored in secret. Maybe even something to be ashamed about. I think it feels bad to be used, but I think the alternative is that nobody wants to use you and I think

that that's worse. Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Occidental College. In her book, American Hookup, the new culture of sex on campus, Lisa interviews college students and finds that hookup culture has a complex set of social rules. She says these rules threaten the emotional well-being of students, those who embrace the culture, and those who want nothing to do with it. Lisa, thanks for joining me on Hidden Brain today. Thank you so much for having me. We spoke with several students in your book, Lisa, and we're going to hear from them in

this conversation. One of the things that kept coming up was that there's no one definition of what hooking up actually is. It can mean a variety of things from making out to having sex, but for all the ambiguity, there does seem to be a clear set of guidelines when it comes to how students should hook up. You know, it's funny because the ideology around hookups is that they're supposed to be spontaneous. And the fact is that there's a pretty rigid set of rules

for how hookups happen. Many of them, probably most of them start at parties where there's drinking. And the way to initiate it is through dancing. So usually in these heterosexual encounters, women will initiate the dancing by going into the middle of the dance floor. And then in a very sort of gender-traditional way, hope that someone picks her and comes up along behind her. Sometimes the woman doesn't even know who is behind her,

which creates a conundrum because part of hooking up is trying to hook up with people that your friends approve of and think are like a good catch. And so often she's dancing, someone comes up behind her, and then what she'll do is she'll look across the circle to one of her girlfriends and try to get some indication as to whether or not she should continue. Let's talk some more about this idea that hookups are a way to win the approval of your friends.

You're saying that some hookups move you up the social packing order and others move you down? Hookups are decidedly not about finding any sort of romantic connection and suggesting that it should be or that one is doing it for that reason is tantamount to breaking a social rule. They're often not so much about pleasure in particular for women. They're very much about status. So the idea is to be able to brag about or having sort of gotten someone who other people might also wish they could have

gotten. So it's all about being able to say I got that guy over there or that person that everyone's looking for, I managed to be the one who hooked up with him tonight. One of the unspoken rules to talk about in hook-up culture is that it's really important that the hook-up be meaningless. One of the young men we spoke with described a situation that almost seems Kafka-esque. We really like each other, but she would not have sex with me. But I also knew that she was working up with someone. And this was such a confusing concept, which is that people will have sex with people that they don't like,

but won't have sex with people that they do like. And of course, what does young man is saying? He can't understand why this young woman who likes him and that he likes is having sex with someone else whom she doesn't like but won't have sex with him. What the students are confronted with is this artificial binary between careless and careful sex. On the one hand, we have this idea that when we get into romantic relationships, we're supposed to be loving and kind, and the sex that happens

in those kinds of relationships is very committed. And on the other hand, we have this concept of casual sex, which is the opposite of that. And that means that all of the kindnesses that go along with romantic relationships are considered off-script, once casual sex is on the table. So if two students are going to hook up together and they want it to be meaningless, then they have to do some work to make sure that both they and everyone else understands that we're over in this meaningless camp and not this powerfully meaningful one. And so to sort of

convince themselves and other people or to show them tells another people that it was meaningless, they have to find a way to perform meaningless. It's not automatic. And they do that by, for example, making sure that they're drunk, or they appear to be drunk when they hook up. So my students actually speak in pretty hushed tones

about sober sex. Sober sex is very serious, but if the students have been drinking, then that helps send the message that it's meaningless. Another way is to make sure that they don't hook up with the same person very many times. So if they really don't like the person in a romantic way, just hook up once, maybe twice, and then cut it off. And then the third thing they have to do to try to establish this meaninglessness is to sort of give that person a demotion in their lives afterward.

The idea that it's meaningless means that we're also not supposed to care about that person at all, and in any way. You're talking the book about how even though, you know, talk about hookups is ubiquitous on college campuses, that doesn't necessarily reflect how much of it is actually going on. So there's a lot of consternation about students' sexual activity, but it turns out that they are no more sexually

active by most measures than their parents were at their age. The average graduating senior has hooked up eight times in four years. So that's once a semester, and half of those hookups are with someone that they've hooked up with before. And in fact, about a third of students won't hook up even a single time their entire college career. But that doesn't mean that they're not surrounded by these really powerful ideas about what they should be doing. And it doesn't mean that they can change

how their peers interact with them or the way in which higher education works. So even though campus hook-up culture might actually be something that is endorsed by a relatively small number of people who are enthusiasts, one of the points you make is that these are people who often come from groups who have traditionally had a lot of power and privilege in society. About 15% of students really, really truly enjoy hook-up culture. It gives them exactly what they want out of college. And studies show that if you ask those students, and they're the students that are hooking up the most, if you ask them if they're having a good time,

they say yes, and I believe them. About a third of students are completely opted out. The rest of the students are somewhere in the middle, and they're ambivalent about the idea of casual sex, but if you look at the students who enjoy hook-up culture the most, those students are disproportionately going to be heterosexual, white, come from an upper middle class or wealthy background, they're going to be male, they're going to be able-bodied,

conventionally attractive. And how is this different for racial minorities or people from the LGBT community? Racial minorities face all kinds of complicated problems that white students don't. And it depends a lot kind of on what particular intersection we're looking at. So some racial minorities are embraced by white students more than others. So African-American men and Asian women are usually considered hot and exotic, whereas Asian men and African-American women are considered less so.

So it very much depends on what intersection of race, gender, and class too, that students are sitting in. But overall, we see lower rates of hooking up among racial minorities for both push and pull reasons. So, part of it is they're pushed out because of racism and an erotic hierarchy that privileges whiteness. But they also tend to get pulled out because racial minorities are more likely to be religious. They drink less alcohol, they maybe had to be more squeaky clean to get into college to begin with. So racial minorities aren't as welcome in hookup culture and they also don't find it as attractive.

And what about the LGBT community? For students who don't identify as heterosexual and we actually still need to do more research on this, but what it seems to be happening is that on small campuses or campuses where people aren't very out, there's not an alternative hookup scene for students who don't identify as heterosexual or bisexual. And the hookup scene that does exist is hyper heterosexualized. And in those cases, students participate at their own risk, risking homophobia in either

behavior or attitude, or they go off campus. And that is why Grindr hit college campuses way earlier than Tinder did because a lot of students who identified as non-heterosexual were using it to find hookups off campus. When we come back, I'm going to ask Lisa about the effects of hookup culture on the emotional lives of young people. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. One argument that some make and this includes feminists on the left and libertarians on the right is that hookups can be liberating.

People have a chance to experiment, try new things, they're empowered to discover their preferences. But one of the students we spoke with Lisa said that what sometimes starts out sounding like empowerment often becomes something else. I did have experiences where the expectations once the hook-up had already started would start to come out and they wouldn't come out kindly. You know, it's not, it wasn't a conversation of, hey are you willing to try this or hey, you know, I really like it when my partner does this to me. It would be a little bit more of, you're going to do this now.

So Lisa, does hook up culture have anything to do with what some people would call rape culture? Yes, I would argue that hook up culture is a rape culture in that it facilitates and excuses behaviors that translate into sexual assault. Can you expand on that? I mean, there are enthusiasts who would basically say, you know, we're just exercising, you know, our free choice. We're not constrained by the norms that might have hindered a prior generation, what's wrong with people experimenting, trying new things, figuring out who they really are? So part of the reason we see hookup culture

on college campuses can be traced back to the sexual revolution in the women's movement. And the women's movement wanted two things for women, both sexually and otherwise. They wanted women to have the opportunity to do the things that men do and to embody masculine traits and interests. And they wanted everyone to sit up and notice that the things women had been doing all along and the traits and interests

that they were believed to have were also valuable. And we really only got half of that. So the feminists succeeded in convincing America. For the most part, the women should be allowed to do what men do and even have masculine traits. But we never really got around to valuing the things that we define as feminine. So a young woman who's growing up in America today is going to, she's going to be told by

most, not all parents are like this, but most parents are going to encourage their daughters to mix in masculine traits and interests into her personality. And they're even going to encourage her to do so, and perhaps reward her more so when she does that than then when she incorporates feminine personality traits. So we're excited when she likes to play with engineering toys when she's a kid, and we're excited when she chooses sports over cheerleading, and we're excited that she decides

to major in physics instead of education. And so women have been getting this message. If they're paying any attention at all, it's very clear that, as they say, well-'re paying any attention at all, it's very clear that, as they say, well-behaved women rarely make history, we reward you, we think it's great, when you act like we think a stereotypical man does. So then when they get to campus, that's what they try to do, and it should surprise none of us that many women on campus decide to approach sexuality the same way they've

been rewarded for approaching everything else in their lives. With this idea of the thing to do, the way to be liberated is to act in the way I think a stereotypical man might. So you know, while there are lots of people who do say that hookups can be liberating, one of the young women we spoke with said she actually feels a little trapped. I think girls know when they're being used and I think it feels bad to be used but I think the alternative is that nobody wants to use you and that means that you're not

talking up with anybody and I think that that's worse. So there's something heartbreaking about that question Lisa because it sounds like what this young woman is saying is that she recognizes that she feels she is being used, but she feels she doesn't have a choice but to be used. There are not a lot of good options for women in hook-up culture that don't truly enjoy casual sex, and there are some that do. But for the rest of them, they're kind of faced with two options. One is that they don't participate in any sexual

activity at all, which also means never getting into any sort of romantic relationship with someone. And the other is passing through this period with a person, the hook-up period, with the hopes of coming out the other end as that person's girlfriend. And there's something different about the double standard on college campuses. It used to be that men would have the power to kind of put women into one of two categories, the good girl or the bad girl. And if women just, quote unquote, behaved herself, she could probably stay in the good girl camp, although there's no guarantee. But today, men still have this power to put women into one of these groups, but they put basically all women into the bad girl group, all women they're hooking up with anyway.

And then, have the power at some point to decide, oh I've been hooking up with you for a while, now I'm going to decide that I like you, and now I'm going to treat you with respect and as an equal. If a woman wants a relationship where at some point she'll be retreated with respect and as an equal, then she has to go through this period where she's not those things. So women's options are either opt out of hook-up culture altogether or expose herself to this period where she's treated disrespectfully in the hopes that it translates into something better on the other end. One of the women we talked with actually describes a situation very much like this, but also describes a dilemma which she faced,

which is even when she likes someone that she's hooked up with, the rules of hook-up culture prevent her from telling the other person what she actually wants. That kind of guy that hooks up with a girl and doesn't let go. That's not really a thing people talk about. Versus the girl who hooks up once and just falls in love with you and never leaves you alone. That crazy girl. Yeah, that's a thing.

And we so desperately don't want to look like that. So when you hook up with someone that you actually really liked, and you really wanted to be with them, and then they don't text you back. And so it's over. That sounds like a terrible place to be in because you are going through hook-up culture to try and find a relationship, but the rules demand that you can't actually ask for one. Yeah. Yeah.

And she used the word desperately, which was interesting. I argue in the book that the worst thing a student can be called these days isn't slut, and it's not even prude, although that one's big one. It's desperate. So if the rule is that we're supposed to be having meaningless sex, and we're enacting all the things that enable us to keep that illusion going, even when that's not how people actually feel. Then it's against the rules for them to say, I actually quite like you. And this is gendered in that, to be disinterested in a hook-up partner, is less believable than men's, even when they are

actually quite good at this. And so men tend to assume that all women are interested in having a relationship with them, whether they are or not, which makes men even more sort of standoffish after a hookup than they otherwise would be, because they're assuming the girl just wants to get with them. And it puts women in the position of trying to prove that they aren't the kind of person who wants to get with the guy she just hooked up with. And so then she's even more standoffish than she would be otherwise. And because the rule is to care less than the other person, then that creates this downward

spiral. We've talked a little bit Lisa about how hook up culture might not be serving women very less than the other person, then that creates this downward spiral. We've talked a little bit Lisa about how hook-up culture might not be serving women very well on campus, but I also get the sense from your book that it might not be serving men very well. It's not. Men are human beings, and so are women, and they have all kinds of different needs that are not served by hookup culture.

Hookup culture serves a stereotypical idea of a man. There are some guys and some women that are like that, that really do thrive in that. But most students want a different mix of opportunities. And when you ask actually men are more likely than women by a few percentage points to say that they wish they could be in a relationship. Having meaningful relationships, having meaningful sexual

experiences that are kind, that's something that everyone wants, certainly not just women. So you're right in the book that hook up culture, demands carelessness, rewards callousness, and punishes kindness. Both men and women are free to have sex, but neither is entirely free to love. That sounds pretty depressing. Yeah. It's heartbreaking. It was one of the saddest realizations for me when I was writing the book, just how

powerfully hook-up culture has convinced students that they should be embarrassed for having feelings and feel weak for wanting connection. And I am very, very impressed by the students. They're really smart. They're very insightful. They're students. They're really smart. They're very insightful. They're earnest. They're wonderful people. But the culture is very toxic.

Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Occidental College and the author of the book, American Hookup, the new culture of sex on campus. Lisa, thanks for joining me on Hidden Brain today. It was my pleasure. This episode was produced by Renee Clark and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Maggie Penman, Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen and Chloe Connelly. Our unsung hero this week is Alan Feldancress. Alan's a regular listener to this podcast and until recently was a member of NPR's

marketing team. Alan really got what Hidden Brain is all about and his enthusiasm came through in his efforts to connect new listeners to the show. His team developed a logo for Hidden Brain, you may have seen it on social media, or on the t-shirts that are available at the NPR gift shop. Many thanks Alan and Bon Voyage. If Hidden Brain has been a part of your adventures or road trips, thank you for bringing us along. If you friends or family embarking on travels in 2017, please suggest our show as listening material

during their journeys. I'm Shankar Vidhantham, and this is NPR. you