Unhooked—and paying for it?

Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp’s recent book Unhooked is a rich sociological vineyard. It revisits a theme flagged by Tom Wolfe in his 2004 novel I am Charlotte Simmons. Both are studies of new sexual norms that have emerged on college campuses in which millions of students have sexual relations with one another while avoiding social relationships. They do not “waste” time on dating, seeking to avoid both the “costs” of developing relationships and the pangs of loss when relationships sour and then break-up. Instead, students engage in sexual relations with partners who are, as the catch-phrase puts it, “friends with benefits”; only the focus is on the (sexual) benefits, not on friendship.  The energy conserved by avoiding relationships, we are told, is then invested by students in their careers.  Some feminists celebrate this development, arguing that all that has changed is that women now do what men long did: f— and hurry along.

To an old sociologist like myself, especially one with my communitarian inclinations, these developments raise many questions. One cannot but note that this is not the first time people tried to separate sexual encounters from social relationships. During the early days of the Soviet revolution, Communists promoted sexual liberation and suggested that engaging in sex should be like playing chess.  You play, you mate, and you move on. Soon, however, the Soviets retreated from this position. In my student days at Berkeley, at the height of the sexual liberation movements (or, at least, what we thought was the height), various experiments were made with group “marriages”, in which several students lived together, rotating who slept with whom on a weekly basis. For the most part, these experiments did not last long, as participants became attached to one another and refused to rotate; i.e. people had a hard time separating their sexual and social relations.

Which brings us to the question: are students these days content with their hookups? I am not talking about casual sex here and there, but rather, about a systematic avoidance of lasting and meaningful relationships; about the nature of a lifestyle consisting of random sex, study, and sports, but no intimate affect-laden and expansive relationships. This question has long commanded the interest of social science. Once upon a time we all lived in traditional villages, in which social norms were very strong, relationships very binding, and where anyone who engaged in untraditional behavior—including premarital sex, extra-marital affairs, or homosexual sex—was ostracized. Modernization, with mass movement into cities, provided a great measure of liberation from all these norms and bonds, but also left people feeling isolated, lost, without a moral compass—and lacking friends. Hence, the rise of various modern forms of social relationships and commitments which are neither as tight and oppressive as villages were, nor as loose or lacking as living in a barracks (as many early industrial workers were required to do) or in a central city high-rise building. People, sociologists long have demonstrated, are social animals; they need relationships to flourish.

All this leads one to ask whether today’s students are a new breed. Can they do without relationships? In her book, Unhooked, Laura Sessions Stepp addresses this question, citing both numerous studies as well as personal interviews. The answer is far from unanimous. Many students, especially women (albeit not all of them), are profoundly uneasy about hooking up. They fall in love, though they are not supposed to; they yearn for more than just a ‘roll in the hay’ (or whatever is the current equivalent). At the same time, as one of them put it, they have no time for a ‘we’. They begrudge the energy it takes to develop and maintain a relationship.

Above all, we do not know (and we ought to) what the consequences are of the unhooked lifestyle for post-college life. Is college merely a passing phase in which people experiment in relation-less sexual contacts, or are these habits carried into post-college life? Are colleges supposed to serve, among other things, as dry runs for the life to follow? If relationships in college are frowned upon and often avoided, what does this spell for the lives of graduates? Does an unhooked college life bespeak of an unhooked society?

True, sociology stresses that one cannot generalize; that people differ. Obviously, not all students merely hookup, and quite a few graduates do have close intimate relationships and even marry. Still the questions stands: what is the trend? Where are more and more students and graduates headed? And what kind of society are we to expect to live in?