It also means that the book grapples honestly with both the attractions and problems of hookup culture and avoids some of the ideological blinders that have led others to argue that hook-up culture is necessary for women’s liberation. The apparent depth of her relationships with students, and the candor and power of the students’ own reflections and observations makes American Hookup an engrossing read. To support that thesis, Wade draws from her qualitative research with her own students at a secular school in the American Southwest and a religious one in the South, as well as from meetings and focus groups with students and staff on campuses across the country. It is this culture that Wade sees as the principle “cause of students’ unhappiness.” It’s possible to not hook up at all, yet still feel pushed and prodded by the campus sexual culture. In what I think is an important distinction, Wade distinguishes actual hooking up with the pervasive hookup culture. (Although students tend to hook up most frequently during freshmen year.) Furthermore, almost a third of students will never hook up during their time in college. In other words, on average, students hook up once a semester, not once a weekend. In reality, the average graduating senior reports hooking up eight times over the course of four years. Students regularly overestimate the extent to which their peers are participating in hookup culture. Yet, as Wade points out, it’s important to remember what this does not mean. Wade notes that students are less happy and healthy than they were even just 10 or 20 years ago, and surmises that “the sexual environment on college campuses is part of why.” As Wade explains when describing a difference between her research findings and those in Katherine Bogle’s 2008 book, Hooking Up, “It may be that dating culture isn’t as strong as it was almost a decade ago. As Wade reports, one-third of students say that their intimate relationships have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle.” One in four female respondents to the Online College Social Life Survey reported being victimized in some way, some more than once. Since then, it’s possible that hookup culture has become more dominant and devious. As a student at a small evangelical Christian college, I did not then find myself in the “fog” of hookup culture that sociologist Lisa Wade describes in her new book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus-but I remember being flabbergasted by what my peers at other colleges were dealing with. I first thought seriously about hookup culture as a college student, when I read Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt’s 2001 report, Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping For Mr.
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