The hitch with hookups

Friend with benefits. Sex buddy. A booty call.

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Call it whatever you want, but it boils down to no-strings-attached sex, and it's becoming more widespread on college campuses, said Laura Sessions Stepp, author of the recently released "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both."

There is no dating. There's the 1 a.m. text message.

Girlfriend, boyfriend? It may never reach that level.

And that word love? It only complicates things.

There's just one hitch -- not everyone is happy about it.

"I had four girls come up to me at a high school and ask, 'How do we bring back dating?'" said Stepp, whose book was released earlier this year. "I said to them, 'Ask a guy out on a date and tell him it's not a hookup.'"

But it's not that easy when hooking up is seen as an entree into a relationship, said Stepp, a Washington Post reporter who followed nine high school and college students over the course of two years. She said she found that for many young women, not hooking up meant losing out.

HOOKING UP

Hooking up is not a new thing. And yes, it was happening before "Sex and the City."

Flappers had petting parties in the 1920s. The sexual revolution was the 1960s.

"But still back then, more young women were dating than having free sex," said Stepp. "In fact, back then people still had some sort of dating relationship. You used the term boyfriend and girlfriend."

The whole traditional dating ritual -- a man asking a woman out to dinner and a movie -- began to decline in the late 1960s, said Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist. In its place came group dating.

She said it's hard to pinpoint an exact moment when hooking up became mainstream, but it evolved over time for a number of reasons: the women's movement, more women going to college and living on campus, the dawn of "the pill."

"Women thought what they wanted was to have all that men had," said Gilda Carle, a television talk show therapist and author of "How to Have the Man You Want By Betting on Yourself."

"They thought men had all the sex they wanted. So they went out and started pursuing sex the way men did."

NOT THAT SERIOUS

But Stepp said women have a harder time having sex with no emotional attachment. And there's a scientific reason, she said: When a woman has sex, she receives a jolt of oxytocin, a chemical that makes her want to be held and caressed. The man gets a jolt of testosterone, which inhibits oxytocin.

Stepp acknowledges that there are some women who have no problem hooking up, which she defines as anything from kissing to intercourse. But she said she found most women were checking their cell phones after a hookup, getting angry if he didn't call or found someone else.

"Young women more than young men suffer depression when a relationship ends," said Stepp. "The shorter the relationship, the more likely they are to experience depression. So girls who hook up as a pattern are running the risk of depression because what happens is you hook up, it's ending, you tell yourself you're fine with it, but you're not."

Andrea Lavinthal, co-author of "The Hookup Handbook," said there's no proof that women can't handle casual sex.

"If you do like someone and want to be in a relationship and they are still in the mode of, 'Let's keep it casual,' that can be tricky," she said. "I think anyone who goes into hooking up learns that the hard way. But that's like any situation."

HOOKUP vs. FEMINISM

Stepp has come under fire from some women who feel the message is anti-feminist: Women cannot be as sexually free as men.

But Stepp responds by saying feminism is about choice. The problem is young women are not necessarily choosing to have hookups; they are feeling pressure to do it.

"I have heard from other women who say, 'Guys just kind of expect this,'" she said. "I hear from young women that their girlfriends who are hooking up think of them as weak because they have a boyfriend."

In a way, it's hooking up -- not warnings about sexual freedom -- that hurts the feminist movement, said Carolyn Kaufman, a psychology professor at Columbus State Community College.

"If you have all these young women who are having sex with no strings attached, how does that not serve men?" she asks. "They can have sex with whomever they want -- no strings attached. The feminist movement was about making choices that were for you -- not for male society."

RELATIONSHIPS

Bogle, whose own book about hooking up is coming out this fall, said she found most young women want to be in a committed relationship. And once college is over, there is a switch to more traditional dating.

"In terms of whether all that hooking up hurts women, that's an empirical question that has to be answered," said Bogle. "Clearly the people Laura Stepp talked to had a lot of emotional ramifications."

Lavinthal maintains that hooking up does not ruin women.

For her book, she interviewed four women who had turned a hookup into a relationship. Two are now getting married.

"At the end of the day, it's really fun," she said. "As long as you are safe and emotionally healthy, it's just experiences. It's stories to make brunch with your girlfriends much more interesting."