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REVIEW. American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (2017). Review
by Deborah A. Abowitz. Source: American Journal of Sociology.

Article  in  American Journal of Sociology · March 2020

DOI: 10.1086/707117

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 American Journal of Sociology
American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. By Lisa Wade. NY: W.W.
Norton, 2017. Pp. 304. $26.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper, digital)
--Manuscript Draft--

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Full Title: American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. By Lisa Wade. NY: W.W.
Norton, 2017. Pp. 304. $26.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper, digital)

Order of Authors: Deborah A. Abowitz, PhD

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Book Review

American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. By Lisa Wade. NY: W.W. Norton,

2017. Pp. 304. $26.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper, digital).

Deborah A. Abowitz

Bucknell University

In American Hookup, Wade makes the case that hooking up constitutes a campus culture

today, not merely a sexual script for one particular mode of sexual activity or interaction among

college students. Wade’s assessment of it is chilling. “Hookup culture is an occupying force,

coercive and omnipresent … students often feel dreary, confused, helpless. Many behave in ways

they don’t like, hurt other people unwillingly, and consent to sexual activity they don’t desire”

(p.19).

Wade’s findings about key aspects of this culture, however, are not surprising in

themselves, given prior research. For example, women’s ambivalence about hookups, feeling

both liberated and disappointed, originally identified by Glenn and Marquardt (Hooking Up,

Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right [Institute for American Values, 2001]), is a recurring

theme in the research literature and in popular accounts (Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How

Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both [Riverhead Books, 2007]). Lynn

Phillips connected this individual ambivalence about hookups to pervasive cultural ambivalence

about women’s sexuality itself, both shaping college women’s responses to hookups that “go

badly” and to unwanted sex and sexual assault (Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s

Reflections on Sexuality and Domination [NYU Press, 2000]). These are risks that increase with

alcohol, yet research indicates hookups rarely occur sober. Drinking fuels the campus party
scene, with both men and women relying on this “social lubricant” (Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex,

Dating, and Relationships on Campus [NYU Press, 2007]), also a finding in the multi-campus

Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS). These data also show a persistent sexual double

standard and interactional inequalities in hookups, including significantly lower levels of sexual

satisfaction for women (Armstrong, England, and Fogarty, “Accounting for women's orgasm and

sexual enjoyment in college hookups and relationships,” American Sociological Review 77

[2012]). Finally, believing that “nobody dates,” we know that students not participating in

hookups (by choice or default) perceive limited social options on campuses today (Freitas, The

End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and

Confused about Intimacy [Basic Books, 2013]).

So what is new about American Hookup? It is the depiction of how hooking up behaviors

have coalesced into a dominant (and often oppressive) campus culture. Wade frames a

comprehensive cultural narrative, making clear the connections between her work and earlier

research. But her examination of hookup culture, both real and imagined, goes further, digs

deeper. Synthesizing previous hookup research and tropes with new data, this book yields a more

complete account of the sex lives of college students today.

Wade’s investigation of hookup culture uses multiple sources, including student journals,

informal interviews and focus groups, public data from the OCSLS, and student newspapers and

other media sources. The journals provide a unique and much-needed longitudinal student

perspective. Submitted as part of two courses, these journals reflect students’ “firsthand

accounts” about their own or others’ experiences with “sex and romance on campus” (p. 20),

enabling Wade’s deep dive into the lived reality of hookup culture. Furthermore, these
narratives, and Wade’s follow-up interviews with some of these writers, show how students’

attitudes toward hookup culture change and evolve over time. Compared to cross-sectional

surveys, one-off interviews and focus groups, this longitudinal perspective, however modest, is

value-added. Even if entries in the journals exaggerate or elide some details, as they likely do,

they still grant agency to student voices in constructing the cultural meaning of the campus

interactions shared in their pages. The convenience sample of roughly 100 journals also provides

a degree of intersectionality often absent in hookup research. Her journal writers comprise a

relatively diverse sample, including a substantial number of students typically marginalized by

hookup culture (students of color, working class and first-generation college students, and

students identifying as sexual minorities). Their narratives are a missing piece of the larger story,

illustrating how the campus climate created by hookup culture also shapes the lives of students

who are not white, not affluent or middle class, and/or not straight.

Wade weaves her sources together into a highly accessible text. After her “Introduction:

The New Culture of Sex,” she moves through 10 chapters, painting a picture of sex on campus

that informs both the naïve and the well-read. She explains where hookup culture came from and

how it works, helping us distinguish among participants (“enthusiasts” and “dabblers”) and non-

participants (“abstainers”). Her third chapter, on “Sex in Drunkworld,” takes on the pivotal role

of alcohol, while the seventh chapter on “Unequal Pleasures” illuminates how hookup culture

reinforces male sexual privilege (and yes, that orgasm gap). The penultimate ninth chapter on

sexual assault, “Flirting with Danger,” addresses how hookup culture “seduces too many

students into thinking that in certain situations sexual aggression is allowed” (p.225). Reading

American Hookup helps us understand how college students’ age-old search for belonging,

identity, and yes, sexual satisfaction, takes shape on many campuses today. However
 dysfunctional this culture is for many, hookups are now normative; they are more than just one

individual “sex-positive” choice (to quote my students).

The dissatisfaction that may linger at the end of this book arises not from the analyses but

from the absence of an operational agenda to address the problems so clearly laid out. In this

regard, however, Wade fails no more than the rest of us. Changing culture is hard. Hookup

culture did not arrive fully formed, and determining how to curb its worst excesses and dangers,

let alone disentangle it, will be hard. Wade cautions us in the end that the “corrosive elements of

hookup culture are in all of our lives: in our workplaces, in our politics and the media, within our

families and friendships, and yes, in bars and bedrooms” (p.247). American Hookup explains

much about this simultaneously liberating and oppressive sexual climate and why we need that

agenda for change.

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