It all started the day an undergraduate approached Paula England about writing a paper. “This guy came into my office and said, ‘I want to do an honors thesis about why students at Northwestern don’t date,’ ” the sociologist recalls. “And I said, ‘They don’t?’”
In her next class, England asked students questions about their dating habits. At first, amused looks rippled through the room. Then a student raised his hand and asked, “Have you ever heard of a hook-up?”
“I said, ‘No—I thought it meant something like you and me having lunch.’ So my street cred fell to negative something, and I realized I was completely out of it.”
England, who studies families, households, divorce and gender inequality, has been teaching courses about gender for years—including at Penn, Northwestern and at Stanford since 2002. She was about to learn that the informal “date” has practically died on campuses nationwide. That there’s a good bit of casual sex. That there’s a big orgasm disparity between men and women. That the double standard has not changed much in 40 years.
“When I compare schools, it looks to me like the situation is a little more tame at Stanford,” England says about results of surveys she has conducted at seven institutions. “There are more kids who aren’t sexually active at Stanford, compared to the state schools in the survey, and there are fewer reports of sexual coercion. But the basic story is a common story across the nation.”
England has been analyzing responses from more than 8,000 undergraduates nationwide who have taken an online survey that can be completed in 15 minutes in the privacy of a dorm room. She also has studied lengthy answers provided by face-to-face interviews her own students have conducted.
“Hooking Up and Forming Romantic Relationships on Today’s College Campuses” is one chapter in the forthcoming The Gendered Society Reader (Oxford University Press). Compiled by England and graduate students Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer and Alison C.K. Fogarty, the study sets new findings in the context of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, and the more recent gender revolution. “In the aftermath of these two ‘revolutions,’ what do dating, sexuality and relationships look like on today’s college campuses?” the researchers ask.
One answer: the hook-up has replaced the casual date. Defined as a situation in which two students, who may or may not know each other, meet at an event and end up “doing something sexual,” it “carries no expectation that either party has an interest in moving toward a relationship.” By their senior year, a little more than 20 percent of Stanford students had never been involved in a hook-up. One-quarter had hooked up at least once but no more than four times. About 20 percent had had five to 10 hook-ups, and more than one-third had hooked up more than 10 times. These hook-ups “often” happened after “a good bit of drinking.”
In some—but not the majority—of cases, England notes, the sexual behavior was intercourse. “If you ask, ‘What percent of hook-ups involve intercourse?’ at Stanford it’s about 25 percent, and for all schools, it’s more like 35 to 40 percent.”
England also has examined the answers to “attitude” questions provided by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, “and the basic story is that they’re a little more liberal on everything, which is ‘duh.’” This year she will be doing qualitative interviews specifically targeting LGBT seniors, “to get a life history of the whole thing.”
England argues that college students’ “mainstream adoption” of hook-ups (which also can be defined by kissing, nongenital touching, stimulating the genitals by hand and oral sex), “is clearly a product of the increased permissiveness that came with the sexual revolution.” And that intrigues her.
“Why do things get more permissive? One factor people often don’t think about is trends in average age of marriage.” England says undergraduates routinely tell her they want to get married at 28, 29 or 30, and that in many cases they’re putting off marriage until after professional or graduate school. Given those expectations, she thinks it’s far less likely that current Stanford students will end up marrying classmates—as previous generations of alums did. “When you think you’re going to pick your partner when you’re 28 or 30, college is not courtship anymore.”
At the same time, England says, “People still have the same bodies they did 5,000 years ago.” So what’s the appropriate configuration of a relationship and of sexual behavior for people who don’t think they’ll be picking their ultimate partner for another decade? “I think that’s what they’re working out.”
England also documented today’s “double standard.” Decades ago, she notes, there was an expectation of virginity before marriage for women, but not for men. Today, the difference is in attitudes toward hook-ups. Women are held to a stricter standard, England says, “but it is fairly vague exactly what that standard is.”
