![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In chapters 4 and 5 Wade discusses two different orientations to the hookup culture: those who opt out and those who opt in. I left this chapter with questions about whether this reading of the role of fun in college overestimates the importance of culture and downplays the structural realities that drive students to go to college and whether the narrative emphasizing fun speaks primarily to young, white, middle-class students or is inclusive of students of a wider set of backgrounds. Fun isn’t just about sex, though in the next chapter, Wade continues to pull on the thread of fun, discussing how fun is essential to the marketing of the college experience. ![]() From there, Wade moves to offer some historical context for “how sex became fun.” Tracing ideas about sex through the twentieth century, including the feminist movement and sexual revolution, Wade interestingly argues that “fun” has become linked to “freedom,” making sex a way for young people to assert and confirm their liberation. In the first chapter, Wade draws on her students’ stories to offer the uninitiated a richly descriptive how-to guide for hooking up, taking readers inside the experiences of pregaming, grinding, hooking up, and post-hookup impression management around which so much of the social and party lives of undergraduates revolve. For the bulk of the book, however, traditional-aged students on four-year residential campuses are treated as the normal college student, a framing that some might find out of step with changing demographics of students in higher education. By contrast, the two commuter campuses Wade visited were less thoroughly in the grip of the hookup culture. It is worth noting that although Wade’s argument that the hookup culture is pervasive is compelling, her framing of who it affects is really limited to traditional-aged students on residential college campuses that function as total institutions-that is to say, enclosed spaces in which students’ lives are formally directed and where students live and work isolated from the broader society. Instead, the problem is the hookup culture, a set of shared understandings and norms about whether and how to hook up that pervades most American college campuses. In Wade’s view, however, the problem is not actually hookups themselves, as the average student simply isn’t engaging in anything close to the nonstop whirlwind of sexual activity that is often imagined to be the norm on college campuses. Wade sets the scene by summarizing some of the discussion of sex on campus that has occurred in the popular and academic presses in recent years, noting that “the idea that college students are having a lot of sex is certainly an enthralling myth” (p. The result is a compelling narrative that is at times heartbreaking and at other times nothing short of hilarious. College students, op-ed columnists, and members of the general public have written essays alternately celebrating, condemning, and lamenting the rise of a supposedly carefree and attachment-light mode of sexual interaction that has come to be known in popular discourse as the “hookup culture.” Wade joins this ongoing discussion and brings to it a wealth of data, a keen eye and intellect, and an obvious respect and fondness for the students with whose stories she has been entrusted. In American Hookup, sociologist Lisa Wade explores a topic on which many opine but on which the research literature is less often invoked: the sex lives of undergraduate students. ![]()
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