Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus by Kathleen Bogle (e book reader android txt) 📗

you go” [and hands the card to me]. So, [Mike’s friends] had the card made for him, it was a V-card, a virgin card, and whatever girl he first has sex with, he’s got to give her the V-card and she has to keep it. And I’m like: “Oh, my God, you told these guys [that you’re a virgin]?” . . . He’s very confident, he doesn’t care, he laughs about it. So, I look at him and I’m like: “So, you’re not a deal closer, huh?” And he’s like: “Nope.” And that’s his problem . . . a lot of girls like him, they flirt with him, but he can’t close the deal.

Despite perceptions, virginity is not a rarity. A national study on college women, conducted in 2001, found a 39 percent virginity rate. This study also found that the virginity rate was still 31 percent among college women in their senior year.14 Other national data on both college men and women indicates that the virginity rate is approximately 25 percent.15 Regardless of the precise number, there are more virgins on campus than most students believe.

The way students I spoke with viewed virginity (and the loss of it) was consistent with sociologist Laura Carpenter’s findings on the meanings men and women assign to virginity loss. Specifically, in her book Virginity Lost, Carpenter found that most young people think of the loss of one’s virginity as giving “a gift,” something to be cherished or treasured and “given away” with great care; as “a stigma,” as something to be lost quickly and even as secretly as possible; or as a “rite of passage,” or something that one must relinquish in the process of becoming an adult.16

A second misperception is that “everybody’s doing it.” Students tend to overestimate the number of hookup encounters that involve sexual intercourse. In a representative study of college undergraduates at a large northeastern university, 78 percent of the students had hooked up at least once. However, among the students that had engaged in a hookup, only 38 percent ever had a hookup that culminated in sexual intercourse, while 61 percent had engaged in hooking up without such an encounter ever culminating in sexual intercourse.17

The ambiguous nature of the term “hooking up” often seemed to generate confusion over precisely what other students are doing sexually. Most students agreed that hooking up could be anything from kissing to having sexual intercourse, but, when pressed, some students 86

T H E C A M P U S A S A S E X UA ll A R E N A seemed to favor the idea that when most students hook up it likely involves sexual intercourse. Larry and Kevin both illustrated the confusion the term “hooking up” generates.

KB: You mentioned hooking up earlier, how would you define hooking up?

Larry: Hooking up, umm [pauses] probably spending the night at someone’s place, whether there’s sex or not doesn’t really matter. Probably spending the night at someone’s place, like obviously kissing, something physical, things going on, it doesn’t so much have to be sex.

KB: Could it be [sex]?

Larry: Could it be, sure, absolutely.

KB: Have you ever hooked up where it was sex?

Larry: Yeah, sure.

KB: Is one more likely than the other? Is it likely to not be sex? Is it likely to be kissing and sleeping in the same bed? What is most likely to happen?

Larry: Probably it would be sex, I would think. It’s kind of a random short-term thing, umm if the person is getting to know you, you may be just hooking up with them, like kissing and like just some physical contact and then it evolves into sex later on [in a subsequent hookup].

KB: So, you hook up with the same person repeatedly and eventually it [leads to sexual intercourse]?

Larry: Sure. [Emphasis added] [Senior, Faith University]

KB: [Do you] have a sense of whether most people are having sex or most people are hooking up [without actually having intercourse].

Kevin: Mostly sex.

KB: Mostly sex?

Kevin: Yeah.

KB: Okay. Even on the first encounter?

Kevin: Yeah. [Senior, Faith University]

Later in the interview, Kevin described a number of hookup situations that did not seem to include intercourse. Therefore, I asked him to clarify whether a hookup generally culminated in sexual intercourse.

T H E C A M P U S A S A S E X UA ll A R E N A 87

KB: You’ve been using the term “hooking up” a lot but you had said earlier that you thought sex was more common than [just]

hooking up [without actually having sexual intercourse].

Kevin: Did I? Are you sure?

KB: Yeah.

Kevin: Usually people are having sex. I will still stick with that.

The ambiguous nature of the term is undoubtedly part of its appeal. Individuals are able to share with others that they did something sexual without necessarily specifying what happened. The problem is that this ambiguity leads to confusion over what other students are doing sexually. Some students seemed to favor the idea that hooking up must mean sexual intercourse in the majority of cases. However, very few students indicated that when they hooked up they always had sexual intercourse. It was always other students who, they believed, actually had intercourse every time they hooked up. Gloria, a freshman at State University, illustrates the idea that it is other students who “go farther” sexually during a hookup encounter.

Gloria: You kiss them [a guy at a party] and then they’ll be like:

“Come back with me to my place, sleep at my place.” And you’ll either say yes or no.

KB: Do you ever have guys come back to your room?

Gloria: No. Maybe once. I’m really good with that, I don’t know, just my morals. I had one guy come over but it wasn’t even for me, he had a girlfriend, he just stayed over. But I have friends and they have guys sleep over all the time. Sometimes they’ll wake up and say: “What did I do?” and sometimes it’s nothing . . . most girls, granted they’ll have sex with them