Are You Hooked Up?

Driving home from Oklahoma City tonight, I did the usual and turned on NPR. The interview was a topic I had considered writing about, but had postponed, namely, teen sex. The commentator was interviewing Laura Sessions Stepp who has written a column about adolescence for the Washington Post for decades now. She also has a new book called Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (released February 15th).

The interviewer began with stats about lower teen pregnancy rates, which had also just been published in an article in the Scout, Muskogee High School's student newspaper. Statistics on teen sex also seem to report lower incidences, but then, this is the post Bill/Monica generation that has a different definition of just what sex is, which makes it a little harder to get a real read on teen sexual behavior.

Stepp's book, however, follows girls aged 15 through college age for a year (although she says middle schoolers are getting hooked up, too), keeping track of how many times the girls "hooked up." Hooking up entails meeting someone without commitment for anything from just kissing to the real thing. What she found is that today's young women are not looking for the same relationship commitment as in by-gone days. They want the same freedom that a man has in respect to using someone for consensual pleasure and then tossing them (pl. intentionally used).

Only Stepp asserts that this is damaging to young women's self image. She feels they are not learning to form relationships from these experiences, and so are leading a flat, emotionless "unhooked" existence, rather than a passionate, joyful one. It's not so much the question of having sex that presents a problem for Stepp, as the lack of intimacy and joy that should result from the encounter. She claims that by delaying relationship commitment, today's young people aren't learning how to form solid relationships and are actually creating suspicion in the relationships they do have.

While it seems like I have observed this same behavior in some of the young people I know, Stepp has been tagged as hyper critical by the younger generation, who claim she doesn't understand them. They have an alternate scenario in which, rather than getting divorced later, they will wait until they find the right person, I guess from all this hooking up. Hey, it sounds good - young people have many things stored in their short term memories - why not add relationships, too? Add alot of alcohol, which Stepp claims is exacerbating this problem, and you can just forget it all.

Despite all the women's lib, one young man she interviewed claimed that hooking up just gave the guys more leeway to be bigger jerks. So, what did women really get for all their freedom? According to Stepp, not much. Girls still reported being just as disappointed when a guy did not call her the next day or even ask for her phone number as girls would have been back in the "free love" days. Brain chemicals at work again - during sex oxytocin is released which forms an emotional bond between partners (the chemical is also released by lactating mothers to form bonds with their babies). The more intense the experience, the more oxytocin is released. The next great question may be how to unhook ourselves, especially our emotional selves, from nature.

We can conquer certain parts of nature, though. One way, at least physically, is the new HPV inoculation, which can at least free girls from the threat of cervical cancer. Texas is requiring it as an additional vaccination. I was wondering what you all thought about that. Would you get the vaccine for your daughter voluntarily, or do you think it should be required by law? Let me know what you think and hook me up with some answers to these perplexing problems.