Laura Sessions Stepp - Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both

BY ALICIA

I f theres one thing I know about adults, its that they pounce on the subject of adolescent sexuality with zeal. Teachers, doctors, psychologists, parents and talk-show hosts express both distaste and concern for my generations in-your-face, supersize-me, consumer attitude toward sex. Yet in all that weve read and heard, when have we gotten an insiders perspective?

Adults look at the sex lives of children through a lens ground in the past. This limits their ability to capture and understand the world today. In this book, Laura Stepp doesnt do this. Instead, she has taken time to observe and listen as other young women and I struggled to develop our ideas about sex and love: how both should be given and received, and what we deserve from each. She has looked through our lenses and attempted to synthesize our perspectives. Ever the journalist, she has worked hard to get the inside scoop.

Walking toward the bus stop on a mild fall day in Durham, North Carolina, I wasnt sure Id recognize her. She had interviewed me several years before for an article in The Washington Post, but our communication since had been limited. I was excited, however, by our reunion because I remembered fondly the mutual intellectual respect Id felt in our first conversations. I scanned the faces of college students milling about until I spotted the dainty figure of a woman about my mothers age.

She was neatly dressed la Ann Taylor, poised and gentle in mannerism and appearance and hardly the person youd think would request an interview about hooking up, the intentionally vague term my generation uses to represent any possible amalgam of sexual behaviors.

I was twenty and a junior at Duke University, tackling the core of my engineering major. I had come to college knowing I had a lot to figure out about myself, no small part of which involved relationships. Laura wanted to observe me over the course of the school year. She asked me to talk to her about the hookup culture: what it was, the extent to which I participated, and what I thought about it. Looking at me over the rims of her glasses, smile lines crinkling just around her eyes, she asked me to define hooking up. No, really, like, she wanted to know: Was it sex or blow jobs or what?

That first interview started our two-year collaboration, a friendship marked off in salads, coffee and sinful desserts, and measured in conversations, recorded in Lauras spidery mom-cursive sprawling across the pages of whatever miniature notebook she happened to have with her at the time. Her questions seemed simple enough at first, but as she probed, I discovered the answers werent simple. I also realized that hooking up had influenced my notions of self-worth, love, relationships and expectations of men in ways I hadnt realized.

She was a cool observer, happy to spend a night out at local pubs and clubs, asking countless questions about what was going on and why. She was not writing an expos to criticize and demean young women, but she was asking questions that were always personal, and sometimes painful and embarrassing. She left no issue unaddressed, forcing me to think about what I had accepted unquestioningly as the norm. I knew it would be a startling thing to see my personal sexual escapades in print, but I trusted Laura and her motivations.

Ive invested my time and thought in Unhooked because I believe in it. Ive grown up through these conversations, and Laura and I have learned from each other. We dont agree all the time, but theres something to be said for simply talking. Our discussions have helped me define love for myself, and in doing so Ive gained an appreciation for how important a process that is.

You dont need to agree with all the perspectives in this book, nor relate to all the stories young women have contributed. Unhooked is simply a starting point for discussion, a strong argument for the importance of talking about relationships, period.

To my peers Id like to say: Our generation is wonderfully outspoken, but its time we learned to listen as well. Who we love is a reflection of what we value, so what do we value? We would do well to examine our lives and the roles that love and sex play in them. This book will catalyze such introspection.

And to parents: One thing Ive come to appreciate post-adolescence is that youre eager to give us the very best. One critical way to do that is to engage more fully in our lives. Listen not only to Laura but to us, your children, as we transition from child to adult. Address our sexuality in a truly interactive conversation. Take a lesson from the open-minded, genuine, no-holds-barred attitude with which Laura approached the subject of Unhooked .

Our society is obsessed with sex, but no one wants to talk frankly about sex. Even now, Im writing under a pseudonym, not because Im ashamed of what Ive done, but because I need protection from the stigma society places on those who publicize the messy details of their skirmishes with sex and love. If I could sign my name to this foreword without fear of losing my job or getting slandered in the media down the road, I would. Im proud of how Ive learned from my failures as well as my successes. I suspect the other young women in this book feel the same way.