Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus by Kathleen A. Bogle Read Free Book Online

participated in hooking up, albeit to varying degrees.
    DEFINING HOOKING UP
    Some students, like Tony, feel that “hooking up” generally refers to
    “having sex”; however, many others indicated that when they say
    “hooking up” they are referring to something less than intercourse. To some it means “just kissing” or “making out.” Others said hooking up involves “fooling around” beyond kissing, which includes sexual touching on or underneath clothing. Still others suggested that hooking up means “everything but” intercourse, which translated to include kissing, sexual touching, and oral sex. Most students acknowledged that different people use the term differently. In fact, many students were already familiar with the term “hooking up” from high school.3
    Their previous exposure to hooking up added to the confusion because the definition they used in high school did not always match their college classmates’ use of the term. Thus, you cannot be sure precisely what someone means when he or she reports having “hooked up” unless you ask a follow-up question to see how much sexual activity took place. Nevertheless, some students feel they know their close friends well enough to know what they mean when they say it (i.e., their group has a shared meaning of the term). This is the case with Faith University senior, Trent.

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    T H E H O O K U P
    KB : Define hooking up.
    Trent : Kissing.
    KB : So, if someone did more than kissing then it’s not hooking up?
    Trent : It is, but I don’t know. Yeah, like hooking up in one sense is like you hook up with a girl and if you’re hooking up with someone and it happens a few times, then I guess whatever happens, happens.
    KB : Could hooking up mean sex?
    Trent : Nah.
    KB : So, it’s different than sex?
    Trent : Yeah.
    In another conversation, Kyle, a senior at State University, offered the following:
    KB : How would you define hooking up?
    Kyle : Just kissing and maybe a little groping.
    KB : Hooking up isn’t sex?
    Kyle : No. I know a lot of other people define it differently.
    KB : So some people say it and it might mean sex?
    Kyle : Yeah. None of my friends would. But I have heard it used that way.
    KB : So if someone says they hooked up you don’t know what they mean, you just know it is something sexual?
    Kyle : Yeah. It involves that. But not sex, everything but sex.
    KB : Oral sex could be hooking up?
    Kyle : Yeah.
    Lisa, a sophomore at State University, had this to say: KB : Can you define hooking up?
    Lisa : I don’t know, anything from kissing to having sex.
    KB : So, it could mean intercourse, it could mean to kiss someone?
    Lisa : Well, usually if it’s a good friend and we’re talking about it, they’ll tell me if they had sex, but if they say “hooking up” it could mean anything from, in my opinion, kissing to having sex.

    T H E H O O K U P
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    Clearly, “hooking up” does not have a precise meaning; it can mean kissing, sexual intercourse, or any form of sexual interaction generally seen as falling in between those two extremes.
    The ambiguous nature of the term should not be surprising. During the well-publicized scandal of 1997 between former president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the public debated what it means to say
    “have sex” or “have sexual relations” after the president emphatically declaimed, “I did not have sex with that woman,” only to have DNA tests confirm the presence of semen on her clothing. Still, Clinton and his supporters argued that his statement was truthful if one defines sex only as sexual intercourse. However, much of the American public scoffed at this narrow definition, favoring a broader definition of sex, which would encompass sexual touching and oral sex. What was interesting about this debate was how views on the subject broke down along generational lines. Researchers found that members of the younger generation were more likely to agree with Clinton’s contention that oral sex