Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus by Kathleen Bogle (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

KB: By sex [do] you mean literal sexual intercourse?

Gloria: Yeah.

KB: So you’ve talked about what you’ve done . . . kissing mostly, and you’ve talked about these other people who have had sex, what about . . . there is a lot of in between.

Gloria: Yeah, I guess there is a lot of fooling around, oral sex, but mostly these people will be with people in their rooms and they are drunk. They won’t just fool around and then stop; they’ll have sex . . . not that many people . . . just fool around.

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T H E C A M P U S A S A S E X UA ll A R E N A KB: Usually they go all the way?

Gloria: Yeah. [Emphasis by interviewee]

It is possible that the students I interviewed were correct. That is, perhaps the volunteers for my study were less sexually active than the general student body. However, I think this is unlikely. Even students who were very sexually active with many different partners believed that other students were leading more promiscuous lives.

A third misperception is with regard to the number of hookup partners. The college women I interviewed, in particular, tended to believe that other students had a greater number of hookup partners than they did. This led many of the women I interviewed to think that they were less sexually active than other students on campus. For example, I asked students how many different people a typical student would hook up with in a semester if he or she was not in an exclusive relationship. Many women believed that their total number of hookup partners was less than their classmates.18

KB: If someone was single how many different people would they hook up with in a semester?

Lynn: Umm, [pauses], seven.

KB: Is that about what you think you would do?

Lynn: Umm, [pauses], when I was in high school I hooked up with a lot of people and then I kind of grew out of that stage because you kind of get tired of it, you know nothing is going to happen with it so it’s kind of like what’s the point. So . . .

I still do [hook up], but just not frequently.

KB: So . . . were you single last fall?

Lynn: Yeah.

KB: Do you remember how many people [you hooked up with]?

Lynn: Umm, two. [Sophomore, Faith University]

KB: In a typical semester, if someone did not have a boyfriend, how many different people might you or one of your friends hook up with?

Violet: It all depends on how active they are going out to different parties. I have had friends hook up with five people in one night at a party.

KB: When you say hook up are you talking about just kissing?

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Violet: Yes.

KB: So they just kiss people at the parties?

Violet: Hmm-mm.

KB: So in a semester it could be a very high number if that were the case.

Violet: Yeah.

KB: [When you hook up] is it just kissing or would you say that it’s a lot of times more than kissing?

Violet: Not for me. A friend of mine, I have a friend that will go out to parties and she will sleep with whoever she meets. And she actually had to leave school because she had slept with half of the campus. [Junior, State University]

Quantitative studies on college student populations have confirmed that students tend to overestimate their peers’ level of sexual activity and number of partners. This finding is consistent with data on college students’ misperceptions of their peers’ alcohol consumption. Specifically, students believe other students drink more often and in greater quantities than they actually do. Alcohol researchers have found that students’ misperception of their classmates’ alcohol use negatively affects their own behavior. For example, many students try to “catch up” with their (false) perception of what “everyone” is doing drinking-wise.19 Thus, in the alcohol-driven hookup culture on campus, misperceptions may play a significant role in affecting behavior.

HOW PERCEPTIONS AFFECT BEHAVIOR

Students’ perceptions of their classmates, whether accurate or not, are important because it affects their own behavior. The men and women I interviewed believed that hooking up and having sexual intercourse under a variety of circumstances was commonplace on their campus.

Furthermore, they consistently seemed to believe that other students were hooking up more frequently or, at least, other students went farther sexually during “random” hookup encounters. College students, then, judged their own behavior relative to these perceptions. If students believe other students are more sexually active than they are, it creates a kind of relativism whereby students define themselves as

“good” because they are not as “bad” as everyone else (i.e., “if others 90

T H E C A M P U S A S A S E X UA ll A R E N A are doing __________, then what I am doing is okay”). This point of view was consistent regardless of the sexual behavior of the student I was interviewing. In other words, whether the student had very little sexual experience or had sexual encounters with many different people, she or he believed that “other guys” or “other girls” had lower standards in adapting to the hookup script.

In some cases, students’ perceptions of the norms for their peers seemed to make them feel pressure to conform.20 For example, a couple of students referred to “getting rid of” their virginity or getting their first sexual encounter “over with” so that they did not have the status of being a virgin anymore. For these students, virginity was a source of embarrassment. Since they thought being a virgin was unusual, they did not want to be “known as one.”21 It seems that some students adapt their sexual behavior to fit in on campus (i.e., “if others are doing __________, then I should too”). Students’ perceptions can also give them permission to behave a certain way. For