It's a new world, but are women that different now?
EVERY generation has to endure the finger-wagging of the previous one. The warnings today's baby boomer parents are sounding for their children inevitably circle back to the unfinished business of their own youth. This is especially true of mothers and daughters, with pep talks and cautionary tales shadowed by feminism's legacy.
Young women will prove the old-school feminists right and have a successful career, a happy marriage and kids to boot. Or, if Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp's forecast proves accurate, they'll end up lonely, haunted by the "good" guys they traded for promiscuity and ambition. That is, unless they sober up, marry young(er) and maybe even practice religion. This is the essential wisdom that Stepp offers in "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both."
"If there is a mantra that young women
Those values are what concern Stepp. "Hooking up" can mean having sex or just kissing but it is rarely an act of emotional intimacy or commitment for young women. And this is at the crux of Stepp's concern: "[W]ho, I wondered, was telling them that they were worth taking more care with -- that they deserved to take care with themselves and insist that boys take care with them, too?"
Stepp interviewed dozens of young women, then focused on nine moderately affluent ones from high schools in the Washington, D.C., area as well as Duke and George Washington universities. These young women are smart, high achievers, which, it is presumed, make their promiscuous behavior all the more disturbing. Stepp followed them to class and bars, noting as they danced on tables and made out in dark corners. And her subjects gamely shared their diary entries, e-mails and instant-message exchanges, their bad sex and bad behavior.
Names were changed, freeing subjects to speak with breathtaking, and, at times, off-putting, candor. A 15-year-old, with her mother by her side, explained that she and her friends perform oral sex on the boys in their class -- and then decide if they like them. College women, meanwhile, talked of choosing drunken one-night stands over boyfriends and often referenced their conquests with rage-filled disdain. It's sometimes compelling and certainly voyeuristic, but Stepp gives the melodramas too much space and perhaps too much gravity, making the book read like an MTV reality show.
