Sex on college campuses isn’t any more prevalent than it was 25 years ago, despite what’s often termed a “hookup culture” that suggests otherwise, says research presented today comparing current-day college students with those of the past.
“Sexual behavior among contemporary college students has not changed greatly over the past 2½ decades,” says a study from the University of Portland in Oregon.
“We’re questioning some of the popular interpretations of the hookup culture that college is a sexual playground,” says lead author Martin Monto. “We wanted to question the assumption that college has become a place with lots of no-strings-attached sex. The evidence suggests it hasn’t.”
The researchers analyzed nationally representative data from the General Social Survey of 1,829 high school graduates ages 18-25 who had completed at least one year of college. They compared responses from 1988-1996 with those from 2002-2010 – when casual sex, “friends with benefits” and no-strings relationships became part of the lexicon. Most respondents were ages 21-25.
Rather than a sexual explosion, the study says, young adults “do not report more total sexual partners or more partners during the last year than respondents from the previous era. In fact, respondents from the hookup era report having sex slightly less frequently.” The term “hookup” can refer to a wide range of behaviors and is often vague, ranging from kissing to oral sex to sexual intercourse.
“The term ‘hooking up’ is very provocative and very ambiguous,” Monto says. “So when researchers ask students about hooking up, students often could be referring to anything from sexual intercourse to kissing.
But when the term ‘hooking up’ is used in the popular media, it is often interpreted as sex. That has led to an assumption that college students’ sexual behavior has changed dramatically.”
© 2013 USA TODAY. All rights reserved.
