Petting below the waist! Woo! Woo!
• Gender Studies
Burning headlines from the forefront of social research! Young men and women in college are having sex without romantic commitment. Whenever I encounter this species of startling revelation I remember the remark of one of my favorite 1920s writers, James Branch Cabell, that people always think that America's youth have just discovered sex for the first time. He was referring to his own sexually happy youth at the close of the 19th century.
Mostly this testifies to two things: the American public's will to remain naοve about human sexuality - regardless of what they did in their own younger days. And the power of a neologism: "hooking up." In how many early 60s sex comedies did Rock Hudson try to "hook up."
Worse than obsession with transitory slang is the weird cloying phrase. If you are in college and people there talk about petting below the waist why haven't you transferred to another school?
In 2000 Paul published what colleagues credit as the first academic article that explored college hookups in depth. Her survey of 555 undergrads found that 78 percent of students had hooked up, that they usually did so after consuming alcohol and that the average student had accumulated 10.8 hookup partners during college. Studies on other campuses produced similar numbers. Researchers at James Madison University found that 77.7 percent of women and 84.2 percent of men had hooked up, a process they said routinely involving "petting below the waist, oral sex or intercourse."
60%! Don't you feel sorry for the 40% who aren't getting any?
At the University of Michigan, more than 60 percent of students reported hooking up; they said that a typical hookup more often included "genital touching" than "a meaningful conversation."
I guess genital touching sounds more scientific than petting below the waist. Since the college years are often burdened with turgid attempts at meaningful talk that is often horrifyingly meaningless (one of the reasons I fled college after the first quarter) their time is certainly better spent getting down to some happy, er, petting than trite and ponderous dialogues. You can get those on PBS anyway.
Much of this is based on focus groups. Having long ago worked in market research I know how reliable they are. The hunger for appropriate respondents often leads to a little cheating. The desire to get paid your fee for showing up often leads to a little cheating.
It always bears repeating: any researcher who can get their name in the news will always get more funding and plenty of research is conducted with an eye toward media publicity.
Comments
Posted by: Precision Blogger | September 28, 2004 10:46 AM
Posted by: Richard | September 28, 2004 10:56 AM