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Sexual subjects: hooking up in the age of postfeminism

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SEXUAL SUBJECTS:
HOOKING UP IN THE AGE OF POSTFEMINISM

by

Jess Butler

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Jess Butler

ii
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to my writing group: Hyeyoung Kwon, Sean
McCarron, and Michela Musto. I could not have done this without you.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a dissertation is a long and often isolating process. It involves many
hours spent quarantined in front of a computer screen, ruminating on
evidence and research questions, trying to find the right words to put on the
page. Yet dissertations are not written alone. They are produced through
collaboration with advisors and colleagues and with the support of family and
friends. I am lucky to have in my corner an amazing and insightful group of
folks that helped—indeed, at times, carried—me through this journey.
I owe perhaps the biggest thanks to Hyeyoung Kwon, Sean McCarron,
and Michela Musto. In addition to being brilliant scholars, thinkers, and
writers, over the course of our work together they have become some of my
dearest friends.
Many other graduate students helped bring this project to fruition, and
I would not have survived graduate school without them. Roxanne Stys is a
courageous and loyal friend who taught me the soul-sustaining value of good
coffee and good conversation. Brad Nabors is my partner in critique, a wealth
of knowledge, and a real dick. Brady Potts reminds me that a hug, a stiff
drink, and a great record can cure almost all ailments. Jazmin Muro, Demetri
Psihopaidas, Max Greenberg, Jeff Sacha, Kushan Dasgupta, Edson
Rodriguez, Nathaniel Burke, Stephanie Canizales, Hoest Heap of Birds,

iv
Sandra Florian, Alfredo Huante, Caitlin Myers, Mike Dickerson, and Megan
Carroll made the TA room a place of mutual support and love, and I will miss
their company dearly.
I’d also like to thank the many undergraduates who agreed to be
interviewed for this project and who shared their most intimate stories with
me without reservation. You made this dissertation what it is, and I hope to
have done you justice.
My dissertation committee members, Sharon Hays, Mike Messner,
and Sarah Banet-Weiser, deserve a million thanks for their support of my
work and my development as a scholar. Sharon not only planted the seeds
for this project; she has given me invaluable advice and guidance each step
of the way. I am so fortunate to know such an exceptional thinker, teacher,
and writer; I am even luckier that she took me under her wing. It is because
of her that I can call myself a sociologist. Mike continues to impress me with
his energy, kindness, and generosity. His enthusiasm about my work
sustained me during some of the most difficult times. Sarah has been my
touchstone for all things postfeminist, and always pushes me to think about
my work in new ways. She has an endless supply of humor, grace, and
compassion, and I will be forever grateful that she welcomed me into her life.
I would also like to thank Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Macarena Gomez-

v
Barris, and Tim Biblarz for supporting me during the early years, and Karen
Sternheimer for recognizing and sustaining my love for teaching in an
environment where such support is often hard to find.
The sociology department staff has the arduous task of managing the
paperwork, money, and egos of an eclectic and demanding group of faculty
and students. Without fail, and despite little recognition, they handle this job
with patience and skill. Stachelle Overland, Melissa Hernandez, and Amber
Thomas are kind, competent, hilarious, and some of my favorite people on
the planet. I can’t thank them enough.
It takes a certain amount of privilege to attend graduate school in the
first place, and I am fortunate enough to have a family that has fully
supported, both emotionally and financially, my pursuit of higher education.
My parents, Linda and Rick Butler, instilled in me from an early age a love of
reading, writing, teaching, and learning. They have worked hard to give me
the best life possible, and I deeply appreciate their sacrifices and their love.
My grandmother, Jody Gatten, has also given me her support, her
encouragement, and her love since day one. Our weekly talks kept me going
even through the worst times, and her wisdom and benevolence inspire me
every day. I was also lucky enough to marry into a very large and very loving
family who welcomed me with open arms. Special hugs go to Andy Swonger,

vi
Tim Swonger, and Amy and Erhard Eimer for their unconditional love and
support.
Astronomical thanks go to my husband, Ty Swonger. The first two
years of our marriage were my last two years of graduate school, and he
endured the worst and best of it with patience, understanding, humor, and
compassion. He fed me, he hugged me, he cried with me, he watched bad
TV with me, he rubbed my feet, he made me laugh, he helped me write, he
listened to me gripe and yell and rant and sigh. He is my favorite human, and
I could not have done this without him.
My favorite non-human, Peter Butler, was with me from the very
beginning of graduate school, and stayed almost to the very end. Thank you,
my sweet Petey Pie, for saving my life.
One final thanks: I was in my sixth year of the graduate program and
hadn’t written a single word in months when I received an email
announcement that someone called “The Dissertation Coach” would be
speaking on campus. I had been thinking of quitting, but wasn’t quite ready to
give it up, so I pulled myself out of bed and went to the talk, where I heard a
woman named Alison Miller describe the experiences of graduate students
who, like me, had become overwhelmed by the process of writing a
dissertation. A few days later, Alison introduced me to Rebecca Schwartz-

vii
Bishir, who became my dissertation coach for the next 11 months. At a
time when I could barely remember my research questions, Rebecca
reminded me why I had come to graduate school in the first place: to learn,
and to share my ideas with others. In a few weeks, I went from writing
nothing at all to writing every day. By breaking down what seemed to be an
impossibly huge undertaking into manageable goals, Rebecca showed me
how to use my time and energy in a healthy and productive way, and I truly
believe that I would not have completed this dissertation without her
guidance. So, for anyone reading this who is in the process of writing a
dissertation of your own, I’ll end by passing on what Rebecca taught me: be
patient with yourself, and gentle. You can do it.

viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION .................................................................................................. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................. iii
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................... ix
CHAPTER 1 The Gullet Report ...................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 2 Re-Imagining College Hookup Culture .................................... 35
CHAPTER 3 What's (Post-) Feminist about College Hookup Culture? ........ 77
CHAPTER 4 Sexual Subjects .................................................................... 118
CHAPTER 5 Exclusions, Exceptions, and Eating the Other ...................... 171
CHAPTER 6 Conclusion ............................................................................ 240
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 252

ix
ABSTRACT
Beginning in the early 1980s, “postfeminism” has become a common
appellation for the attitudes and behaviors of young women in the
contemporary United States. Also emerging in recent decades, the practice
of “hooking up” is now the dominant form of intimate heterosexual interaction
on college campuses. While postfeminism and hookup culture share several
important characteristics, no studies to date have considered their
connections. This dissertation combines textual, historical, ethnographic, and
qualitative interview methodologies to examine the relationship between
postfeminist discourses and college hookup culture. Drawing from in-depth
group interviews with 50 undergraduate women and men at a large private
research university from 2007-2012, I ask: how does hooking up function as
a postfeminist culture, and how does postfeminist hookup culture reflect,
reproduce, and/or disrupt existing inequalities of gender, sexuality, and race?
I find that college hookup culture is postfeminist both in its explicit claim to
operate “beyond gender” and in its implicit re-inscription of key gender,
sexual, and racial stereotypes and inequalities.
Women now attend college at a higher rate than men; they are
increasingly employed in male-dominated fields; and they enjoy heightened
visibility in politics, media, and sports. Postfeminist discourses draw upon

x
these celebratory narratives, proclaiming feminism’s “success” in bringing
about gender equality in education, work, and the home. Although these
victories are complicated by inequalities of race, class, and sexuality, today’s
young women have grown up in a postfeminist world where gender equality
is assumed to have been, at least for the most part, already achieved.
Yet there have been few studies that examine postfeminism “on the
ground,” or as it functions in the everyday lives of young women and men.
Existing research focuses almost completely on describing the ideological
aspects of postfeminism as they appear in popular media. The few
sociological studies that attempt to measure contemporary attitudes about
feminism stop short of examining how postfeminism is enacted or embodied
in daily life.
I argue that college hookup culture is an ideal place to begin an
examination of postfeminism “on the ground,” for a few reasons. First, the
college campus has long been a central locale for the enactment of gender
and sexual ideologies. For instance, the shift from dating to mating that has
taken place over the course of the last century has occurred largely, or at
least most visibly, on college campuses across the U.S. Young people are
getting married later and having sex earlier, and a growing number of them—
78 percent more in 2000 than in 1970—are enrolling in college. This means

xi
that there is a higher proportion of young, unmarried, sexually active
college students on campus today than ever before in our nation’s history.
Second, hooking up is not simply a new form of intimate behavior; it is
also a culture made up of repeated metaphors, myths, styles, norms, and
narratives. Even a cursory glance at the shared codes of hookup culture—for
example, “it’s just easier for guys to get off than it is for girls,” or “whether you
become a slut or not is really your choice,” both of which I heard repeated
again and again in interviews—reveals a striking similarity to the
characteristics of postfeminism, including:

• a vocabulary of individual choice and personal responsibility;
• a sex-positive paradigm that celebrates women’s sexual
freedom;
• a conceptualization of men and women as biologically different
but socially equal, and;
• a claim, either implicit or explicit, that feminist political activism
is no longer needed.

Finally, viewing hookup culture through a sociological lens requires us to
be attentive to how inequalities of race, class, and sexuality shape gendered

xii
interactions. The postfeminist commodification of race and ethnicity—as
“flava” that adds spice to white femininity—is ever-present in college hookup
culture. Yet, as is true of most popular postfeminist cultural representations,
the participation of students of color in hookup culture rarely challenges the
centrality of whiteness on campus.
In many ways, college hookup culture is an ideal site to examine
questions of intimacy, feminism, and neoliberalism in the late modern era.
Because hookup culture and postfeminism both rely on an overarching
framework of purported gender equality, individual choice, and sexual
freedom, they may work together to conceal existing, as well as new, forms
of inequality. In its specific focus on the connections between hooking up and
postfeminism, my research speaks to the stalled “revolution” in sexual
politics, as well as issues of gender and racial inequality, and suggests a new
way of thinking about contemporary sexual interaction.

1
CHAPTER 1
THE GULLET REPORT
It’s spring in Southern California, and I’m sitting outside at Los Angeles
University.
1
I’m getting ready to give a speech in front of 100 students who
are staging a campus-wide walkout in protest of a recent intra-fraternity email
that was leaked to the student body. The year is 2011.
The email, written by a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, offers a
vivid illustration of the theories and practices that undergird college hookup
culture.
2
It is prefaced by a call for other fraternity members to submit their
own experiences for a weekly “Gullet Report.”

Please send me all of your hookups in Tucker Max
3
format (for
those unfamiliar with this legend, Google will suffice). These
renditions should be elaborate and interesting. I want raw data
on who fucks and who doesn’t. In conclusion The Gullet Report
will strengthen brotherhood and help pinpoint sororstitiutes
more inclined to put out.

1
All names are pseudonyms.
2
A complete transcript of the email can be found at http://jezebel.com/5779905/usc-frat-
guys-email-explains-women-are-targets-not-actual-people-like-us-men.
3
Tucker Max is a best-selling author and public speaker. He writes about sex, drinking, and
encounters with women, and is especially popular among young men.

2
The rest of the email is devoted to defining the key terms the author
believes his brothers should know in order to live the life of a “cocksman.” It
begins with a disclaimer:
I will refer to females as “targets.” They aren’t actual people like
us men. Consequently, giving them a certain name or
distinction is pointless.

In addition to the aforementioned “sororstitiutes” (a not-so-clever, and
misspelled, combination of “sorority” and “prostitute”), these terms include:

Pie: A target’s vagina. Some of your may have heard phrases
such as twat, cooter, muff, snatch, poontang, cock pocket, DNA
dumpster, fun hatch, cock sock, the fish flap, spunk-pot,
whisker biscuit, or the rarely used, wizard’s sleeve. All these
terms are interchangeable and fine to use.

Gullet: Usually refers to a target’s mouth and throat. Most often
pertains to a target’s throat capacity and it’s [sic] ability to
gobble cock. If a target is known to have a good gullet, it can
deep-throat dick extremely well. My advice is to seek out this
target early in the night. Good Gullet Girls (GGG) are always
scooped up well before last call.

R.D.A. (Raw Dog Assassin): A man that refuses to wear
condoms because no feeling on earth can compare to a warm
piece of pie coming in contact with your cock. Let’s be honest, if
it isn’t raw it isn’t real. Drawbacks of this philosophy are that
you may have to visit the clinic more often than not, but a quick
penicillin shot really isn’t that bad (trust me).

Loop n’ Doop: A target that is very easy to take down. All she
takes is a good amount of liquor (loop) and she will be good to
go for you to fuck her (doop). Be careful with loop n’ doops,

3
because too much loop and they will get sick and be useless
entities.

There’s more. The student goes on to explain the “rating system” for
women’s attractiveness (1-10, in case you’re wondering, with “outliers
existing up to a -5”), including how to calculate your “lifetime average” and
your “filth rating.” It then moves on to “Additional Rules for a Cocksman,”
including “non-consent and rape are two different things,” and “the target
should maintain the hair around her pie.” The email concludes with a “Pie
Code.”

A pie code is essential to have so pie-getters can have a
conversation in front of targets while talking about them and
deciding which one to make a move on. The following
references:

Blackberry: a black target
Blueberry Pie: half-black/half-white
Pumpkin Pie: A Latin/Mexican target
Pecan Pie: half-white/half-Latin
Strawberry Pie: white target
Cherry Pie: A young white target
Lemon Meringue: Asian target

Note: If you are so lucky to encounter a perfect piece of pie. I
mean the grip is out of this world, it doesn’t look like hair ever
existed in the region, and it tastes like strawberry shortcake,
then you are allowed to refer to the pie as crème brulee. It must
hit the tri-fecta to be considered for this great and honorable
distinction.

4
*Don’t fuck middle-eastern targets. Exhibit some patriotism and
have some pride. You want your cock smelling like falafel?
Filth.

As the author makes clear, this email was originally intended for Kappa
Sigmas only. But, as things on the Internet tend to do, it got out, and quickly
spread across campus and the blogosphere. The response from students on
campus, and in comment threads on the various websites that reposted the
email, was mixed. There was some outrage, particularly over the blatant
racism and the claim that non-consent and rape are “two different things.”
But overall, the students I spoke to, and most of the comments I have read
online, described the email as relatively harmless.
For their part, campus authorities denounced the email as “disgusting”
and “contrary to everything [Kappa Sigma stands] for,” and promised to
investigate. The official investigation, however, concluded that the original
source of the email could not be determined, and no disciplinary action was
ever taken. Ayushi Gummadi, president of the campus Panhellenic council,
issued the following statement:

Sexual behavior is based on individual decisions. That said, I
think one of the strongest things we can do is be good role
models and lead by example. We want to set positive examples
in terms of knowing that [women] should have standards, be
safe and not engage in risky sexual behavior (quoted in
Weinraub 2011b).

5
Which brings us back to the rally. In the wake of the Gullet Report, a
group of concerned students called for a campus-wide walkout in protest of
the email, as well as campus authorities’ inadequate response to the email
and other recent acts of misconduct among fraternity members, that was to
be held as part of the annual “Take Back the Night” activities. The event
ended with an address from the university president, who again called for
students to “take responsibility” for their actions and practice “positive healthy
behavior.”
Fast-forward to 2013. In the short time that has passed, we’ve seen
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh call Sandra Fluke a slut for wanting
access to birth control, pop star Chris Brown get a woman’s bruised face
tattooed on his neck, and Michigan state representative Lisa Brown get
banned from the House floor for saying the word “vagina” during an abortion
debate.
It is possible to claim that the Gullet Report is an isolated incident, the
drunken ramblings of an Adderall-addled frat boy that bear no relation to
broader trends in contemporary society. It is possible to claim, more broadly,
that boys will be boys or that frats will be frats. It is possible. But such claims
cannot explain why so many students—young men and young women—find
humor in dreck like the Gullet Report. They also cannot explain why, one

6
year earlier, Karen Owen, a Duke University student who made a
PowerPoint presentation detailing her sexual escapades with 13 male
student-athletes (which, of course, also went viral), received threats of
litigation and violence for “disgrac[ing] the school” (Seelye and Robbins
2010) and violating the athletes’ privacy.
4
It is possible to claim that these
things are just a series of unfortunate events. But I won’t.
This dissertation is about, among other things, the Gullet Report. It is
about a world where, we’re told, girls can do anything boys can do, where
men, young and old, can publicly make misogynist comments with little fear
of retribution, and where women are in on the joke. If we look closely enough
at college hookup culture, this is what we see.
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby?
British cultural scholar Angela McRobbie (2004, 2009) has argued that
postfeminism has become so installed as a structural and epistemological
framework that for many people it now seems to be common sense. Today’s
women attend college at a higher rate than men; they are increasingly

4
Karen Owen graduated from Duke in 2010. To date, she has never given an interview
about the scandal, and no lawsuits have been filed against her. The websites Jezebel and
Deadspin both published queries they received from an editor at HarperCollins, as well as an
agent from William Morris and a movie producer, about contacting Owen to discuss book
and movie deals.

7
employed in male-dominated fields; and they enjoy heightened visibility in
politics and media. As other scholars have noted, postfeminist discourses
emphasize these celebratory narratives, proclaiming feminism’s “success” in
bringing about gender equality in education, work, and the home. Feminism
is still constructed as a thing of the past; however, previous feminist
victories—the pill, Roe v. Wade, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—are
not forgotten, but are instead actively invoked as proof that feminism is no
longer needed.
To be sure, postfeminism’s repeated tropes—feminism is dead,
women are equal to men, girls just want to have fun, and so on—are
everywhere in contemporary US culture, and its representatives—from
Snooki and Kim Kardashian to Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj—are equally
ubiquitous in mainstream media. In postfeminism’s most popular
representations, women’s freedom and empowerment are de-historicized,
de-politicized, and presented as obvious; feminist values are incorporated or
“taken into account” (McRobbie 2009) only to be dismissed as passé and
irrelevant; and feminism itself is evacuated of meaning and political value.
Postfeminism “On the Ground”
Contemporary young women have undoubtedly benefitted from the struggles
of first- and second-wave feminists to gain increased access to education,

8
employment, and political participation, secure (some) reproductive rights
and freedoms, and chip away at the sexual double standard that condones
sexual activity among men while condemning sexually active women. While
these victories are complicated by inequalities of race, class, and sexuality,
today’s young women have grown up in a postfeminist world where gender
equality is assumed to have been, at least for the most part, already
achieved.
Yet despite postfeminism’s apparent hegemony, there have been few
studies that examine postfeminism “on the ground,” or as it functions in the
everyday lives of young women and men. Research on postfeminism, as I
will show, focuses almost completely on describing and analyzing its
ideological aspects as they appear in popular media. The few sociological
studies that attempt to measure contemporary attitudes about feminism stop
short of examining how, or in what contexts, postfeminism is enacted or
embodied in daily life. They also fail to elaborate the full range of meanings
encapsulated in discourses about postfeminism.
It seems to me that college hookup culture is an ideal place to begin
an examination of postfeminism “on the ground,” for a few reasons. First, the
college campus has long been a central locale for the enactment of gender
and sexual ideologies. For instance, the shift from dating to mating that has

9
taken place over the course of the last century has occurred largely, or at
least most visibly, on college campuses across the U.S. (see Bogle 2008).
There are reasons for this: young people are getting married later and having
sex earlier, and a growing number of them—according to the US Department
of Education, 78 percent more in 2000 than in 1970—are enrolling in college.
At its most basic level, this means is that there is a higher proportion of
young, unmarried, sexually active college students on campus today than
ever before in our nation’s history.
Second, as I discuss in Chapter 2, hooking up is not simply a new
form of intimate behavior; it is also a culture made up of repeated narratives,
metaphors, myths, styles, expectations, and assumptions of which most
college students are aware regardless of their personal level of sexual
activity. Even a cursory glance at these shared cultural “codes”—for
instance, “it’s just easier for guys to get off than it is for girls,” or “whether you
become a slut or not is really your choice,” both of which I heard repeated
over and over in my interviews—reveals a striking similarity to the
characteristics of postfeminism as it appears in media representations. If you
talk to young people about hooking up, I’m willing to bet you’ll hear them:

10
• use a vocabulary of individual choice and personal responsibility;
• promote a sex-positive paradigm that celebrates women’s sexual
freedom;
• discuss women’s conspicuous consumption of feminine goods and
services (e.g., shoes, clothes, cosmetics, and hair removal);
• conceptualize men and women as biologically different but socially
equal, and/or;
• claim, either implicitly or explicitly, that feminist political activism is
no longer needed.

Because postfeminism and hookup culture both rely on an overarching
framework of purported gender equality, individual choice, female
empowerment, sexual freedom, and sex-positivity, they may work together to
conceal existing, as well as new, forms of gender, sexual, and racial
inequality. If, as I will argue throughout this dissertation, hookup culture is a
central site for the enactment of postfeminism, it is also a central site for the
maintenance and reproduction of the power relations that make postfeminism
possible and necessary. By encouraging young people, and especially young
women, to relinquish political identities in favor of social and sexual practices
that are “both progressive but also consummately and reassuringly feminine”

11
(McRobbie 2009, 57), hookup culture works, in my view, to prop up and
perpetuate patriarchal power under the guise of “women’s lib.”
Finally, viewing hookup culture through a sociological lens allows us—
indeed, requires us—to be attentive to how inequalities of race, class, and
sexuality inform and shape gendered interactions on college campuses. It
also prompts us to interrogate existing research that describes
postfeminism—and, as I show in Chapter 5, hooking up—as primarily the
domain of white girls. While hooking up may be more popular among white
students than it is among students of color (and this remains an empirical
question), it is absolutely incorrect to assume that nonwhite students never
hook up, or that they do not know the rules of hookup culture. The
postfeminist commodification of race and ethnicity—as “flava” that adds spice
to white femininity—is ever-present in college hookup culture, from the
fetishization of Asian girls to the mythos surrounding the black penis. Yet, as
is true of most popular postfeminist cultural representations, the presence
and participation of students of color in college hookup culture rarely
challenges the centrality of whiteness on campus.
This dissertation examines college hookup culture as one site where
postfeminist discourses are articulated, negotiated, and contested. Drawing
from group interviews with undergraduate women and men at a large

12
research university, I ask: in what ways is hooking up a postfeminist
culture, and how does postfeminist hookup culture reflect, reproduce, and/or
disrupt existing symbolic boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race? I argue
that hookup culture is postfeminist both in its explicit claim to operate
“beyond gender” and in its implicit re-inscription of key gender, sexual, and
racial stereotypes and inequalities. I also find that undergraduates share
many common assumptions about sexual practices on campus regardless of
their personal level of participation in the hookup scene. In its specific focus
on the culture of hooking up, this research suggests a new way of thinking
about contemporary sexual interaction and contributes to existing theories of
gender, sexuality, and postfeminism.
“Love’s Dying Ritual”: Popular Assessments of Hooking Up
Like postfeminism, hooking up emerged in the 1980s as a new
5
form of
heterosexual interaction. Most scholars agree that in the three decades
since, hookups have become the primary way that college students
experience intimacy (see Bogle 2008). Over the past decade, social

5
The question of how “new” hooking up is continues to be debated; nevertheless, it is safe
to say that there has been a marked shift in the “order” of dating and mating practices over
time -- that is, from dating then mating to mating then dating, or, perhaps more accurately,
mating then nothing at all. This is not to say that young people in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s
never had casual sex with strangers, but rather that this was not the dominant form of
heterosexual interaction on college campuses during those times.

13
commentators have drawn attention to the changing nature of dating and
mating practices among teens and young adults, mostly lamenting the
“death” of committed relationships or celebrating the newfound sexual
“freedom” that hookup culture allows.
6
These news stories have in common
one central question: Does hooking up provide opportunities for
empowerment for women, offering alternatives to “traditional” (and
presumably restrictive) dating, or does this practice—with its ambiguous
ideology and loose moral code—simply confuse young women (and men)
and reproduce a sexual double standard? In other words, these
commentators ask: Is hooking up good for young women?
7

Most often, the answer is “no.” In a classic right-wing assessment,
Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt (2001) argue that hooking up
“undermines the likelihood of achieving the goal of a successful future
marriage” (4). Other journalists have bemoaned the “demise of dating” and
expressed concern for the pitiful college girls floundering in a “turbulent sea”

6
See, for example, “Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships” (National Public
Radio June 2009); “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity” (New York Times January
2009); “The Demise of Dating” (New York Times December 2008); “Love’s Dying Ritual”
(Washington Post 2005); “Girls Just as Bad as Boys” (Chicago Sun-Times 2005); “Connect
and Forget It” (Chicago Sun-Times 2005); and “Dorm Brothel” (Christianity Today 2005).
7
Commentators have largely ignored the question of whether hooking up is “good” or “bad”
for men. In my view, this omission reflects two related assumptions: (1) that men’s sexual
behavior is biologically determined or “natural,” and (2) that the sexual practices of
contemporary young men are not seen as significantly different from those of men in earlier
eras, and thus do not warrant further examination.

14
of venereal diseases, licentious boys, and unfulfilling sex (Blow 2008;
Stepp 2007a). To different degrees, these and other observers (e.g., Guroian
2005; Herrmann and Rackl 2005; Raspberry 2005; Wilson 2005) contend
that hooking up is an adverse symptom of women’s newfound “equality” that,
just like decent jobs and equal pay, will inevitably leave them feeling
confused, unhappy, and alone. It is just this kind of logic—that feminism itself
is to blame for women’s woes—that journalist Susan Faludi (1991) has
famously dubbed a “backlash” against feminism.
Sometimes, however, the answer is “yes!” More than a few popular
writers have published books and articles in defense of young women’s
participation in hookup culture, claiming that drunken casual sex is an
important stop on the road to women’s liberation (see, for example,
Baumgardner and Richards 2000; Lavinthal and Rozler 2005; Sherman and
Tocantins 2004; Rosin 2012; Valenti 2007). For instance, in their now-classic
tome ManifestA, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (2000) explain
that hooking up is just one of the many perks of “girlie” feminism, which they
define as a sex-positive, can-do, all-access pass that encourages women to
wear “porn star” baby-doll t-shirts, get Brazilian bikini waxes, and have guilt-
free hookups as markers of sexual freedom and gender equality. Or,
according to Jessica Valenti, best-selling author of Full Frontal Feminism,

15
“Sometimes doing silly, disempowering, sexually vapid things when you’re
young is just part of getting to the good stuff” (2007, 48).
So we’ve got one side—mostly made up of older men—telling us that
hooking up is bad for women because too much equality is confusing. We’ve
got another side—mostly made up of younger women—telling us that
hooking up is good for women because it lets us enjoy our sexual freedom. I
don’t disagree that feminism has played a crucial role in the emergence and
popularity of hooking up on college campuses; without the birth control pill or
easy access to condoms, for instance, casual hookups would be much less
appealing. I do, however, take issue with the claim that hooking up is always
a feminist act, or, conversely, that it is just another way that feminism has
failed young women. In my view, it makes much more sense to think about
hooking up as a postfeminist activity or, more precisely, a postfeminist
culture.
A New Approach
This study moves beyond common understandings of hooking up as simply a
form of sexual behavior that either puts the health and virtue of young women
at risk or marks the liberation of young women’s sexuality. Instead, I argue
for a new conceptualization of hooking up as a culture in the postfeminist
frame. This shift in perspective is not merely semantic; rather, it requires us

16
to reorient our thinking about college hookup culture and ask new kinds of
questions. For example, instead of asking, “Is hooking up good for young
women?” I have in mind questions like, “What are the relationships between
hookup culture and postfeminist discourses?” Or, “What, if anything, can
hookup culture tell us about postfeminism, and postfeminism about hookup
culture?” I’m especially interested in how both postfeminism and hookup
culture deal with issues of power and inequality, so I also ask: “How does
postfeminist hookup culture reflect, reproduce, or disrupt existing symbolic
and material boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race?”
Re-conceptualizing hooking up as a postfeminist culture not only
prompts us to ask different kinds of questions; it also allows us to unearth
different kinds of answers. For instance, thinking about hooking up as a
postfeminist culture helps us understand how all women (and men!) are
influenced by the repeated narratives, rituals, and rules of hooking up, even
those who engage in casual sex only rarely, or not at all. It also widens our
analytic lenses so we can see how gender and sexuality operate as a
package, and how inequalities of gender, sexuality, and race are linked and
reinforced through everyday interaction.
Because human identities and interests are always culturally
embedded, I reject the behaviorist conception of human nature in favor of an

17
interpretive view of humans as actively creating themselves and their
social world (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Connell 1987; Giddens 1979). For
example, it is not as if men “instinctively” want casual sex while women
“naturally” prefer relationships (although this is often how such desires are
explained); rather, young women and men continually construct, reiterate,
and sometimes resist cultural definitions of “sex” and “relationships” and what
these constructions mean in specific socio-historical contexts. In this study, I
examine a so-called “micro” formation—the culture of hooking up on one
college campus—as a way to comprehend the so-called “macro” forces
shaping contemporary U.S. society—in this case, the state of gender and
sexual relations, feminism, and multiculturalism among young people.
Although not representative or generalizable in a statistical sense, such an
approach does allow me to make claims about societal significance by
showing how a particular case illustrates something about the world in which
it is embedded (see Burawoy et al. 1991, 281).
With these theoretical interventions in mind, I wanted a research
design that would provide space to witness the real-time construction of
hooking up as a shared culture and to observe the ways in which participants
echoed, edited, and sometimes challenged each other’s understandings of

18
the campus hookup “code.” To this end, my research took the form of
focus groups.
Frith (2000) defines focus groups as “a small group of people
engag[ing] in collective discussion of a topic preselected by the researcher”
(275-276). Also known as “group interviews” or “group discussions,” focus
groups are designed to gather qualitative information about the beliefs,
attitudes, and values that guide participants’ behavior. Focus groups are
distinct from one-on-one interviews in that they emphasize collective
discussion over individual responses. The role of the focus group researcher
is more flexible than that of the individual interviewer; rather than simply
responding to the researcher’s questions in turn, group members interact as
much with each other as they do with the interviewer. Broadly speaking, it is
this interactive method of data collection that distinguishes focus groups from
other forms of qualitative research (Frith 2000, 276).
In order to examine the ways in which young people understand
college hookup culture, I interviewed undergraduates at Los Angeles
University (LAU), a large private research university in southern California.
8

8
Over the course of this project, I have also had hundreds of informal conversations with
college students, high school students, and young adults in their twenties and thirties about
their experiences with hooking up. Everyone I meet, it seems, has something to say about
hookup culture.

19
From 2007 to 2012, I interviewed 50 undergraduates—27 women and 23
men—from a variety of backgrounds.
9
Prior to the focus group, students
were asked to report their age, hometown, gender, sexual identification,
racial/ethnic identification, student status (year in college), academic major,
and participation in extracurricular campus activities such as fraternities and
sororities, athletic teams, and cultural groups. Students also provided
information about their parents’ occupations as well as their own career
aspirations. Students were not asked to disclose their relationship status;
however, I learned during the interviews that the majority of respondents
were single.
10

I found focus group participants in three ways. In the first phase of
recruitment, I asked students in several introductory-level sociology courses
for which I served as a teaching assistant to participate in a study about
college life, hooking up, and gender. Of the 74 students pooled, 27
volunteered for an interview. (To avoid ethical conflicts, students were

9
See Small (2009) for a discussion of the “n” in qualitative research.
10
The terms “single” and “in a relationship” did not seem as salient among my respondents
as the literature on hooking up would suggest (e.g., England, Armstrong, and Fogarty 2012).
For instance, some of the students I spoke to were involved in a “long-distance relationship,”
usually with a boyfriend or girlfriend from high school; however, they did not define such
relationships as exclusive and these students occasionally hooked up with other people. The
converse was also true: some students who described themselves as “single” also reported
being involved in “repeat” hookups with the same person over an extended period of time.
Interestingly, students in these types of “relationships” often said they did not want to hook
up with other people.

20
interviewed only after final grades were submitted and were not offered
any form of extra credit for the course.) In the second phase, I emailed
students in various sociology courses and posted announcements in campus
newsletters asking for volunteers. While this approach reached a broader
swath of the student population, the response rate was much lower—in this
phase, I secured only four interviewees. In the final phase of recruitment, I
relied on snowball sampling. At the end of each focus group, I asked
participants if they knew of other students who may be interested in
participating in the study. I collected their names and reached out to them via
email—most responded; some did not. Of the 26 students I recruited using
snowball sampling, 19 were subsequently interviewed.
I chose to recruit students from introductory-level sociology courses
for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, these are the undergraduates
to whom I have access. While on one level this certainly skewed my data, I
found that it ultimately assisted in establishing rapport—in some respect, I
already “knew” these students, and they knew me, either through our time
together in class or through our mutual relationships with other
undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members. I also discovered
that many of the students enrolled in introductory-level sociology classes are
not sociology majors; rather, they are often satisfying a general education or

21
diversity requirement that all undergraduates must fulfill in order to
graduate. Of the 50 undergraduates I interviewed, only six were majoring in
sociology.
Respondents ranged in age from 18 to 22, as well as one 27-year-old:
most were freshmen or sophomores; six were juniors or seniors. Their
racial/ethnic self-identifications included white (19 students, or 38%); black or
African American (11 students, or 22%); Asian, including both international
and native-born students (15 students, or 30%); Hispanic or Latina/o (4
students, or 8%); and one student who identified as biracial (Korean and
Nicaraguan). Compared to the university’s undergraduate student population,
African American and Asian students are overrepresented in this sample
while Hispanic or Latina/o students are underrepresented; the proportion of
white students is about the same.
11

Respondents also varied in the extent and frequency of their sexual
experiences. Of the 50 students I talked to, 32 had hooked up at least once
(64%), 12 had hooked up more than 10 times (24%), and 19 had never
hooked up at all (38%). If we compare these rates to those in Paula
England’s Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS), a large-scale

11
Of the 17,500 undergraduate students at the university, 40.9% are white; 4.6% are black;
22.6% are Asian; and 13.9% are Hispanic.

22
quantitative survey of 22 U.S. colleges and universities that offers the most
representative overview of hookup patterns to date, we find a very high level
of similarity. Of the more than 19,000 students surveyed in the OCSLS, 72%
have hooked up at least once during their time as undergraduates. On
average, these students have hooked up nearly seven times by the end of
senior year, an average that includes the 42% of students who have never
hooked up and the 28% who have hooked up 10 times or more (Kalish and
Kimmel 2011). These percentages correspond almost exactly to those
reported by my respondents.
All interviews were face-to-face, lasted approximately two hours, and
took place in a classroom on campus. Some examples from my interview
guide include asking respondents to define hookup culture; compare their
own experiences with hooking up with those of their peers; describe gender
differences in hookups; comment on evidence showing unequal gender
patterns in oral sex; and speculate about historical differences in sexual
practices. Keeping in mind that my status as a graduate student and teaching
assistant, as well as a self-identified feminist, may have affected how
undergraduates responded to my questions, I clarified that I was not
interested in critiquing hooking up as a practice, but rather in understanding
the shared ideology that underpins it. All interviews were digitally recorded

23
with the respondents’ permission and subsequently transcribed and
coded. I use aliases throughout the transcripts and this text to ensure
anonymity and confidentiality. After transcribing the group interviews, I began
looking for repeated concepts, narratives, assumptions, and expectations;
these ultimately became the “code” of hookup culture that I examine in
Chapter 2. I also noted how students talked about feminism (see Chapter 3);
gender differences and inequalities (see Chapter 4); and racial/ethnic and
sexual boundaries (see Chapter 5).
Frith (2000) contends that focus groups are especially beneficial for
sex research for three primary reasons: (1) they are useful for exploratory
research into under-researched topics and for speedy policy analysis; (2)
they can enable the researcher to learn the language and vocabulary
typically used by respondents in talking about their sexual activities; and (3)
they provide conditions under which people feel comfortable discussing
sexual experiences and which encourage people to talk about sex (277). I
found the second and third to be especially true in my research: I quickly
learned the language and vocabulary used by students to talk about
hookups, and students readily and comfortably discussed their sexual
experiences in a way that did not feel—to them or to me—like “research.” My
role shifted easily between interviewer and observer: I would present a

24
question or scenario, and then just sit back, listen, and laugh as the group
candidly discussed and debated the ins and outs of campus hookup culture.
Indeed, at the end of our focus groups students often remarked that it had felt
more like a “Friday morning debrief” among friends than an interview.
12

One of the biggest challenges for sex research is to provide a setting
in which participants feel comfortable and relaxed enough to talk about sex
(Frith 2000, 281). With this in mind, I had to decide whether to schedule
interviews with homogenous or heterogeneous groups of students—for
example, all women, or a mix of women and men—as well as whether to
interview groups of friends or students who did not previously know one
another. In the beginning, this decision was not an easy one; I feared
students would feel stifled or embarrassed to disclose sexual information in
front of their friends, classmates, or me. My first focus group consisted of
three men and three women, all former students of mine, who knew each
other to varying degrees: they were all juniors; two of the women were
roommates and close friends with one of the men; two of the men were both
members of a student organization on campus; two were African American,
one was Latina, and three were white; one was a virgin, another was in a

12
The benefits of focus groups were further confirmed by the common tendency for students
to talk much longer than the allotted two hours. For instance, one group talked for 4 ½ hours,
and was quite surprised when I told them how much time had elapsed.

25
“serious relationship,” and two had even hooked up—with each other—
their freshman year. I was nervous, to say the least. Yet within the first two
minutes the magic of focus groups was revealed: the students were affable
and relaxed, yet quick to “call each other out” on the details of their former
hookups, many of which they had already discussed at length.
In the thirteen focus groups that followed, I experimented with
composition: one group consisted of six sorority sisters who hooked up
regularly; another of three independent (not involved in the Greek system)
men who lived together; another of two women and two men, all virgins, who
had been former classmates; another of five African American women;
another of three Asian men and one white woman; and so on. All of the focus
groups included at least three participants; none had more than six. Looking
back, the most interesting groups were those that included a mix of men and
women from different racial backgrounds with varying levels of hookup
experience—these groups allowed students to actively respond to, and
sometimes dispute, the common-sense claims and beliefs of others in the
group, and allowed me to witness the construction of hookup culture in
action. Yet while the heterogeneous groups were usually the most exciting,
the groups that were more homogenous provided a different kind of valuable
data: these students tended to disclose information that was more detailed

26
and often quite personal.
13
Moreover, same-gender and same-race groups
illuminated the construction of symbolic boundaries and the “us versus them”
mentality that is so central to hookup culture yet rarely articulated in existing
research. In the end, using a variety of groups was beneficial both because it
taught me about how focus groups work and because it helped garner
nuanced data.
Interviews in a group setting provide a unique, and I believe
underutilized, opportunity to explore how people create open-ended dialogue
in culturally patterned ways (see Eliasoph and Lichterman 1999). As Jowett
(2004) has suggested, focus groups offer “a window through which to
witness the dynamic negotiation of meaning in dialogue, through which
contested categories … come to be made and challenged” (92). Cultural
forms—such as the hookup “code”—”do not arise spontaneously in the
minds of their individual carriers; they are shaped by the social groups to
which those individuals belong and by the systems of meaning in which
those individuals are immersed” (Hays 1994, 68-69). Focus groups allow us
to discern these collective processes and productions in ways that individual
interviews would likely preclude.

13
For example, in one group of four sorority members, a woman recalled her experience of
being raped at a fraternity party.

27
This study extends existing research on hooking up in a few
important ways. As I have noted, the kind of data we get from focus groups is
different from the sort usually used in hookup studies, and points more
directly to the social construction of hooking up as a shared culture. Beyond
this methodological intervention, I also wanted to interview students from
groups that have been previously underrepresented in research on hooking
up (such as African Americans, LGBTQ students, and men) as well as those
for whom hookups may be particularly prevalent (such as fraternity and
sorority members), so I actively recruited students from these groups, with
mixed results. For instance, almost half of the women I interviewed were
members of a sorority; yet only three fraternity men agreed to be interviewed
for this study.
14
And, while I was able to interview a relatively high number of
African American and Asian students, only three respondents identified as
Latino/a or Hispanic. Even so, because my study includes a majority of non-
white students (62%), I can draw some conclusions about the significance of
race and ethnicity in hookup culture that are largely missing from previous
studies.

14
This may reflect a reluctance among Greek men to speak about their sexual experiences
in light of recent scandals involving fraternity hazing and sexual assault. Nonetheless, the
fraternity brothers I did interview spoke with remarkable candor and insight about their
experiences in the Greek system.

28
My data is limited in at least one other important way. Because Los
Angeles University has a racially diverse student population and a lively
Greek system, finding non-white students and Greek students was relatively
easy; however, finding students who did not identify as heterosexual proved
much more difficult. For instance, after I posted a request for volunteers in
the campus LGBT Resource Center newsletter I received four email
responses from interested students; however, for various reasons, none of
these students subsequently appeared for an interview. Of the 50 students I
interviewed, only two described their sexual preference as something other
than heterosexual. In my view, the absence of LGBTQ students in my data
reflects, among other things, the centrality of heterosexuality in college
hookup culture. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned about how LGBTQ
students understand hooking up and I hope my work will inspire future
research in this area.
When I began this project, I was unsure that hooking up “meant”
anything more than a bunch of drunken college kids having drunken casual
sex. Yet after just a few focus groups, I was convinced. In the hours I spent
poring over transcripts, looking for patterns and anomalies, what surprised
me most was the similarity of responses across different groups. Despite
what journalists would have us believe, hooking up is not random. As I show

29
in the next chapter, even students’ tendency to hook up with “randoms”
shows up in hookup culture in structured and systematic ways.
Chapter Summary
One of the primary goals of this dissertation is to connect the literature on
hooking up to the literature on postfeminism. An important part of this project
involves first explaining how hooking up is a culture, and then using
qualitative data to show why, and in what ways, I conceptualize this culture
as postfeminist. I then use interview data to show how hookup culture and
postfeminism intersect to produce new subjectivities and reproduce old forms
of inequality.
Chapter 1 introduces the dissertation, including a broad literature
review and methods section, and highlights the key contributions of the
study. In Chapter 2, I argue for a conceptualization of hooking up as a culture
with underlying rituals, rules, and assumptions of which most college
students are aware, regardless of their personal level of sexual activity.
Drawing from cultural sociology, I begin Chapter 2 with a brief discussion of
what “culture” means, both generally and in the context of hooking up. Next, I
review recent research in social psychology and sociology that defines
hooking up as a form of sexual behavior (e.g., England, Shafer, and Fogarty
2007; Grello, Welsh, and Harper 2006; Manning, Giordano, and Longmore

30
2006; Paul, McManus, and Hayes 2000), and argue that while this kind of
research offers valuable information about the rates and risks associated
with casual sex among college students, it does not capture the full
complexity of hookup culture. I then apply sociological theories of culture to
my interview data, comparing stories from undergraduates at LAU as a way
to demonstrate the cultural underpinnings of hooking up. I conclude by
discussing the implications of re-conceptualizing hooking up as a culture—
specifically, that it influences all college students, not just those who hook up
regularly.
Chapter 3 outlines the key similarities between hookup culture and
postfeminist discourses. Here, I argue that hookup culture and postfeminism
share several key tenets: both (1) rely on negative stereotypes about
feminism and feminists; (2) assert that feminist activism is no longer
necessary or desirable; and (3) emphasize individual choice and personal
responsibility as the routes to women’s empowerment. After briefly
summarizing the socio-historical context from which postfeminism emerges, I
review the existing scholarly literature on postfeminism. Because sociologists
have been slow to study postfeminist discourses and performances, I focus
especially on work from feminist media studies. Drawing from this research, I
outline the central tenets of postfeminism and argue for a conceptualization

31
of postfeminism as a neoliberal sensibility. In the second part of the
chapter, I use examples from my group interviews with women and men at
LAU to map several points of convergence between postfeminist discourses
and college hookup culture.
Chapter 4 turns to the gendered character of hooking up. Drawing
from interview data, I examine the pressure for women to look and behave
according to feminine ideals and the continued stigma against women who
have “too much” casual sex, as well as hookup culture’s celebration of sexual
“freedom” amid persistent gendered disparities in orgasm and oral sex. I
argue that with its emphasis on sex-positivity, combined with an
encouragement of self-surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover paradigm
that defines femininity as a bodily property, postfeminist hookup culture re-
inscribes key gender stereotypes and inequalities. I conclude with a
preliminary discussion of the ways in which the intersection of postfeminism
and hookup culture produces new feminine subjectivities.
In Chapter 5, I analyze the construction of symbolic boundaries in
hookup culture. I use interview data from undergraduates both “in” and “out”
of the dominant hookup scene to examine how students at LAU constructed
cultural boundaries and labeled social “others.” I demonstrate that while
some students were excluded from hookup culture on the basis of physical,

32
racial/ethnic, or sexual characteristics, other students used narratives of
moral and cultural superiority as reasons for avoiding hookups. I argue that in
its assumption of white, heterosexual, “fit” subject and its commodification of
difference, postfeminist hookup culture reproduces key racial stereotypes
and inequalities and perpetuates systems of compulsory heterosexuality and
white privilege.
Why Hookup Culture Matters
Despite what some conservative pundits would have you believe, college
kids having sex is nothing new. Teenagers and young adults continue to
seek long-term, committed relationships and many of them eventually get
married. And last I checked, rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and
sexually transmitted diseases were actually going down. Hooking up is not
undermining marriage any more than abstinence protects it. It does not result
in legions of young unwed mothers. It has not spawned a generation of
miserable, confused women. These common complaints are proxies for
deeper issues. In my view, when people bemoan hookup culture, what they
are really bemoaning is the widespread popularity of postfeminism and the
sexuality of the postfeminist girl.
Scholars have yet to adequately theorize (or even acknowledge) the
complex relationship between hooking up and postfeminism, and I do not

33
claim to offer the final definitive theory in the pages that follow. However,
my findings can provide some preliminary insights and suggestions for
further research. In my view (as well as that of my respondents), the cultural
narratives of both hooking up and postfeminism represent a tempting catch-
22 for college students. On one hand, both extend the promise of increased
“freedom,” “choice,” and “empowerment” to women and men alike. For young
women especially, who have heard their mothers’ and grandmothers’ stories
of educational biases, employment barriers, and sexual stigmas, these
newfound opportunities represent a marked improvement. On the other hand,
however, hooking up and postfeminism both demand that young people
relinquish political identities and collective action in favor of individual choice
and personal responsibility. When these two ideologies come together, as
they do in the college hookup scene, the result, as I will show, is an
increasingly complex, paradoxical, and insidious system of gender regulation
and sexual subordination. Encouraging women that they can, and should, “do
anything boys can do” is not, at least on its own, a bad idea. Yet when young
women take this advice into the bedroom or fraternity house, they often find
that the promises of postfeminism have not been fulfilled. Every student I
interviewed was conscious of this paradox, but they felt they had little ability
or incentive to change “the way things are.” Their acquiescence, in my view,

34
is partly a result of the flawed logics of hooking up and postfeminism in
which individualism trumps collectivism and social change takes a backseat
to the status quo.
Framed in this light, the situation for college students appears quite
grim. In a recent op-ed piece, Kenneth Kambara (2010) suggests that “the
‘hookup’ can be reduced to a consumer behaviour, a mode that fits us all like
a glove, whether we want it to or not” (2). He goes on to argue that while
hooking up may mean a lot to “those writing on ‘hookup’ culture as a wedge
issue of morality or bitching about media and society,” it means very little to
those who actually participate in hookup culture (2). I certainly agree that
scholars and popular critics have often used hookup culture as ethical bait in
the so-called “culture wars” rather than investigating it from an historically
specific sociological perspective. However, we would be remiss to believe
that hooking up doesn’t also “mean” something to millions of young women
and men across the US, just as it would be a mistake to write off hookup
culture as merely one more example of the “commodification of everything”
under late capitalism. My findings reveal a plethora of shared cultural norms,
rules, and expectations that clearly carry meaning and influence students’
attitudes and actions—in bed and in general, whether they hook up or not.

35
CHAPTER 2
RE-IMAGINING COLLEGE HOOKUP CULTURE

So what we get drunk?
So what we smoke weed?
We’re just havin’ fun
And we don’t care who sees
So what we go out?
That’s how it’s supposed to be
Living young and wild and free

Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa ft Bruno Mars, “Young, Wild & Free”

Don’t have sex with someone the first time you hook up with them if you want
something more. That goes back to the naïve thing—I feel like that’s
something they should’ve learned in high school, like, not necessarily from
personal experience, but just watching other girls, watching your best friends.
It’s like the girls that date the guy that, like, cheated on every girl and you
think you’re gonna be the one to change them. It’s just not gonna happen.

Jen (20, white, sorority
member)

In a recent article published in Sex Research & Social Policy, professors
Caroline Heldman and Lisa Wade review the status of research on hooking
up. In their introductory comments, they propose that scholars interested in
hooking up begin to “theorize the distinction between a sexual culture that
includes hooking up and a ‘hookup culture’” (2010, p. 1). Implicit in their
suggestion is a puzzling fact about research on hooking up: scholars (e.g.,

36
Armstrong et al. 2010; Bogle 2008; Garcia et al. 2012) have begun to refer
to the collective practice of hooking up on college campuses as a “hookup
culture,” yet rarely (if ever) do they explain what this means. In this chapter, I
explore the idea of “hookup culture” and how it differs from previous
conceptualizations of hooking up.
What the %^&# is a Hookup?!
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when hooking up began to take on
its contemporary meaning as a form of casual sexual interaction. One study
of slang terminology among college students at the University of North
Carolina cites the mid-1980s as the time when “hooking up,” defined as “to
find a partner for romance or sex” or “to kiss passionately,” started to appear
in popular vernacular (Eble 1996). Based on the available data, it is safe to
say that most college-aged men and women today still think of hooking up in
this way.
Scholars who study collegiate hookup culture have long lamented the
lack of consensus about what hooking up actually involves—for instance,
some students define hooking up as kissing, while others insist it refers to
sex only. Hooking up is, by definition, a purposefully ambiguous term: as
other scholars have noted, it can involve kissing, oral sex, and/or intercourse,
it can take place between strangers, acquaintances, or close friends, and it

37
may be an isolated or ongoing experience (Bogle 2008; England, Shafer,
and Fogarty 2007; Manning, Giordano, and Longmore 2006).
The students in my study demonstrated similar looseness in their
definitions of the term. At the beginning of each focus group, I asked students
to describe a hookup to someone who had never heard of it. During this foray
into a world of make-believe—most students could not name a single person
who was unaware of the meaning of the term—they offered an array of
definitions. The following exchange between six sorority sisters is typical:

Jess: So, what is hooking up?
Kathryn: Umm, I’d say there’s like three ranges. It’s like,
one-night stand, then, like, hooking up, like
undefined exclusively or un-exclusively but you’re
like hooking up for an extended period of time that
usually maxes out at like 4-6 weeks—[laughter,
other students nodding their heads]—then you’re
dating.
Mandy: Maybe not even like a one-night stand
necessarily, but like, a make-out at a frat.
All: Yeah.

38
Hollis: Yeah, like a one-night, one-time—
Beth: Slash five minutes, slash all night—
Hollis: Out on the dance floor, either for like 5 seconds or
like, all night long and he takes you home but you
just, like, kiss goodbye and that’s it.
Beth: Or you leave in the morning in his clothes!
[Laughter.]
Kathryn: Right.
Leanne: I consider hooking up to be anything more than
kissing. Kissing or making out is kissing and
making out.
Summer: Oh, see, I count everything. I leave it open.
Mandy: Me too, like a big umbrella.

College men, too, offered similarly broad definitions. Take for example this
excerpt from a group interview with four independent (not involved in the
Greek system) men:

39
Jess: What’s a hookup?
Dylan: Uhhhh. It’s an interesting question. There’s
varying degrees.
Steve: It’s kind of a vague word.
Kai: Yeah. I mean, in high school, it just meant like
making out with somebody. But then -- I think it
just means you have something going on.
Dylan: There’s like varying degrees.
Michael: My theory—this is my personal opinion—I think
once you turn horizontal, like, you find a surface in
which you are horizontal—[laughter]—that’s a
hookup.
Steve: See, that’s not what I think, but that’s funny.
Jess: What do you think?
Steve: I mean, I think, like, making out.
Dylan: But like, making out with somebody for like, five
seconds, I don’t know if that would count.

Yet despite the apparent ambiguity of the term, none of the students I spoke
to, nor those in any other accounts I can find, believe that hooking up simply

40
means hanging out. The meaning of hooking up among college students
today is, invariably, sexual.

Jess: How would you describe hooking up to somebody
who had never heard of it?
Karen: People … usually getting drunk and just having
casual sex, no strings attached.
Jess: Is it always sex?
Harold: It’s just kind of, like, a casual thing.
Alex: I think hooking up is … you have to have casual
sex, I guess. No strings attached.
Karen: Actually, umm, some of my friends use the word
“hookup” for anything but sex. Just, like, sexual
things. But it doesn’t have to be intercourse.
Jess: Could it just be getting together and going to a
movie?
Harold: Not anymore. It always has a sexual connotation.

The other students I spoke to corroborated these definitions. They
maintained that hooking up is “a situational thing” with “varying degrees” that

41
is “difficult to document exactly.” A hookup may include “anything from
kissing to having sex, and in between—or both,” and it may involve “multiple
partners, sometimes at the same time, multiple times a week.” Leanne, a
sophomore sorority member, summed it up: “Do whatever you want.
Whoever you want. Whenever.”
Defining “Culture”
In order to understand how these shared definitions help constitute “hookup
culture,” we need to be clear about what “culture” is in the first place. We
often say that activities or artifacts characteristic of certain social groups—
rap music, for example, or romance novels—are “cultural,” and contrast
these with other realms of social life such as politics or the economy
(Spillman 2002, 3; see also Hays 2000). We also seem to have some sense
that different groups of folks “have” cultures—for instance, “gay culture” or
“black culture” or “American culture”—that connect us to other people in our
groups and distinguish us from outsiders (see Berger 1995; Spillman 2002).
We also talk about things like “high culture” and “pop culture” and
“oppositional culture,” and we might even be able to name some of the
values and practices that we think these various cultures include. In general,
culture seems to be something we find in people’s heads; it’s something
private, subjective, maybe a reflection of material processes or social

42
structures, but definitely not scientific “truth” (Hays 2000). Culture, as most
people tend to think of it, is just something that drifts around, popping up on
people’s dinner plates or the fourth of July, gone just as quickly the next day.
Sociologists who have made the cultural turn (see Hays 2000) have
argued that this common-sense way of thinking and talking about culture is
largely misguided. Sure, different groups of people may, and often do,
express “their” culture—wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, or eating
tamales—but these cultural expressions do not just float around willy-nilly.
Rather, they are patterned and structured in ways that individuals do not
always see or control. Unlike those who see culture as “soft,” cultural
sociologists understand culture as a powerful symbolic system that plays a
central part in shaping social existence (Hays 2000, 597).
Hays (1994; 2000) argues that culture must be understood as a social
structure. She writes:

Culture is a social, durable, layered pattern of cognitive and
normative systems that are at once material and ideal,
objective and subjective, embodied in artifacts and embedded
in behavior, passed about in interaction, internalized in
personalities, and externalized in institutions. Culture is both
the product of human interaction and the producer of certain
forms of human interaction. Culture is both constraining and
enabling. Culture is a social structure with an underlying logic of
its own (1994, 65).

43
As social structures, cultures consist of systems of meaning and social
relations. Systems of meaning, according to Hays, include beliefs, values,
language, forms of knowledge, and common sense, as well as material
products, interactional practices, and ways of life. Systems of social relations
include patterned roles, relationships, and hierarchies of people such as
gender, race, and class (Hays 1994, 65). In this view, cultures cannot be
reduced to any of these elements; systems of social relations and systems of
meaning continually interact and influence each other. Moreover, cultures
(like all social structures) are shaped by previous and existing cultural forms.
Then there’s that part about cultures being both constraining and
enabling. In Hays’ view, cultures allow for “structurally transformative
agency,” or the ability to make choices from structurally provided alternatives
that may effectively transform a culture. However, Hays warns that although
we are free to think and behave in a variety of ways, cultures will, more often
than not, reproduce themselves and remain stable over time. In other words,
although they can change, cultures are not infinitely malleable.

If we understand culture as comprising dynamic systems of
meaning with a certain inner logic of their own; systems that
organize thought and are embedded in concrete ways of life;
that are sometimes articulated and sometimes taken for
granted; that are simultaneously external to the individual and
internalized by her; that have both an ideal and material
existence; that are sometimes open to reflection and

44
sometimes operating behind the backs of actors; that shape the
way we think and act; systems that include language and
knowledge as well as norms, values, and beliefs, the most
grandiose ceremonies as well as the most mundane rituals;
then we realize that culture is profoundly resilient (Hays 1994,
68).

So, to sum up: culture is simultaneously individual and collective, subjective
and objective, ideal and material, private and public, small and large,
internalized and externalized, enabling and constraining. It is comprised of
systems of meaning and social relations. It is stable, durable, patterned,
organized, transcendent, and pervasive. Ultimately, then, culture is incredibly
complex, and wields a tremendous amount of power. For this reason alone,
culture is a worthy object of sociological inquiry—but how can, and how
should, we study it?
Culture has long been an object of interest for sociologists. Beginning
with the classical theorists and continuing through the Chicago school,
symbolic interactionism, the mass culture critique, the social construction of
institutions and identities, studies of subcultures, labeling theory,
ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of cultural industries,
the study of culture has generated studies of identities, boundaries, cultural
production, cultural capital, ideological hegemony, and audience studies
(Hays 2000, 596-97). Social scientists have studied the “cultures” of crime

45
and delinquency, social classes, age groups, occupational groups, ethnic-
immigrant groups, gender, and more (Berger 1995, 26). Scholars have
emphasized different analytic dimensions of culture, including artifacts,
norms, customs, habits, practices, rituals, symbols, categories, codes, ideas,
values, discourse, worldviews, ideologies, and principles (Spillman 2002, 4).
Much ink has been spilled debating the “right” way to study culture (Douglas
1986; Geertz 1973; Hays 2000; Schudson 1989; Spillman 2002; Swidler
1986), and these debates continue into the present day (see, for example,
Gans 2012).
Spillman (2002) has argued that much of the confusion about how to
study culture may be resolved if we conceive of culture as processes of
meaning-making that may appear in all sorts of social practices and
products, both generally and in specialized arenas (4). In order to understand
processes of meaning-making, then, our task as cultural sociologists is to
account for different meanings and to examine the effects of these processes
and meanings in social life (ibid.). As cultural sociologists, we can study
culture “on the ground,” by examining how interactions constitute meanings
and how individuals use them; “in the institutional field,” by interrogating
meaning-making as it happens within institutions or networks of cultural
producers; and/or “in the text,” by investigating how textual properties are

46
influenced by, and influential for, meaning-making practices (Spillman
2002, 8). If we treat processes of meaning-making as occurring
simultaneously in these three ways, we can avoid the traps of seeing culture
as either consensual (without variation or dissension) or as merely reflecting
power relations (Spillman 2002, 9; see also Hays 2000). In addition, by
showing how the identities and practices of individuals and small groups
depend on the social organization of meaning production and the discursive
frameworks which structure available meanings, as well as how macro-social
phenomena are composed in micro-practices, understanding culture as
processes of meaning-making helps us understand more precisely how the
“micro” and the “macro” are connected in society (Spillman 2002, 9).
All of this relates to hookup culture in a few important ways. First, it
helps us get at the question posed by Heldman and Wade (2010) at the
beginning of this chapter: is hooking up a form of sexual behavior that is part
of a broader sexual culture, or is it a culture in its own right? If we follow
Hays’s (1994, 65) definition of culture—a social, durable, layered pattern of
cognitive and normative systems that are at once material and ideal,
objective and subjective, embodied in artifacts and embedded in behavior,
passed about in interaction, internalized in personalities, and externalized in
institutions—then it becomes clear that hooking up is indeed a culture. As

47
this chapter helps demonstrate, college hookup culture is a social structure
with an underlying logic of its own; it organizes thought and is embedded in
concrete ways of life; it is sometimes articulated and sometimes taken for
granted; it is simultaneously external to the individual and internalized by her;
it has both an ideal and material existence; and it is sometimes open to
reflection and sometimes operates behind the backs of actors (Hays 1994,
65, 68).
Second, thinking about hooking up as a culture helps us understand
how power and inequality are produced and reproduced through seemingly
mundane events. As a system of social relations, hookup culture structures
roles and relationships in patterned ways that are difficult to avoid or disrupt.
And, as I will show, it also embeds people within hierarchies of gender,
sexuality, and race and encourages the construction and reproduction of
symbolic boundaries.
Third, conceptualizing hooking up as a culture helps us understand
why the majority of college students know the norms, values, and beliefs that
undergird hookup culture even though most of them do not hook up with any
regularity. In this sense, hookup culture has become hegemonic on many
college campuses across the U.S.—even if they disagree with its tenets,
many students feel that hooking up is the only available form of intimate

48
interaction (Bogle 2008, 90). The system of practices, meanings, and
values that hookup culture promotes becomes the yardstick by which all
students measure their own experiences of intimacy. Viewed in this way,
hookup culture takes on a new importance: it ultimately shapes how students
relate to and understand their social world.
Research on Hooking Up
Despite—or perhaps because of—its loose, shifting parameters, hooking up
has become remarkably popular among young people in the contemporary
United States. Indeed, in recent years scholars have identified hooking up as
the dominant form of intimate heterosexual interaction on U.S. college
campuses (Bogle 2008; England, Shafer, and Fogarty 2007; Hamilton and
Armstrong 2009; Heldman and Wade 2010). Research shows that hooking
up is often fueled by alcohol and takes place largely within the context of
house parties and bars on or near college campuses (England et al. 2007).
Above all, it is a casual sexual interaction that requires little communication
and presumes no commitment to an ongoing relationship (Bogle 2008; Kalish
and Kimmel 2011; Manning, Giordano, and Longmore 2006).
Early research on hooking up was dedicated to defining hookups vis-
à-vis traditional dating relationships. For example, Glenn and Marquardt
(2001) describe hooking up as “a distinctive sex-without-commitment

49
interaction between college women and men” (4). Sociologists have also
referred to social, historical, and demographic shifts including the advent of
the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, the increasing age of first
marriage, and the growing proportion of youth who spend their early adult life
in college to explain the rise of hooking up among college students in the US
(Bogle 2008; England et al. 2007).
Other research has closely examined various social and psychological
predictors of hooking up (Grello, Welsh, and Harper 2006; Paul, McManus,
and Hayes 2000). For example, Grello et al. (2006) found that “females who
reported the most depressive symptomatology and males who reported the
fewest symptoms were the most likely to engage in casual sex” (265). Kalish
(2007) has shown that students who are younger, white, and less religious
tend to hook up more than those who are older, nonwhite, and more
religious.
The Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS) has been
administered to over 19,000 students from 22 U.S. campuses and offers the
most comprehensive overview of patterns in hookup behavior and practices
to date. It asks students about levels of sexual activity, types of sexual
behavior, levels of familiarity with and respect for sexual partners, and
experiences with giving and receiving oral sex and achieving orgasm

50
(England, Shafer, and Fogarty 2007). Analyses of recent OCSLS data
suggest that the majority of college students (72%) have hooked up at least
once during their time as undergraduates (Kalish and Kimmel 2011). On
average, students have hooked up nearly seven times by the end of senior
year, an average that includes 42% of students who have never hooked up
and 28% who have hooked up 10 times or more (ibid.). According to OCSLS
respondents, most hookups do not include sexual intercourse; however, the
majority of students who have intercourse during college do so as part of a
hookup (Hamilton and Armstrong 2009).
Scholars have interpreted OCSLS data, as well as data from similar
studies on individual campuses, in a variety of ways. For example, in a 2007
study, England, Shafer, and Fogarty examined the gendered character of
hookups, finding that women play less of a role in initiating sexual interaction,
reach orgasm less frequently than men, and are at higher risk of being
stigmatized for their participation in the hookup scene. Bogle (2008) has
argued that the expectations surrounding a hookup are different for women
and men, with women hoping that hookups will lead to a relationship and
men preferring that hookups come with “no strings attached.” Hamilton and
Armstrong (2009) reject this “battle of the sexes” approach, suggesting that
neither hookups nor relationships offer women an advantage over men.

51
Moreover, they suggest that a focus solely on gender obscures the ways
in which other factors such as social class shape how college students
experience hookup culture. Finally, Kalish and Kimmel (2011) have argued
that hooking up is a mode of homosocial communication for men. Hooking up
also, in their view, allows “sex-positive” women to engage in traditionally
“male” modes of sexual behavior while exploring their own heterosexual
desires (Kalish and Kimmel 2011, 138).
Taken together, studies about hooking up can be divided into two
general camps: one group has amassed survey data about the frequency,
regularity, and general characteristics of hookups on a large scale; the other
has presented individual testimonials from college women, and some men,
describing their personal experiences with hooking up. While these studies
provide a useful overview of the rates and potential risks associated with
casual, alcohol-driven sexual experimentation, they fall short in a couple of
important ways.
First, many of these studies suggest, either implicitly or explicitly, that
hooking up is especially risky for young women. As a woman, this rubs me
the wrong way because it’s patriarchal and patronizing. As a scholar, it rubs
me the wrong way because it leads researchers to ask the wrong questions.
While I agree that hooking up can be “bad” for women, I also think it can be

52
“bad” for men, and, more importantly, that if we only look at how it’s “bad,”
we miss a lot of the most interesting stuff that’s going on.
Second, all of the research on hooking up to date has conceptualized
hooking up simply as a form of sexual behavior—a hookup is, in this view, a
sex act that has risks and rewards for those who do it regularly. But what
about all the students (a whopping 80 percent, according to OCSLS data)
who hook up only sporadically, or those who have never hooked up at all?
Again, if we only look at how hooking up affects the students who do it, we
miss a lot of really interesting stuff.
Finally, nearly every account of hooking up to date concludes that
hookup culture is “normless.” For example, a 2001 report to the Independent
Women’s Forum found that “the culture of courtship, a set of social norms
and expectations that once helped young people find the pathway to
marriage, has largely become a hookup culture with almost no shared norms
or expectations” (Glenn and Marquardt 2001, 6). Or, as Bogle (2008) asserts:

The fact that the hookup script allows for such a wide range of
behavior leaves students grappling with the norms of the
hookup script. This lack of clarity on what others are doing
when they say ‘I hooked up’ led to a sense of normlessness.
Rather than there being a standard to which individuals should
aspire, students seemed to believe they were responsible for
inventing their own personal standards for what is appropriate
(93-94).

53
Hooking up, in this view, leaves young women and men confused and
alone, searching for rules in an unregulated environment. Though they would
much prefer an alternative to hooking up, students continue to participate
because of social pressure—hooking up, for them, seems like “the only game
in town” (Bogle 2008, 90). Moreover, scholars contend, college students are
“caught between a sexually permissive college culture and a broader culture
that is not as accepting of sexual behavior” which may create collective
“dissonance” and confusion about casual sex (Paul, McManus, and Hayes
2000, 87).
To be sure, scholars are correct in their assessment of hookup culture
as fundamentally ambiguous. Indeed, the promise of ambiguity and the
freedom that in connotes seems to be part of its appeal—since the rules are
equivocal, hooking up offers the possibility of sexual gratification without the
restrictions on autonomy intrinsic to more conventional relationships. Even
the term “hookup” itself is vague: as we have seen, a hookup can mean
grinding on the dance floor, three-way anal intercourse, or anything in
between. But while other observers maintain that this uncertainty somehow
implies the absence of rules and expectations, I want to suggest that
ambiguity is in not necessarily synonymous with normlessness—particularly
in the case of hooking up. In fact, what I find in the hookup “code” is a

54
structured and systematic ambiguity, just as there is a structured and
systematic character to the randomness and casualness of the practice itself.
My findings suggest that the hookup scene actually involves a detailed, and
widely known, set of cultural norms that inform and guide students’ sexual
practices.
Scholars are also right to give causal credence to the social, historical,
and demographic shifts that have made hooking up an increasingly
convenient option for college students. The availability of birth control, the
legalization of abortion, the increasing age of first marriage, and the growing
proportion of young people, especially young women, who are spending their
early adult life in college are all changes that matter for anyone trying to
understand the emergence of hooking up as a popular sexual practice. On
their own, however, these changes cannot explain the particular form that
contemporary hookup culture takes. Why, for example, do so many college
women call their friends “sluts” as a term of endearment? Why do students
report that talking about hookups is as much fun, if not more, than hooking up
itself? And why are undergraduates unfazed by continuing gender disparities
in rates of orgasm and oral sex? To answer these questions, we need to see
the connection of hookup culture to wider cultural trends.

55
In short, I believe the cultural context and the cultural content of
hooking up remain grossly under-theorized. The research we have on
hooking up is great at telling us about the what and the who and even the
how, but it’s not so great at telling us about the why and the why now. These
studies give us valuable descriptive data about hooking up as a sexual
behavior, but they do not tell us very much about hookup culture.
In contrast to previous studies, I examine hooking up as a postfeminist
culture that shapes and constrains the beliefs and actions of all students,
whether or not they hook up themselves. This approach allows us to examine
how the cultural “code” of hooking up is itself deeply gendered,
heteronormative, and assimilationist, as well as the ways in which its
enactment tends to reproduce, rather than disrupt, gender, sexual, and racial
inequalities on campus. It also gives us the tools to ask the “why now?” and
“why this particular form?” questions and make connections between the act
of hooking up and broader social, political, and cultural shifts.
Hooking Up as Culture
Think back for a minute to our earlier discussion of how students define
hooking up. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that sorority girls know the ins
and outs of campus hookup culture (see, for example, Bogle 2008). What
may be surprising, however, is that students who had never hooked up

56
provided strikingly similar definitions, as evidenced by the following
exchange among a group of international students who were not involved in
the hookup scene:

Jess: If I asked you to describe hooking up to someone
who had never heard of it, what would you say?
Jamie: I’d tell you it was casual sex between people who
don’t know each other.
Krissy: It’s when two people get together and have
intimate behavior.
Jess: Does it have to be sex?
Krissy: It has to be sexual, but maybe not sex-sex.
Jess: Does making out count for everybody?
Jamie: Not me. I would say, “I made out with somebody.”
Lorraine: I would think it’s just—two random people—and I
think most likely it’s drunk?
Jess: Do people ever hook up sober?
Krissy: Sometimes.
Jess: But most of the time they’re drunk?

57
Lorraine: I think so, yeah. Most likely I think it’s in a
casual—like, when people are clubbing and stuff
like that. You hook up with people cuz you’re
dancing with them, I don’t know, body language
and stuff. That’s how it looks in the movies at
least.

Just like the sorority women and independent men, these students—who, for
various reasons, adamantly avoided the hookup scene—have a pretty
accurate idea of what a hookup entails, even though they’ve never hooked
up themselves. I found this to be true across the board: whether or not
students hooked up regularly, or sometimes, or not at all, didn’t actually
matter—they were all aware of the rituals and rules that shape sexual
interactions on campus. This basic observation suggests that hooking up is
more than just a form of sexual behavior; it is also a shared and prescriptive
culture.
Because scholars have generally agreed that hooking up is
fundamentally characterized by a lack of norms, rules, or coherent logic, re-
conceptualizing hooking up as culture adds an important layer of complexity
to existing accounts. My goal here is not to dismiss or discount claims that

58
students are “grappling with the norms of the hookup script,” or that many
believe they are “responsible for inventing their own personal standards for
what is appropriate,” or even that hookup culture is inherently ambiguous.
Rather, I aim to show that ambiguity, contradiction, and personal
responsibility are all part of—not antithetical to—the shared cultural “code” of
hooking up. To underscore this point, the following sections include excerpts
from my interviews that demonstrate students’ awareness of the rituals and
rules that, I argue, are central to the construction of collegiate hookup culture.
Rituals
Alcohol
Alcohol is often cited as the “social lubricant” that makes hooking up
possible. It is also frequently blamed for the “misperceptions” that students
may have about hookup culture (Bogle 2008; see also Grello et al. [2006]
and Paul et al. [2000] for an overview of sociological research on alcohol
consumption and casual sex). To be sure, many of the students I spoke to
believed that hookups would occur far less frequently if alcohol were not
readily available.
From the outset, my respondents confirmed that hooking up and
alcohol make great bedfellows. When asked if one should be drunk during a
hookup, Matt, a fraternity brother, answered bluntly: “Shit yeah.” A sorority

59
member named Amy concurred, saying, “The drinking scene goes hand-
in-hand with the hookup scene.” Her sorority sisters elaborated:

Carol: I think the fact that we’re at LAU, and like … it’s
not a party school, but—
Danielle: People know how to party.
Megan: Yeah, and the frats are wealthy and can throw
these huge parties with unlimited alcohol, and that
definitely, like—
Carol: Helps. A lot.
Megan: That’s why I think it’s not limited to the Row—it’s
like, where there’s alcohol …
Jess: Do you think alcohol has to be involved for it to be
a hookup?
Carol: I do feel like alcohol is always present.
Megan: Well, that’s how it starts.
Danielle: Definitely how it starts.
[Everyone agrees.]

60
Sara: Yeah, I haven’t had anything start here that didn’t
involve some sort of substance.
Carol: I have. It happens. But it’s very rare.

Most students described feeling pressure
15
to “party” and drink alcohol.
Nowhere was this pressure more pronounced than on the Row.
16

Hollis: The weirdest experience is going out to the Row
sober—you never wanna go to the Row again.
Mandy: Have you gone to the Row sober?!
[Laughter, disbelief.]
Hollis: Once. It’s not fun. You, like, see these people
embarrassing themselves and doing things they
regret in the morning—it’s, like, the kind of thing
that’s only funny if you’re on the same page as
them.

15
When I first asked students if they felt pressure to hook up or participate in the party scene
on campus, many initially interpreted the term “pressure” in the sense of rape or sexual
violence, rather than social or cultural pressure. It was only after I probed further that they
recounted feeling non-violent kinds of pressure.
16
The Row is a street near LAU that houses all the fraternities and sororities. As I elaborate
in Chapter 5, it is the social center of campus.

61
As Mandy’s comment suggests, students in the Greek system found it
hard to imagine a hookup culture that did not include alcohol. But even non-
Greek students reported that the social pressure to drink alcohol was part of
the hookup scene. When I asked if she felt pressure to participate in the
hookup scene, Lisa, a soft-spoken freshman who didn’t drink or hook up,
described it this way:

Not even just hooking up, but it kind of is a part of it, but like,
you get asked—any time you’re not holding a drink—”Do you
want a drink? Do you want a drink?” And so sometimes I’ll just
like, get one, and not even drink it. And then they’ll just start,
like, tapping your drink, like “Why aren’t you drinking, I just got
you this drink!” And it’s like [throws her hands up in frustration.]

It seems, as other observers have suggested, that drinking alcohol may
function as “liquid courage” or an “alibi” for questionable sexual behavior. The
following focus group discussion is illustrative:

Jess: Should you be drunk during a hookup?
Andy: I think, just going back to the awkwardness of the
hookup—I think alcohol helps with that, because it
gives you an alibi, in that whenever someone’s
like, “You hooked up with who?!” the next
question is always—

62
All: “Were you drunk?”
[Laughter.]
Andy: And you’re always like, “Well, yeah.” And then it’s
like, oh, all right. That’s a completely different
story and there’s a completely different
perception.

This exchange confirms that students’ alcohol use helps them navigate the
ambiguous terrain of hookup culture. It also alludes to another important
ritual in the hookup scene: gossip.
Gossip
Jess: How often do you talk about your hookups?
Carol: 24/7!
[Laughter.]
Megan: Yeah. We talk about boys a lot. Well—we’re best
friends, so we talk to each other about everything.
Danielle: If you’re not talking about hookups, you’re talking
about boys. Like, not necessarily hooking up—but
that’s a big topic. I mean, we have some boys that
we’re just friends with.

63
Sara: For sure. But in terms of, like, boys that we’re
interested in, in the like, sexual sense, I think we
talk about them a lot.
Lissa: I don’t really go into that much detail, we don’t
really get—
Caitlin: I don’t think we’re like boys in that sense, like,
“Yeah, I totally did this!”
Carol: I don’t know—sometimes we do get graphic. Like,
if something goes awry. [Laughter.] And you don’t
know if it’s just you, so you have to consult
everyone else to find out what actually happened!
Megan: That’s so true.
Sara: If everything goes as planned, you’re OK. But if
something awkward transpires, or someone saw
you on your walk of shame, or somebody walked
in—
Megan: Yeah, then we go into major detail.
Caitlin: I think part of the hookup culture is hooking up
with someone and then telling someone about it.
All: Yeah.

64
Megan: But you don’t spread it—you just tell your friends.
Carol: It’s something to talk about.
Danielle: Friday morning debrief is a major part of it.
Sara: Ohh, Friday. That takes up, like, half our day.
[Laughter.]
Lissa: I don’t—it’s just kinda me, but I don’t like to tell
everyone everything about me. So there’s a lot of
stuff with boys that I don’t wanna tell people.
[Awkward silence as the girls assess this
comment.]
Caitlin: I think it’s, like, personal, how much you
disclose—like, my friends, I told them everything
at the beginning of the year, and they’re like, “Oh
my God, Caitlin’s so open,” cuz that how I was in
high school and that’s how I am still, and I kinda,
like, scared some people—but it’s personal.
Megan: But whether or not you tell us, we’re still tellin’
you. You’re still gonna hear about it.

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Like the sorority women in this focus group exchange, the students I talked
to described a widespread tendency for friends to talk about hookups. As
Caitlin argues above, “Part of the hookup culture is hooking up with someone
and then telling someone about it.” Even Lissa, who, unlike her friends, feels
uncomfortable talking about her sexual experiences, is influenced by the
cultural demand for gossip. As Megan reminds her: “whether or not you tell
us, we’re still tellin’ you.”
Another group of sorority sisters explained that part of the fun of
hooking up is talking about it with their friends.

Jess: What do you like about hooking up?
Summer: It’s like, when you go out on the Row, it’s just new
… someone that you don’t know … it’s just, like,
exciting.
Leanne: I dunno—for me, it’s almost just as fun to talk
about it the next day.
Beth: I know! Talking about it is, like, the best.
[Laughter.]
Summer: Yeah, the debrief is really fun.

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Three independent (non-Greek) women who occasionally hooked up had
this to say:

Jess: How often do you guys talk to your friends about
hooking up?
Samantha: Every single one that I’ve had.
[Laughter.]
Arielle: Probably, like, multiple times a day.
Stephanie: And not even if it happened, but if you wanted it
to, or want it to. It doesn’t even matter if it
occurred.
Samantha: I mean, it’s not like the only conversation that
people have, but I feel like among girls, it’s
something they can, like, talk about.

Men, too, often discussed their hookups. A sophomore fraternity brother
named Steve explained:

I think that’s a big part of it—the story aspect. In that if so many
guys are trying to hook up, then the next morning, when you’re
hanging out again, you’re gonna go out in the circle and
everyone’s gonna be like, “What happened?” and like, if you

67
don’t have that story to share, then you’re kinda at that point—
like, you’re not a part of it.

Of course, gossip among young people is nothing new, and sex has long
been a popular topic of conversation. But bragging about sexual
experiences—a ritual conventionally understood as masculine—seems to be
particularly important for women (as well as men) in hookup culture.
Sociologist Pepper Schwartz reports that there is “more bravado lately
among college women boasting about their sexual conquests” (quoted in
Rackl and Herrmann 2005). Like Schwartz, many of the women I spoke to—
particularly those who did not hook up—believe that the allure of hookup
“debriefs” is one part gossip, two parts bravado. As a junior named Lydia
argued, “A lot of the hookup culture is based off that vocalization—like, the
telling of stories and the bragging aspect of it.” E’Chelle, a celibate African
American independent, had this to say about her roommate: “I hear stories of
accomplishment, like, every single time. I just think it’s all a show. It’s just
flattery.” Notably, it seems hookup braggadocio may function differently for
women and men. “Girls brag about hooking up with guys when they’re hot
guys,” remarked an Asian American freshman named Patty. “Guys brag
about hooking up no matter what.”

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Rules
Casual

No strings attached. Hit it and quit it, or a booty call, whatever.
A good time, and that’s it. Definitely no mushy feelings
afterward. It’s almost like a hi-and-goodbye, wave on the street
kind of thing.

Like Kamau, an African American student who did not participate in the
hookup scene, the students I interviewed insisted that hooking up is, first and
foremost, a casual encounter. Various students pointed out that hookups
should not include expectations for further contact, nor should either partner
“get attached.” As one sorority member named Beth assured me, women are
perfectly capable of adhering to this rule. “There are so many girls who don’t
give a shit,” she told the group. “Even me—like, I don’t give a shit. Don’t get
too attached. I’m not attached.”
In general, my respondents agreed that while some students were
disappointed by the casualness of the hookup scene, most knew that
hookups were not the place to go to find a relationship. The following
statement from a senior named Willow is typical:

I would say if a girl goes into it thinking it’s just a hookup, then I
don’t think she expects much out of it. Cuz if you actually like a
guy, you’re not gonna just go—like, it’s not gonna start as a
hookup.

69

In a related theme, students also explained that hookups are definitely not
the place to start a relationship. All of my respondents said they would
probably not try to find a relationship at a party, and most believed hooking
up was incompatible with marriage, “feelings,” or “something more.”
Random
In addition to the shared assumption that hookups should have no
expectations and are not conducive to serious relationships, students
described an array of more specific rules that they used to help navigate the
hookup terrain.
There are norms determining who should hook up with whom. The
majority of my respondents agreed that hookup partners should be “random”
with “no prior intimate connection.”
17
Troy, Tanisha, and Kimberly, a group of
African American seniors, explained:

17
Students made an exception here for “repeats,” or hookups between the same people that
continue over time, usually for a few weeks or months. However, “repeats” should not be
confused with “relationships” because they are not always monogamous and often end
suddenly and without warning.

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Jess: So, what’s a hookup?
Troy: Well, when I think of a hookup, the first thing I
think of is a party scene, I think of a couch, a
leather couch.
[Laughter.]
And usually I think of a male and a female—or
two individuals—but if it’s a male and a female
then the female’s usually intoxicated, and them
making out or hooking up, but they don’t really
have to know each other. It has to be no
relationship. It’s just casual fun.
Jess: Does it have to be strangers?
Kimberly: No.
Jess: So “no relationship” means what?
Tanisha: It just means that there’s been no prior intimate
connection.
Troy: Or like, no titles.
Kimberly: Not boyfriend and girlfriend.
Troy: Exactly.

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Students had a variety of strategies for avoiding familiar faces and former
partners. For example, an international student named Elena who had never
hooked up said, “I don’t think I’d wanna hook up with somebody who, like,
lives on my floor.” Shawn, an Asian American independent, advised looking
even farther away: “In my experience, it’s easier to hook up with girls who
don’t go to LAU.”
And, once again, even students who did not hook up were attuned to
the “random” rule. When asked to explain students’ preference for hooking
up with randoms, a white engineering major named Jenny who had never
hooked up hypothesized, “You don’t have to talk to them and deal with all
that—their problems. Friendship is a lot of work. Relationships are a lot of
work. Sex, not so much.”
In another focus group of sophomore women who had never hooked
up, Krissy, Lorraine, and Jamie had this to say:

Jess: When you hook up with someone, is it better to
know them or not know them?
All: Not know them.
Jess: Why is that?
Krissy: Then you have to deal with it afterwards.

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Jess: What do you have to deal with?
Lorraine: They take it really serious.
Jess: Who does?
Lorraine: The partner. Maybe one side would take it too
serious, and then you don’t want to go into the
relationship—or maybe you don’t like the other
person and you just want sex.
Jess: Why else would it be preferable not to know the
person?
Emily: You don’t ever have to talk to them again.
Lorraine: And you can find different types of guys!

Not all students agreed that full anonymity was ideal. Take, for example, the
following exchange between three independent men:

Daniel: The perfect hookup is, like, you’re friends with the
person beforehand, and then you hook up with
them, and it’s like, perfectly normal afterwards.
Like, it could happen again or not and it would be
fine.

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Chad: Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. I don’t like,
like, not knowing the name of the other person.
It’s like, fuckin’ weird. Cuz you feel like, I should
know their name—that’s fucked up.
Nick: I dunno—sometimes I’m kinda down—sometimes
I’m OK with hooking up with a girl and, like, not
really talking to her at the end of it.
Daniel: Yeah, me too. Like, sometimes.

In the view of many respondents, anonymity provides a welcome safeguard
against post-hookup awkwardness. One woman, for instance, suggested that
anonymous hookups are ultimately “safer” because they “aren’t as
meaningful” as having sex with a boy/girlfriend or friend.
18

Taking Culture Seriously
To the uninformed observer (or even the seasoned scholar), it may appear at
first glance that hookups are undefined events, usually made even more

18
“Friends with benefits” is another aberration to the “randoms” norm. However, students
reported that while they would enjoy a “friends with benefits” situation, these kinds of
relationships were rare as well as notoriously sticky—precisely because one friend or the
other almost always “gets attached.” The exception that proves the rule.

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fuzzy by alcohol, and certainly not planned or logical. Take, for example,
the following account from an independent man named Kai:

There’s like, this system that’s like, you’re gonna get drunk,
randomly meet randoms, and just, like, whatever happens.

It is possible to interpret Kai’s definition literally and conclude that hooking up
is just a drunken, random occurrence. However, I argue that such an
interpretation would be both empirically unfounded and theoretically
negligent. For one, to understand hooking up as an unregulated, undefined,
and unplanned phenomenon is to miss the crux of Kai’s statement: “There’s
like, this system …” Although his language skills could use some work, Kai’s
characterization of hooking up as systematic is spot-on. As we have seen,
students are able to name a range of regulations and expectations for how to
behave before, during, and after a hookup takes place. Contrary to the claim
that “[t]here are no clear rules guiding what they should do and under what
conditions” (Bogle 2008, 182), many of the men and women I interviewed
were acutely aware that hooking up is a “game” and that they should play by
the rules. As Danielle put it, “The game is soo crazy. Oh my God. Like, now I
have to wait twenty-two minutes before I text back cuz that’ll make me look
busy.” Danielle’s sorority sister Carol continued, “The rules are there always.
The game is, like, always being played.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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There is one important thing that scholars have gotten right about
hookup culture: even though a minority of college students hook up regularly,
students tend to overestimate the level of their peers’ sexual activity. Take,
for instance, the following excerpt from an interview with three independent
men:

If you’re not [hooking up] then it’s weird, cuz you’re sort of like,
what are you doing? Like, what are you doing with yourself? Do
you have a hobby? Do you, like, collect stamps? What do you
do in your spare time? What are you doing? You’re not chasing
tail? Get the fuck outta here.

As this comment illustrates, hooking up is indeed understood as the
normative form of sexual interaction on campus. Students dealt with the
perceived pressure to participate in hookup culture in different ways. As we
will see in Chapter 3, many women and men drew upon a neoliberal rhetoric
of individual choice and personal responsibility to justify their participation, or
lack thereof, in the hookup scene. Others described dedicating large
amounts of time and energy to looking “hot” and behaving according to other
gendered norms, as I discuss in Chapter 4. But for the most part, students
believed that hookup culture—while powerful—was just another part of
college life. “I think it’s just the environment,” a sophomore named Chelsea
explained. “In high school, hooking up is such a big deal, having sex is such

76
a big deal—and when you get to college, it’s just, like, everyone’s kind of
doing it.”
It’s hard to get people to talk about culture, and college students are
no exception. As other scholars have also observed, my respondents often
reverted to the explanation that hooking up is simply what college students
do—for better or for worse, it “just happens.” Many of the students I spoke to
believed that college is the one time in their lives when they can “do it and
get away with it,” a time “when you’re supposed to … go crazy.” Whether
they regularly engaged in casual sex or never hooked up at all, most
students offered some version of Caitlin’s rationale: “When you’re out, like,
drunk on the Row … it just kinda happens.”
When I talk to my students, friends, and colleagues about the broader
implications of hookup culture, they often assure me that hooking up is
simply a “phase” that young people will get past once they leave college. Yet
seeing hookup culture as an inevitable stop on a developmental train, or as
unique to the college campus, obscures the larger cultural significance of
hooking up, particularly the ways in which it is linked to other dominant
ideologies. It is these linkages to which we now turn.

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CHAPTER 3
WHAT’S (POST-) FEMINIST ABOUT COLLEGE HOOKUP CULTURE?

In Hooking Up, sociologist Kathleen Bogle writes: “Rule number one for
women is: Do not act like men in the sexual arena” (2008, 103). As I will
show, her statement reflects a common misunderstanding of recent socio-
cultural shifts as well as the current cultural climate on college campuses
across America. Like other scholars of college hookup culture, it is as if Bogle
has failed to notice the explosion of “postfeminist” popular cultural icons
during the last two decades: women like Lil’ Kim, Britney Spears, Christina
Aguilera, Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé,
Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, the sisters Kardashian and, of course, fictional heroine
Carrie Bradshaw, all of whom unabashedly celebrate female sexual prowess
and are adored and emulated by of millions of girls (and boys) around the
world. If, as Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2002) has suggested, teenage girls
who consume sexualized media images are more likely to engage in sexual
activity, these hyper-visible (and hyper-sexualized) icons have no doubt
influenced young women’s attitudes about sex and gender.
This chapter examines the relationship between college hookup
culture and postfeminism. I analyze hookup culture as one site where

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postfeminist cultural discourses are articulated, negotiated, and contested.
After briefly detailing the socio-historical context out of which postfeminism
emerges and proposing a conceptualization of postfeminism as a neoliberal
sensibility, I ask: how does hooking up function as a postfeminist culture? I
find that hooking up is postfeminist in at least three key ways: its explicit
claim to operate beyond gender; its emphasis on female empowerment and
choice; and its “grammar of individualism” (Gill 2007, 153) that undermines
notions of the social or political. In its specific focus on the relationship
between postfeminism and college hookup culture, this research suggests a
new way of thinking about contemporary sexual interaction and contributes to
existing theories of gender, sexuality, and feminism.
Finding Feminism
I never meant for this to be a study about feminism. In the early versions of
my interview schedule, I was only concerned with understanding college
hookup culture; questions about feminism were nowhere to be found. But in
the first interview, during a discussion of inequalities in orgasm rates and oral
sex, I found myself asking six sorority girls: “So, do you guys consider
yourselves feminists?” The conversation exploded. We spent the next two
hours talking about feminism: what it is, what it isn’t, why we need it, and why
we don’t. In every interview that followed, I asked that same question—”So,

79
do you guys consider yourselves feminists?”—with the same result. Far
from the common allegation that today’s college students are apathetic and
apolitical, I heard in those conversations a different kind of narrative emerge,
one that took seriously the claim that we are living in an era of “gender
equality” and reflected a complicated, and often contradictory, relationship to
feminist politics and ideals.
This chapter begins with two of those conversations. I cite them here
in their entirety because I am convinced that talking to each other—not their
professors, not their parents, but each other—is a central way students figure
out their relationship to feminism. They also illustrate that what feminism “is”
differs from group to group, and that the value students attach to feminism
(however it is defined) is at least partly based on their particular social
locations and experiences.
The first conversation comes from a group of six sorority sisters. They
are all white, they are all straight, and they all aspire to professional careers.
Their parents, too, are all white, straight, and middle- or upper-class. Hollis,
for instance, was raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. Her dad is a CEO and her
mom, as she puts it, is “just a mom.” There’s also Beth, an outspoken theater
major from Greenwich, Connecticut, with aspirations to become an actress
or, if that doesn’t work out, an engineer. Like Hollis and Beth, the other four

80
girls—Kathryn, Mandy, Leanne, and Summer—are part of the campus
power elite. They have money and the perks that come with it: Marc Jacobs
tote bags, Joe’s jeans, Chanel earrings. More than that, they all fit the mold
of the idealized young American woman: tall, tanned, and slender; long-
haired, made-up, and well-versed in the language of consumer culture. They
are the future Kim Kardashians, the kind of women that popular
commentators love to talk about and that other women (and men) look to as
models for beauty, fashion and, of course, sex. Their opinions are important
not because they are unique, but because they play a central part in shaping
hegemonic views about sex and feminism on campus.

Jess: So, do you guys consider yourselves feminists?
Kathryn: Mmmm … I think feminist has like a negative
connotation, cuz everyone just thinks they’re so,
like, craaa-zy.
Mandy: I think the word “feminist” strikes fear in guys’
hearts.
Hollis: I’m gonna go, “I’m girl power.” I’m not a feminist.

81
Beth: I don’t really know … feminist … like, the
definition. Like, when I think of a feminist all I think
of is like, bra-burning women.
Hollis: Right.
Leanne: We were talking about in one of my classes how
words become stigmatized. I think “feminist” might
have that kind of thing but I, like for me, I’m totally
a proponent of female empowerment.
Kathryn: As opposed to like a die-hard femin-ist.
Summer: Yeah.
Mandy: I wouldn’t stand up and call myself a feminist, but
I mean, like, I don’t think that women are at a
point in life where they are totally equal to men. I
think that we have room for improvement. But I
wouldn’t say I’m a feminist.
Beth: Yeah, definitely the “girl power” movement—like, I
enjoy learning about women’s movements and
that kind of thing, but I wouldn’t go as extreme as
saying “feminist.”

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Leanne: One guy used that as an excuse for me to go
further in our hookup. I can’t remember how he
phrased it, but … like, he seriously tried to
convince me that I wouldn’t be a slut if I slept with
him because guys and girls are the same now,
and he’s not a slut, so …
Summer: Like, if he can do it you should be able to do it?
Wow.
Leanne: Yeah. He really made me start thinkin’!
Jess: Is feminism necessary?
Hollis: This is hard.
Leanne: Well, okay. I don’t want to keep babbling, but I
think there needs to be an equilibrium. One of my
issues with the term, like, “girl power,” is because
I think there are some areas in which guys are
also underrepresented and under-thought-of and
to a certain extent I do generalize them too, and
I’m trying not to do that anymore, because I think
that they have feelings, too. So I think there needs
to be a balance. As opposed to, like—maybe a

83
balancing movement more so than a feminist—
like, just girls—movement. Because I think guys,
it’s about them too, and our interpersonal
relationships. Because I don’t think they expect
blow jobs as much as we think they expect blow
jobs.
Mandy: Just like an understanding kind of thing.
Leanne: Yeah. And I don’t know how to do that with action,
I don’t know if it’s something, like, we need to
have a conversation about these injustices, but I
know there needs to be some kind of action or,
uhh, you know, educational-type thing. I don’t
know.

Perhaps the most telling moment in this entire conversation is when
Hollis complains, “This is hard.” These are girls who rarely have to think
about feminism, or whether it’s necessary; theirs is a world where women
can, and often do, “have it all.” It is also a world, as Leanne reminds us, in
which men are “underrepresented and under-thought-of” and “have feelings
too.” Much of their conversation, in fact, revolves around what men think:

84
Mandy tells us that the word ‘feminism’ “strikes fear in guys’ hearts,” while
Leanne reveals that it was because of a hookup with a particularly creepy
guy that she “really started thinkin’” about feminism.
Importantly, these girls do not reject feminist ideals wholesale. Mandy
even admits that she doesn’t think we’ve reached a place where women are
totally equal to men, and that there is “room for improvement.” Beth insists
she enjoys learning about the women’s movement, and that she supports the
“girl power movement.” In general, their conversation suggests that women
should aim for an “equilibrium” in which both women and men are happy and
appreciated—a sentiment that might easily be described as reflecting (at
least some) feminist principles.
But they won’t call themselves ‘feminists.’ The term itself carries too
much baggage. A ‘femin-ist,’ in their view, is too die-hard, too extreme, too
crazy, too scary, and far too eager to burn her off-brand bra. In their rejection
of feminism in favor of ‘female empowerment’ or ‘girl power,’ these six
women are not unlike the majority of their college peers. Echoing backlash
pundits, many of the students I interviewed accused feminists of wanting “a
total power shift” and ignoring the experiences of men. Others were reluctant
to sacrifice conventional femininity for feminist empowerment. “Being a girl
comes with, like, perks,” explained a Korean American sophomore named

85
Patty. “Like, it’s okay if the guy has to be the strong one and pays for dates
and stuff like that. If you’re asking for more power, you have to equal that
out.”
On one hand, this is the stuff of classic antifeminism. These girls are
regurgitating stereotypes and cultural myths about feminism, then rejecting
them in favor of a more attractive and boy-friendly version of ‘girl power.’
There’s even the tired line about how feminism is bad for men. On the other
hand, though, they are vocal about the need for ‘female empowerment,’ and
they readily acknowledge the absurdity of Leanne’s interaction with the “I’m
not a slut” guy. They’re unwilling to call themselves ‘feminists,’ yet they want
men and women to be equal. They want to learn about women’s movements,
but they’re not sure how to make one of their own. Their conversation offers
a perfect illustration of what Angela McRobbie (2004, 2009) has described as
the “entanglement” of feminist and anti-feminist ideas that is so central to a
postfeminist sensibility. Not simply a rejection of prudish, militant mothers,
postfeminism also draws on a vocabulary of individual choice and
empowerment, offering these to young women as substitutes for more “die-
hard” feminist political activity.
The second conversation comes from an interview with two
sophomore women, Nicole and Chloé. Both girls grew up in southern

86
California and transferred to LAU after one year at junior college. Nicole, a
Hispanic 20-year-old, is a member of the Alpha Phi sorority on campus and
volunteers with the Red Cross. Chloé is Chinese American, also 20 years old
and a member of Alpha Phi, and Nicole’s best friend.

Jess: So, do you guys consider yourselves feminists?
Chloe: Well I’m definitely not, like, actively trying to
change anybody’s mind or anything about like,
their opinion of women. But in terms of like, when
talking about girls and guys, like, I’m definitely not
gonna just sit there and listen to guys bash on
girls or something. But at the same time, I’m
definitely not like, trying to change anyone’s mind.
Nicole: I feel like I take control a lot, and it’s like … I
mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. I just feel like
girls—we definitely have more power and we
definitely need to show that we have more power,
because like … she [Chloe] pisses me off
sometimes—
Chloe: [Laughs.]

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Nicole: She’s like, “Oh, I felt bad [about not having sex
with a partner during a hookup]” or “I didn’t know
how to get out of it,” and I’m like, “Dude!” All you
have to say is “Fuck you, I’m not having sex with
you.”
Chloe: But I don’t think that’s like, necessarily a girl thing.
I think that’s just, like, me—like, I definitely am not
like—I definitely don’t like confrontation. I would
rather be the person who just sucks it up and
does whatever. Do you know what I mean?
Nicole: But I feel like a lot of girls are like that.
Chloe: Well definitely, I feel like it’s a lot of girls, but I feel
like for me, I would just rather not have to, like, I
don’t know. I definitely acknowledge that, like, I’m
not as strong as she is in being like, “No. We’re
not doing anything tonight.” Like, you walked me
home with the expectation that we would hook up
and I’m just not hooking up with you—I mean, I’ve
done that once, but it was because he walked out.
I just can’t always do that.

88
Nicole and Chloé’s conversation reflects an understanding of
feminism that is related to but differs in important ways from that of the
sorority sisters. Like Hollis, Beth, and the other sorority women, neither
Nicole nor Chloé is willing to claim the label ‘feminist.’ Nicole, however, does
assert that she would not “just sit there and listen to guys bash on girls or
something.” Yet her comment, which reflects at least nascent feminist
principles, is immediately qualified: “But at the same time, I’m definitely not
like, trying to change anyone’s mind.” Here, Nicole reminds us of one of the
central tenets of postfeminism: replacing activism with personal choice and
individual responsibility. Saying she is unwilling to try to “change anyone’s
mind” is another way of saying that people are entitled to their own opinions,
even if she disagrees.
The rest of Nicole and Chloé’s conversation is telling because these
two young women never actually say what they think ‘feminism’ is. Rather,
they immediately begin talking about how feminist principles—namely “taking
control” and “showing that we have more power”—shape their experiences
with hooking up. Nicole expresses her frustration that girls don’t exercise
their power in sexual relationships, pointing to Chloé’s failure to stand up for
herself when she doesn’t want to have sex with a hookup partner as
evidence. Yet Chloé insists that this “failure” is hers alone—as an individual,

89
she chooses to avoid confrontation and “be the person who sucks it up
and does whatever.” She does not, as Nicole does, situate this preference in
the context of gender or sexual inequality, but rather explains it as a matter of
personal choice. Even after Nicole suggests that many girls feel similar
pressure, Chloé interprets her behavior as individual weakness: “I’m not as
strong as she is.”
Unlike the sorority sisters, Nicole and Chloé do not discuss the stigma
attached to feminism, and it may be tempting to see their conversation as
avoiding the topic altogether. However, if we recall Rosalind Gill and
Christina Scharff’s (2011) suggestion that postfeminism and neoliberalism
share at least three key tenets—individualism, autonomy, and self-
transformation—we can understand Nicole and Chloé’s comments as
quintessentially postfeminist. Both women self-identify, and identify others,
as individuals capable of forming their own opinions and making their own
choices. Both rely on notions of autonomy to explain their experiences in
hookup culture, framing Nicole as the successful autonomous subject and
Chloé as the “failure.” Finally, even as Nicole champions a form of ‘girl
power,’ she insists that the remedy for gender inequalities in hookup culture
is simply for individual women to stand up for themselves. Her insistence that
all Chloé needs to do is change her attitude and approach—for example, by

90
saying “Fuck you!” to unwanted sexual partners—demonstrates one way
in which postfeminism and neoliberalism overlap in college hookup culture to
produce new forms of power and gender regulation.
According to Ariel Levy, journalist and author of the bestselling book
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, modern
women participate in “raunch culture”—consciously objectifying themselves
and other women—in order to gain status by becoming “one of the guys”
(2005, 4). In Levy’s view, these women use sex and sexiness as a way to
reclaim control over their own bodies and beat men at their own game.
Similarly, in 2007’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love,
and Lose at Both, journalist Laura Sessions Stepp asserts that “the ethic of
female empowerment” is one of the main reasons that contemporary young
women continue to participate in the hookup scene. Stepp cites feminism as
one “driving force” behind contemporary girls’ “sexual assertiveness” and the
phenomenon of hooking up: since modern girls have been told to go after
what they want in all aspects of life, they carry this advice with them into the
bedroom (2007a, 40). In Stepp’s view, hooking up (or, in her words,
becoming “unhooked”) presents a “practical alternative” for modern girls who
“believe they can’t afford to invest time, energy and emotion in a deep
relationship” (40). Moreover, hooking up may give young women a newfound

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sense of control over their sex lives: “This traditionally male social scheme
has been reconstructed by girls who took a good look around and decided
that it was better to be predator than prey, better [to] do unto others before
they do unto you” (Stepp 2007a, 66).
Scholars (e.g., Banet-Weiser 2004; Jowett 2004; McRobbie 2009;
Projansky 2007; Tasker and Negra 2007) have noticed a growing aversion to
“feminism” and “feminists” among young men and women in the
contemporary US. I observed a similar trend in my research: when
respondents were asked whether or not they self-identified as feminists, the
response was a resounding “No.” For many college students, the term
conjured up an array of negative descriptions: according to my interviewees,
feminists are “craa-zy,” “extreme,” “weird,” and “butch” “bra-burning women”
who “strike fear in guys’ hearts.” As Zack, an Asian American junior,
explained: “[Feminists] seem overpowering … domineering. The guy won’t
have an opinion—he’s just, like, your slave.” Like many Americans, these
students believe that feminism is both unnecessary and undesirable, and are
leery about identifying with a movement that, in their view, ended before they
were born.

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The “Death” of Feminism
On June 29, 1998, Time magazine asked: “Is Feminism Dead?” The cover,
which featured the faces of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem,
and “postfeminist” fictional television character Ally McBeal, suggested that
the answer was, of course, “yes.” This article is only one of many news
stories and magazine articles that that began to emerge in the 1980s, all
anxiously speculating about the status of feminism in contemporary society.
19

Such widespread speculation (and, more often than not, celebration)
about feminism’s death implies that there was a time in recent collective
memory when feminism was, for better or worse, alive and well. Most
Americans have at least a vague idea about a “women’s movement” that took
place in the US during the 1960s and 70s, led by women who called
themselves “feminists.” The conventional story goes something like this:
women were tired of being obedient housewives, so they decided to get jobs
and stop shaving their armpits. They thought sex was really important, and
they wanted to be able to do it without getting married or having babies.
Some people weren’t too happy about this, but the feminists eventually got

19
See, for example, “Is the Left Sick of Feminism?” (Hochschild 1983); “The Awful Truth
about Women’s Lib” (Jong 1986); “When Feminism Failed” (Dolan 1988); and “Why the
Women Are Fading Away” (Collins 1998).

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their way and—voilà!—the problem of gender inequality was solved. Of
course, these days we are regularly reminded that feminist attempts to
address equality have actually produced more discontent for women (see
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic piece for the latest example) and that
men and women are really, in the end, from different planets.
The women’s movements of the 1960s and 70s were followed,
beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by a shift to post-Fordist modes
of production and neoliberal forms of governance in many western societies,
including the United States. Much of the writing about neoliberalism has
defined it as a hegemonic global doctrine that emphasizes “deregulation,
privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision”
(Harvey 2005, 3). For scholars such as David Harvey (2005), neoliberalism is
primarily a political economic philosophy or practice that “seeks to bring all
human action into the domain of the market” (3). Other scholars, most
notably Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999), have argued that neoliberalism cannot
be explained solely in political-economic terms (see also Barry, Osborne, and
Rose 1996; Dubal 2010). Drawing from Foucault’s work on governmentality,
Rose and others have emphasized the ways in which neoliberal forms of
governance construct new kinds of citizen-subjects and ways of governing
“at a distance.” Because neoliberalism “assumes that social subjects are not

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and should not be subject to direct forms of State control” (Hay 2000, 54),
it therefore requires individuals to be increasingly self-reliant and self-
governing. In Rose’s words,

It has become possible to actualize the notion of the actively
responsible individual because of the development of new
apparatuses that integrate subjects into a moral nexus of
identifications and allegiances in the very processes in which
they appear to act out their most personal choices (1996, 57-
58).

Understanding neoliberalism as a form of governmentality illuminates how its
reach extends far beyond “the market.” For example, as Lisa Duggan (2003)
has pointed out, under neoliberal regimes the costs of social reproduction
become increasingly privatized and the responsibility of caring for
dependents shifts from state agencies to individuals and families (14).
Consumer citizenship is prioritized at the expense of social welfare, bolstered
by the seemingly neutral rhetoric of personal responsibility and individual
choice. In this context, rights-based political movements multiply as
disenfranchised individuals and groups use the technologies, processes, and
subjectivities of consumer culture to achieve their goals (Grewal 2005, 9).
While neoliberalism is neither universal nor homogenous in outcome
(see Dubal 2010; Ong 2006), the shift to neoliberal forms of governance in
the West nonetheless provides fertile ground for the development of

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discourses that emphasize consumer citizenship, personal responsibility,
and individual empowerment. Moreover, these discourses rely heavily on the
concept of “choice”—economic, political, and, perhaps most importantly,
sexual—as the primary route to female freedom (see Grewal 2005).
It is within this complex social environment that postfeminism emerges
as a popular sensibility. Propped up by the “success” of the women’s
movement and the ever-expanding implementation of neoliberal policies,
postfeminism surfaces as a more attractive alternative to previous forms of
gender politics.
Defining Postfeminism
Since its inception in the early 1980s, “postfeminism” has become a common
appellation for the attitudes and behaviors of young women in the
contemporary US.
20
The boundaries of its definition are vague: terms such as
antifeminism, new sexism, retrosexism, new traditionalism, and third-wave
feminism are often used synonymously with postfeminism, blurring the lines
between it and other popular sensibilities (Projansky 2001; Tasker and Negra
2007). It’s a fun exercise to debate the nuances and relative accuracy of
labels like these, but for our purposes, it is particularly important to

20
Walters (1991) locates the first printed use of the term “postfeminism” in a 1982 New York
Times Magazine article by Susan Bolotin entitled “Voices from the Postfeminist Generation.”

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distinguish between postfeminism, which I define as a range of cultural
discourses promoted largely by popular media, and third-wave feminism,
which I define as a quasi-political movement or self-identification that seeks
to improve upon or update first- and second-wave feminism (see Banet-
Weiser 2007; Genz 2006; Showden 2009).
Emerging in the 1990s, third-wave feminism situated itself within a
linear feminist trajectory as a more progressive corrective to earlier “waves”
of liberal feminism. Led by women of color such as Rebecca Walker (1992,
1995), the third wave was initially constructed as a more inclusive and
welcoming space, particularly with regard to racial/ethnic and class diversity,
than that inhabited by their first- and second-wave foremothers. Publishing in
feminist magazines like Bitch and Bust, and often employing a manifesto-like
style, writers like Baumgardner and Richards (2000, 2004) laid out the goals
of the third wave: to reinvigorate feminism by bringing young women back
into the movement, and to allow women to define feminism in their own
terms.
Ultimately, the third wave is meant to provide women with a
comfortable, inclusive—and, I argue, fundamentally neoliberal—space where
they can cultivate individual feminist identities without all the strident
negativity of “old-school” feminist activism. In an essay entitled “Feminism

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and Femininity: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Thong,” self-proclaimed third-wavers Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy
Richards propose “girlie” feminism as a way for young women to challenge
traditional associations of femininity with weakness and subordination—it is a
can-do, sex-positive, all-access pass that allows women to be independent,
strong, smart, and sexy all at once (2004, 60). While, as Baumgardner and
Richards explain, third-wave feminists actively campaign for reproductive
rights, sexual freedom, and economic and political equality, they also believe
that there are ways to “be political” other than burning their proverbial bras
(2004, 62; see also Baumgardner and Richards 2000). In fact, girlie feminists
often reject overtly political activism in favor of consumer-based cultural
activism—for example, taking pole-dancing exercise classes, listening to
Taylor Swift, or getting Brazilian bikini waxes as markers of their newfound
liberation.
There are important similarities between third-wave feminism and
postfeminism. Both terms can be used to signal an epistemological challenge
to Anglo-American feminism and to denote a time after a particular moment
in feminist history (Gill and Scharff 2011, 3; see also Brooks [1997] and
Hollows [2000]). Yet while third-wave feminism actively engages with feminist
history (if only to deem it inadequate), postfeminism displaces or replaces

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feminism altogether. Some define postfeminism as linear, or as a logical
end point in a historical trajectory from “pre-feminism” through “feminism” and
into the current “postfeminist” moment. Others understand postfeminism as a
backlash against an older generation of feminists. The backlash thesis,
advanced most famously by journalist Susan Faludi (1991), suggests that
postfeminism not only declares feminism over; it accuses feminism of
spawning an entire generation of miserable, burned-out, confused women.
There are also those who, echoing Camille Paglia (1990), Katie Roiphe
(1993), and Naomi Wolf (1991), define feminism as “anti-sex” and see
postfeminism as a more up-to-date, sex-positive alternative.
These three definitions—postfeminism as linear, backlash, or sex-
positive—are particularly prevalent in public discourse; however, I believe
that they are ultimately insufficient conceptualizations. For one, “feminism”
has never been a linear, monolithic, agreed-upon movement, so it makes
little sense to understand postfeminism as such. Moreover, defining feminism
as anti-sex both misrepresents much of feminist thought and renders
invisible the ongoing debates among feminists about sex and sexuality.
Finally, while the concept of backlash is certainly important for understanding
the emergence of postfeminism, it does not adequately capture the complex,
and often paradoxical, character of this contemporary sensibility, particularly

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the ways in which postfeminism discourses offer up an entanglement of
feminist and antifeminist ideas (McRobbie 2004, 255). Not simply a rejection
of prudish, militant mothers, postfeminism also draws on a vocabulary of
individual choice and empowerment, offering these to young women as
substitutes for more radical feminist political activity.
In her analysis of contemporary feminism in the U.K., Angela
McRobbie (2009) successfully complicates definitions of postfeminism as
simply linear, backlash, and/or sex-positive by illuminating the ways in which
feminism has also been instrumentalized and deployed by media, pop
culture, and the state as a signal of women’s progress.
21
She points out that
contemporary young women are (at least notionally) the beneficiaries of past
feminist victories to the extent that “gender equality” now seems to be
common sense. Women now attend college at a higher rate than men; they
are increasingly employed in male-dominated fields; and they enjoy
heightened visibility in politics and media. Postfeminism emphasizes these
celebratory narratives, proclaiming feminism’s “success” in bringing about
gender equity in education, work, and the home (Projansky 2001, 67).
Feminism is still constructed as a thing of the past; however, previous

21
Although she focuses primarily on the British context, McRobbie’s analysis is applicable to
the U.S. and elsewhere, especially those places that have experienced similar cultural,
economic, and political shifts.

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feminist victories—the pill, Roe v. Wade, Hillary Clinton’s presidential
campaign—are not forgotten, but are instead actively invoked as proof that
feminism is no longer needed. In short, “postfeminism suggests that it is the
very success of feminism that produces its irrelevance for contemporary
culture” (Tasker and Negra 2007, 8).
However, while postfeminism is clearly a response to feminism,
postfeminist narratives rarely mention “feminism” per se. Instead, they evoke,
both implicitly and explicitly, a variety of concepts, histories, and phrases
that, taken together, construct an identifiable ideological framework. Rosalind
Gill (2007) has argued that rather than an epistemological perspective, an
historical shift, or (simply) a backlash against feminism, postfeminism should
be conceived of as a sensibility that characterizes an ever-increasing number
of popular cultural forms (148). Understanding postfeminism as a sensibility,
in Gill’s words, “emphasizes the contradictory nature of postfeminist
discourses and the entanglement of both feminist and anti-feminist themes
within them” (2007, 149). And, as Sarah Projansky (2001) has noted, thinking
about postfeminism discursively “helps illustrate how postfeminism is a
cultural response to feminism, one that seeks to rework—to steal rather than
supersede—feminism” (88, emphasis in original). As a versatile and
pervasive discursive formation, postfeminism can travel through complex

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social terrains, deftly adapting to cultural, economic, and political shifts
while maintaining its core characteristics.
The notion of postfeminism as a sensibility also allows us to identify a
number of relatively stable features that constitute postfeminist culture.
Following Gill (2007), I identify a narrative, performance, and/or text as
postfeminist if it incorporates one or more of the following characteristics: it

• implies that gender equality has been achieved and feminist
activism is thus no longer necessary or desirable;
• defines femininity as a bodily property and revives notions of
natural sexual difference;
• marks a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification;
• encourages self-surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover
paradigm;
• emphasizes individualism, choice, and empowerment as the
primary routes to women’s independence and freedom; and
• promotes consumerism and the commodification of difference.

As these criteria suggest, postfeminism is, by definition, rife with paradox:
it simultaneously rejects feminist activism in favor of feminine consumption

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and celebrates the success of feminism while declaring its irrelevance.
Such “collective ambivalence,” as Projansky (2001) has rightly pointed out,
“ensures that postfeminism is wide-ranging, versatile, and influential” (87).
Postfeminists may be lawyers, doctors, and heads of state; they may also be
strippers, shoppers, and sorority girls. In short, it appears the only thing
postfeminism requires is that women “be who they want to be”—just as long
as it isn’t a feminist.
Analyzing Postfeminism
In attempting to assess the cultural breadth and impact of postfeminist
representations, recent work in feminist media and gender studies has been
especially helpful in providing analyses of the representational elements of
postfeminism. Focusing primarily on representations of postfeminism in film,
television, music video, and women’s fashion magazines, scholars have
explored the relationship between feminism, femininity, and sexuality as it
appears in popular culture. Postfeminism in this research is conventionally
understood as a contemporary ideological project that encourages a
renunciation or displacement of feminist identification or activism in favor of a
discourse that emphasizes individual choice, personal responsibility, sexual
freedom, and consumption of feminine goods and services as routes to
female empowerment.

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Feminist media scholars have made important inroads in
describing the ways in which postfeminism reinforces existing relations of
power and reproduces inequality. For example, Tasker and Negra (2007)
contend that “many postfeminist texts combine a deep uncertainty about
existing options for women with an idealized, essentialized femininity that
symbolically evades or transcends institutional and social problem spots”
(10). Or, as Projansky (2001) asserts, “when a pervasive set of discourses
defines feminism in these (or any other) limited ways, other options are
closed down, other experiences are unaccessed, other possibilities are
denaturalized, and other forms of activism are discouraged” (232). These
scholars believe that “postfeminism has become so installed as an
epistemological framework that in many ways our culture has stopped asking
the kinds of questions that it appears to ‘settle’” (Tasker and Negra 2007, 6).
Yet overall, these studies have tended to reproduce what Brundson
(2006) has called the feminist “ur-text,” whereby scholars have tended to
evaluate postfeminist representations as markers of agency or constraint,
empowerment or disempowerment, liberation or oppression, and so on,
without examining the ways in which postfeminist discourses incorporate
multiple, and often contradictory, ideologies. Of course, the claim that any
discourse is plainly empowering or disempowering is problematic. As many

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feminist theorists have argued, there is no such thing as “real” or
“authentic” empowerment, agency, or pleasure; yet nor are the women who
claim to experience these things simply victims of false consciousness.
Rather than circling around the question of whether postfeminism is “good” or
“bad” for women, I believe scholars and critics of postfeminism would benefit
from further historicizing and contextualizing its repeated images, narratives,
and performances.
Where Are the Sociologists?
The sheer amount of attention given to postfeminism in feminist media
scholarship should, in my view, be ample grounds for sociological inquiry.
Communication scholars have contributed enormously to our understanding
of the representational elements of postfeminism. Yet there is still much to be
learned about how postfeminism functions in everyday life. Somewhat
curiously, only a handful of sociologists (Aronson 2003; Hall and Rodriguez
2003; Jowett 2004; Renzetti 1987; Rosenfelt and Stacey 1987; Taylor 1989)
have examined postfeminism as a cultural sensibility or social practice.
In a short but oft-cited review article, Rosenfelt and Stacey (1987)
have called into question a tendency among many feminist scholars to
confuse postfeminism with antifeminism and thereby minimize or dismiss its
sociocultural importance, pointing to various texts to demonstrate the

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distinctive postfeminist message found in popular and scholarly
commentary. Other sociologists (e.g., Taylor 1989) have positioned
postfeminism within a broad “social movement” context to counter the
common allegation that feminist activism is in decline.
In general, social science research on postfeminism has been limited
to survey or interview data that attempts to gauge women’s attitudes toward
feminism and their perceptions of gender inequality. In an early study (that,
notably, defines postfeminism as a “second stage” of feminism), Renzetti
(1987) used a 24-item attitudinal inventory to measure women’s beliefs
regarding gender roles, gender inequality, and the women’s movement. Her
respondents showed a general awareness of gender inequality and support
for the women’s movement, accompanied by reluctance to self-identify as
feminists. In a similar project, Hall and Rodriguez (2003) found that overall
support for the women’s movement has increased and/or remained stable
over time, and that young and minority women are more supportive of
feminism than are other women (898).
Aronson (2003) has offered perhaps the most nuanced analysis of
attitudes toward feminism in the postfeminist era. Using in-depth interviews
taken from an ongoing longitudinal study, she explored women’s attitudes
concerning perceptions of opportunities and obstacles as well as their

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experiences with gender discrimination. Regardless of race or class
background, her respondents showed a general optimism about women’s
expanded educational and career opportunities as well as an awareness of
persistent gender-based obstacles. Additionally, most of the women in
Aronson’s study understood gender inequality as a matter of individual
responsibility rather than a systematic structural issue. Renzetti (1987) also
found that young women’s reluctance to identify as feminists did “not appear
to stem from any negative images of feminists,” but was instead rooted in a
common perception that “women can succeed as individuals and without
collective efforts” (274).
While these studies offer important corrections to previous research
by interviewing women from a variety of racial, economic, and experiential
backgrounds, they still fail, in my view, to make postfeminism—understood
as a complex range of historically and contextually specific cultural
discourses, representations, and performances—central to their analyses.
Much of this research positions postfeminism as the opposite of feminism
and thereby defines support for postfeminism as a lack of support for
feminism. Such theoretical dichotomies, even when expressed as an
attitudinal continuum (e.g., Aronson 2003), cannot grasp the full complexity of
postfeminist discourses because they obscure the ways in which

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postfeminism invokes aspects of both feminism and antifeminism in its
production of gendered subjectivities. As Jowett (2004) has argued,
“processes of (dis)investment in feminist identities and ideas are far more
complex” than existing sociological research implies (91). And, as influential
studies like Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor (1977), Elijah Anderson’s Code of
the Street (1999), and Sharon Hays’s Flat Broke with Children (2003) have
shown, cultural discourses play a central role in producing and maintaining
social inequalities.
The work of Jowett (2004) has attempted to move beyond the
dichotomous logic common to sociological studies of postfeminism in the
United States. Drawing from group interviews with Asian and white women in
Great Britain, Jowett found that attitudes toward feminism were closely
related to discourses of women’s progress and achievement propagated by
the New Labour government (2004, 91). Her respondents understood
feminism as “something which had contributed to female progress in the
past, but was no longer relevant” (2004, 96). Understood primarily as an
historical phenomenon that had made important contributions to, but was not
contemporaneous with, modern women’s lives, feminism was simultaneously
acknowledged and dismissed as a thing of the past. In her insistence upon
locating postfeminism in a particular socio-historical context, Jowett (2004)

108
underscores the connections between public discourse and private
attitudes. Her work points to the need for further sociological exploration of
the ways in which postfeminism functions as part of a wider cultural
imaginary and how it may be interpreted differently in particular socio-cultural
spaces and historical moments. To this end, it is imperative for social
scientists to construct a working definition with which to begin to examine
postfeminism in more nuanced ways.
In my view, conceptualizations that emphasize gender equality with
sexual difference, individual choice and empowerment, femininity as a bodily
property, sexual freedom, and the commodification of difference, in addition
to backlash and sex-positivity, such as those advanced by Gill (2007) and
McRobbie (2009), provide the most fruitful framework for understanding
postfeminism. Postfeminism, as I understand it, is not (just) a resentful
retaliation against earlier generations of feminists; nor is it (just) an empty
celebration of feminine consumption. It is not that young women have
suddenly retreated into a space of “traditional” feminine domesticity; nor is it
true that they have somehow accepted gender inequality and women’s
objectification as inevitable. The “post” of postfeminism does not signify
feminism’s death. Rather, postfeminism becomes a kind of substitute for or
displacement of feminism as a radical political movement in which earlier

109
feminist demands for equal rights, collective activism, and the eradication
of gender inequality are taken into account and then displaced by the
postfeminist ideals of individualism, choice, and empowerment (McRobbie
2009, 1).
Mirroring the cultural logic of neoliberalism, postfeminism constructs
women as both subjects and consumers, elevating consumption as an
individualistic mechanism of empowerment and effectively commodifying
feminist activism (Tasker and Negra 2007). As consumer-subjects, women
self-consciously participate in a highly stylized “postfeminist masquerade”
(McRobbie 2009), getting manicures and breast implants because they have
the freedom to “choose” to engage in conventional femininity. Thus the
contemporary young woman, self-reflexive and gender-aware, finds herself
“confined to the topographies of an unsustainable self-hood, deprived of the
possibilities of feminist sociality, and deeply invested in achieving an illusory
identity defined according to a rigidly enforced scale of feminine attributes”
(McRobbie 2009, 120). And, as if that weren’t enough, the “grammar of
individualism” on which such notions of consumer choice relies ensures that
experiences of gender, sexual, and/or racial inequality are framed in
exclusively personal terms (Gill 2007, 153).

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In this context, it appears that the emphatic and widespread
declaration of feminism’s “death” may signify a re-formulation and re-
deployment of sexuality in accordance with contemporary (read: neoliberal)
relations of power. Gill and Scharff (2011) contend that postfeminism and
neoliberalism overlap in at least three important ways. Both are structured by
a “current of individualism” that undermines notions of the social or political;
both demand an autonomous, self-regulating, active subject; and, perhaps
most importantly, both call upon women, more so than men, to “work on and
transform the self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct, and to present
all their actions as freely chosen” (Gill and Scharff 2011, 7). Indeed, Gill and
Scharff have suggested, and I agree, that neoliberalism is “always already
gendered, and that women are constructed as its ideal subjects” (2011, 7,
emphasis in original; see also Gill 2007).
The conversations that began this essay demonstrate nicely two of the
core components of both postfeminism and neoliberalism as they appear in
the everyday lives of college men and women: the “current of individualism”
that undermines notions of the social or political; and the demand for an
autonomous, self-regulating, active subject. They also point to several other
key tenets of postfeminism, particularly the emphasis on female
empowerment and the notion that feminist activism is no longer necessary or

111
desirable. Finally, these conversations underscore the contradiction
between the rhetoric of postfeminist empowerment and the reality that—as
long as young women and men are stuck in the logic of individual
responsibility—real, social empowerment remains impossible.
Postfeminists (Not) In Revolt
Since I am interested in the relationship between hooking up, postfeminism,
and social change, I ended each group interview by asking students how
hookups might be improved in ways that promoted gender and sexual
equality. I assumed that if these men and women were cognizant of the
various stereotypes and inequalities that hookup culture reproduced—and,
as we will see, they clearly were—surely they would want to figure out ways
to make hookup culture better for everyone involved.
I was wrong. Rather than linking arms in feminist solidarity (which
was, admittedly, my fantasy), the students I interviewed seemed puzzled,
even amused, about my hope for collective action and social change. “I don’t
think I’m as focused on changing it,” a senior named Tom explained. “I think
it’s a system that has a large amount of, like, socialized rules and flaws, but
at the same time, I think my children are going to have to grow up in a world
that will still have inherent imbalances, and you need to learn how to function
within that system and how to deal with that.”

112
While students were surely aware of the stereotypes and
inequalities that hookup culture reproduces, they rarely indicated that political
activism—feminist or otherwise—was a viable solution. Instead, like Nicole
and Chloé, they resorted to the neoliberal rhetoric of individual choice and
personal responsibility.
For example, even as they acknowledged the implicit pressure to
abide by the rules of hookup culture, all of the students I interviewed insisted
that the decision to hook up (or not) was ultimately their choice. As a sorority
member named Jen put it:

I think it’s just your choice. Unless you’re one of those, like,
sheep—or, like, coming here from hick-town and it’s culture
shock. I don’t know, but regardless of how powerful it is—how
you act in relation to it is up to you.

Like Jen, Beth told me that when it comes to dealing with the
pressures of hookup culture, it’s up to individuals to make choices about their
level of participation.

For me, I just don’t think that it’s a huge deal to, like, make out
with people. I just really don’t. So like, for me, I don’t feel
pressure cuz I choose it myself, but obviously you can tell if this
guy’s been talking to you for more than five minutes they’re
probably looking for something, so you, like, know. And if you
wanna walk away and go over and talk to someone else, like,
they’re still watching you, they come over—so that kind of thing,

113
I guess there’s pressure? But, like, as a personal choice, if I
decide—I’ll just, like, leave the frat or something if it’s annoying.

Some students used choice rhetoric to explain their decision to hook
up; others believed it was their choice not to participate. “It’s fine to do
whatever you want, whatever you’re comfortable with,” a sophomore named
Lisa explained, “but I’m not comfortable with [hooking up], and that should be
OK.”
Even those students who were highly critical of hookup culture, like
Erika, believed that whether or not to hook up was—for better or for worse—
a choice. “The amount you hook up is something that you control,” she
maintained. “You made the choice, so you deal with it in your head—you’re
ready for it.” I discuss the decision to abstain from hooking up in more depth
in Chapter 5; for now, I simply mean to point out that at the very same time
students say “it’s my choice,” they are also implicitly acknowledging the
pressure to conform to hegemonic sexual/cultural practices.
Students’ insistence that hooking up was a choice was, in my
assessment, inextricably linked to two other pervasive cultural ideologies:
personal responsibility and individualism. Like most Americans, my
respondents expressed a deep-seated belief that they were, above all,
individuals who were responsible for their own behavior—sexual and

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otherwise. Willow, for example, cited her own experience as evidence of
the power of individualism in the face of cultural pressure. “I actually don’t
think I’ve been affected by [hookup culture] all that much,” she said. “Like, I
thought I was gonna be a huge whore, and I haven’t been.”
Moreover, since students believed they were responsible for their own
actions, it followed that they—and other students, too—were also responsible
for any consequences their conduct may incur. Asked who usually provides
birth control during a hookup, a white freshman named Sara had this to say:
“It’s equal. Each person is responsible for their own part. I don’t want a kid—
that’s my responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Harold, an Asian
American senior, put it simply: “You’re responsible for yourself.”
During a conversation about sexual double standards, Katie, a junior
from Austin, Texas, offered a particularly illustrative comment: “Girls get the
slut label and stuff, but in a way they ask for it. I don’t think it’s a culture thing;
I think it’s how you make yourself seem to other people.” Her comment
squares perfectly with Deborah Siegel’s (2007) description of a fictional
postfeminist: “Raised in solidarity,” she writes, “this daughter of feminism had
seemingly internalized messages about women’s progress only to become
hyper-individualistic” (125). Yet even as the widespread tendency to
understand hookups as a matter of individual choice and personal

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responsibility may give students a sense of achievement and control, for
some it may also foster feelings of inadequacy, isolation, and moral impunity
(see Chapter 5).
If we listen to the narratives of college students, it appears that the
remedy for inequality in hookup culture can be found not in political activism
or systemic change, but in the hearts and minds of individual women and
men. “If there’s anything to do,” insisted a sophomore named Steve, “it’s
what you make it. If I wanted something better, it’s my decision to change it.”
The funny thing about the logic of individual choice and personal
responsibility, though, is that it works both ways: while individuals reap the
benefits of their choices, they are also responsible for the damages. The
problem with individualism in postfeminist hookup culture is not just that it
breeds a self-centered “me-first” mentality on campus (though it surely does
that, too); it is that it holds women and men—as individuals—accountable for
what are actually systemic social inequalities. “In the postfeminist rubric,”
writes Siegel (2007), women can “no longer cry ‘patriarchy’ to excuse [their]
personal failures and disappointments, nor claim ‘victim’ status when
wronged by the system” (139). In other words, if a woman doesn’t orgasm
during a hookup (an outcome that, as I show in Chapter 4, is often produced
by the shared hookup “code”), the logics of individual choice and personal

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responsibility ensure that she has no one to blame but her partner, her
vagina, or herself.
Siegel (2007) has noted that “when the words ‘young women’ and
‘feminism’ appear yoked together in a sentence these days, it’s increasingly
in reference to Girls-Gone-Wild types who fight valiantly for their right to bare
their breasts on camera and flash their thongs” (10). Contemporary young
women, in her view, “epitomize the dilemma of a generation: caught between
the hope of a world that no longer degrades women and the reality of a
culture that is still, nevertheless, degrading” (2007, 155).
My research suggests that college women are indeed caught in this
uniquely postfeminist bind. They feel pressure to conform to the glorified
ideal of feminine sexiness (which, for most women, is altogether
unattainable) and to behave in ways that will “prove” their attractiveness to
men. They are also keenly aware of the stigma that is (still!) attached to overt
expressions of female sexual desire and feel compelled to police their
sexuality accordingly. At the same time, these women and men have been
raised in a postfeminist culture that says they can—and should—do anything
boys can do. They believe that women have come a long way in the
classroom and the bedroom, and they’re not about to trade in their condoms
for corsets. What all this means for hookup culture is that women are now

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“free” to have casual sex “like a guy”—just as long as they continue to
look and act “like a girl.”

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CHAPTER 4
SEXUAL SUBJECTS
Boy you know you love it
How we smart enough to make these millions
Strong enough to bear the children
Then get back to business

See you better not play me
Oh come here baby
Hope you still like me
Fuck you, pay me

My persuasion can build a nation
Endless power
Our love we can devour
You’ll do anything for me

Who run the world? Girls!

Beyoncé, “Run the World (Girls)”

Everyone wants to be a lady but everyone also wants to prove they can
hang. Like, I can be one of the boys. I can do this. I guess it’s a little bit of
validation, but it has a different twist for girls.

Ivy (19, Korean American, independent)

One of the central arguments in this dissertation is that all students—
including those who hook up every weekend, those who have never hooked
up, and the majority of students who fall somewhere in between—are aware
of, and influenced by, the cultural norms and expectations that undergird

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college hookup culture. Indeed, this is part of what makes hooking up so
important: if hookup culture reproduces gender and sexual inequality, it does
so in ways that ultimately affect us all.
Take, for example, Jen and Lisa. When I met them, both were
students in a general education sociology course for which I was a teaching
assistant. Jen is a white 20-year-old from San Jose, California, with
aspirations to be a physician’s assistant. Lisa, also white, is an 18-year-old
from rural Indiana and an active member of the school of business’s
Women’s Leadership Board. Both young women joined a sorority their
freshman year—Jen pledged KAO, Lisa ADPi—but they have had strikingly
different experiences within the Greek system on campus.
Of all the women I interviewed, Jen most strongly embraced a
postfeminist sensibility. Tall, tanned, and thin, Jen prided herself on being
able to “drink guys under the table,” spoke with disdain about the “naïve girls”
who expected sexual partners to treat them well, and hooked up every
chance she got. Positioned smack in the middle of the hookup scene, Jen felt
the full weight of its gendered expectations and worked hard to achieve the
requisite body, look, and attitude.
Lisa, in many ways, is Jen’s opposite. Short and slightly pudgy, she
did not drink or use drugs, and she dressed in a style that might kindly be

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described as “off-trend.” She was also a virgin. Yet like Jen, Lisa felt
immense pressure to look and act in ways that lined up with the cultural
expectations promoted by the hookup scene.
During a particularly interesting focus group, Lisa, Jen, and a Korean
American sophomore named Ivy discussed their perceptions of hookup
culture at LAU.

Jess: So do you all feel like you’re ‘in’ the hookup
scene?
Ivy: No. No. Just sometimes. [Laughs.] But no,
definitely not. I think there’s some girls who are
like, habitually, constantly just looking for some
ass.
Jess: Who do you think those girls are?
Ivy: I have some girls on my [dormitory] floor who do,
and umm, I think they’re just looking to have fun,
and they feel like college is the time to, like, peak
at that. I had this belief where I thought I would
come into college and be like, soo open to
hookups and stuff, but it turns out I’m not, like, at

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all. Because you think to yourself, this is the time I
can do it and get away with it—and afterwards
you’re like, I don’t wanna be getting called a slut
when I’m 25. But when you’re 19, or 21, it’s okay.
It’s just something stupid in college.
Jen: Honestly, that’s what sucks, is even if you don’t
have sex with someone, but if you—here,
everyone shacks
22
everywhere. My good friend
was shacking at Lambda and my other friend
didn’t want her to do it, so we just went and we
literally slept on the couch in the same room so
that she wouldn’t sleep with this kid and then we
all left and then everyone was like, ‘Oh, who are
they sleeping with in Lambda?’ Like, we slept on
the couch, but everyone assumes you did
everything anyways.
Jess: Lisa, what about you?

22
To “shack” means to sleep at someone else’s dorm, apartment, or fraternity house. As Jen
suggests, the term often implies that sexual activity took place.

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Lisa: No. I don’t even, like … no one really asks me to
dance anyway ‘cause I totally don’t give off that
vibe, and—let’s face it—there are a lot of really,
really gorgeous girls here who are willing to do all
that. So no, I’m not really a part of that scene.
Jess: Jen?
Jen: I mean, I’ll like, make out with guys, but I don’t
think it’s a big deal. I definitely don’t walk around
having sex with everybody. I had a boyfriend for
two years and then we broke up, but it was
perfect timing ‘cause I was going to college. And
then, like, I got here and I was like, oh, whatever,
I’ll try the casual sex thing, and I didn’t feel like
shit—I thought I would feel like shit—but what it
was for me was like, I didn’t.

Twenty minutes later, the discussion turned to issues of women’s progress
and the sexual double standard that continues to plague women—both those
who hook up frequently and those who do not.

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Ivy: The thing about hookups that I do enjoy is that
girls have the freedom to be promiscuous as
opposed to before when it was, like, shunned, you
know? And now girls can just do whatever they
want and not get as much shit as before. [Pauses
to think about what she has said.] But no, they still
get a lot of shit, compared to guys.
Lisa: Girls are sluts, guys are cool.
Jen: I saw something on this guy’s Facebook wall, he
was talking to this girl who asked him why if some
guys sleeps with multiple girls in a week and he’s
the king of the frat and then a girl sleeps with two
guys in one year and she’s a complete slut, and
he was like, ‘I told her, if a key can open a lot of
locks, it’s a master key, but if a lock’s been
opened too many times, it’s a bad lock.’ And all
these guys on his wall were like, ‘Oh my God
that’s so funny! Hahaha!’ And I’m like, really?
Lisa: I feel like also it might be a little bit different
because boys aren’t giving anything up. It’s more

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like the girl that’s giving something up. So that’s,
like, where the difference comes from. ‘Cause I
think everyone knows that, umm … knows
underneath that it’s important? It’s totally fine, like
I’m glad that it’s not—that girls aren’t so
suppressed anymore, but I think part of it is
because there’s … I feel like girls are sort of held
to a higher standard, fairly or unfairly.
Jess: What do you mean by ‘higher standard’?
Lisa: Just because of the ways everyone always talks,
like, boys are immature, girls are mature, girls are
gonna be like—this is so sexist, but girls are
gonna be moms, girls are supposed to be
nurturing, so when you don’t act that way it’s
more shocking, but when a boy acts that way it’s
kinda like, well, boys will be boys. Even though
that’s like, maybe not fair at all.

As these excerpts from my interview with Jen, Lisa, and Ivy demonstrate, the
relationship between women’s liberation and hookup culture is anything but

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simple. On one hand, it seems that the traditional sexual double standard
is slowly eroding as more and more college women openly engage in casual
sexual encounters.
23
On the other hand, new double standards have
emerged that define women’s sexual pleasure as secondary to men’s, if not
altogether irrelevant, leaving those women who do partake in casual sex
holding the short end of the proverbial stick.
Yet scholarly and popular explanations of this contemporary paradox,
while numerous, have largely failed to grasp the complexity of this particular
socio-historical moment and its relationship to hookup culture. Bogle (2008),
for example, argues that women continue to participate in the hookup scene
(and accept their subordinate position within it) simply because “the
prevailing script in any era is seen as the only way, or at least the most likely
way, to get together with men and feel a part of the social scene of their
peers (182). Or, as Paul, McManus, and Hayes (2000) contend, since
“traditional sex role expectations dictate that females owe sexual gratification
to males … a hookup might be viewed by a female as an altruistic act—
something they must do even if they don’t want to” (85).

23
Emphasis on “slowly.” See Rush Limbaugh’s 2012 attack on Sandra Fluke.

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Popular commentators have hawked a similar story: according to
Washington Post writer William Raspberry, young women “are, willy-nilly, in a
hookup culture that they don’t remember asking for but feel powerless to
change” (2005, A17). Replete with historical generalizations and overly
simplistic “peer pressure” logic, such quasi-theorizations leave much to be
desired. The contention that “the ostensible lack of rules in the hookup script
may appear to be liberating … but it is also problematic because there are
many unwritten rules that women must learn as they go along” (Bogle 2008,
182) completely misses the fact that college women not only know these
rules, but have a hand in their production and perpetuation. In this chapter, I
assess the various, and often contradictory, reasons that college women
continue to participate and find pleasure in hookup culture, despite continuing
gender and sexual inequalities.
The Whore Side of the Closet
College hookup culture is propped up by a slew of gendered expectations of
which students—both those who hook up and those who do not—are all too
aware. Women, and to a lesser extent men, felt immense pressure to look
and behave according to prevailing hetero-gendered ideals. These ideals
centered on having the ‘right’ body, the ‘right’ look, and the ‘right’ attitude.
The following excerpt from my interview with Jen, Lisa, and Ivy is typical:

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Jess: Is there pressure to dress a certain way, or act a
certain way?
Lisa: I think so. There’s this girl, she’s roommates with
one of my friends, and she’s here from Kansas—I
don’t think she really went out all that much in
high school, like, very studious, she’s here on a
presidential scholarship or something, like, so
smart. Anyways, she’s like reinventing herself
here and she totally doesn’t know what she is,
what she wants to be, and I always hear her
talking, like, ‘Well the girls here are dressing this
way, so…’ She’ll like, take an item of clothing off.
And then some girls were talking about how many
people they’ve hooked up with and she was like,
‘Oh my God, you’ve hooked up with so many
boys—how do I do that?’ So I guess I don’t feel
pressure but I’ve been sort of exposed to that in
high school and I just know what it’s about so I’m
kind of like, whatever, but I think for her, it’s like a

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good example of the pressure because she
comes here and everyone’s doing this thing and
she’s not exposed to it and she’s feeling like,
‘Who am I? How can I fit in?’ And that’s the way
to do it.
Ivy: I think there’s a lot of girls who are really
sheltered. And I think they’re more easily inclined
to follow that sort of view of girls dressing like
sluts and doing more sexual activity type stuff
because they feel like that’s right.
Jen: The clothes thing is weird. I was, like, a hippie in
high school—parties for us, no one dressed up.
So like, coming here, I can’t just put on my flowy
top and shorts, I have to have heels—like, I don’t
wear heels, so I’m like, I have to wear heels? So
that’s different—I feel like it elevates it, the
dressing thing.
Ivy: I have, like, a whore side of my closet.
Jen: Me too!

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Ivy: There’s nights when I’ll go out in jeans and flats,
and I’m a short girl, and you get, like, no attention
at all—not like I’m asking for attention, but like
really, no attention. And then there’s nights when
you go out in a short skirt and heels and done-up
makeup, and it’s like, wow—this is a change.

Lisa’s parable about “the girl from Kansas” serves as an apt illustration of
one of the primary characteristics of postfeminism: the importance of self-
surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover paradigm. Here, these three
women describe the pressure for girls who are “new” to hookup culture to
adapt their demeanor and style of dress in accordance with postfeminist
cultural ideals. Furthermore, their conversation demonstrates that while the
“pressure” to make oneself over in the image of the “hot” postfeminist girl
may be especially pronounced for “new” girls, the neoliberal postfeminist
demand to “perfect the self” affects more seasoned college women as well,
particularly in its prescription for the ‘right’ look and attitude.
Recall for a moment the central tenets of postfeminism that I outlined in
Chapter 3. Postfeminism as a sensibility:

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• encourages self-surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover
paradigm;
• defines femininity as a bodily property and revives notions of
natural sexual difference; and
• marks a shift from sexual objectification to sexual
subjectification.

These three tenets are particularly important for understanding how gender
inequalities are produced and perpetuated in college hookup culture. First, as
I show in this section, is the encouragement of self-surveillance, self-
discipline, and a makeover paradigm whereby women are called upon to
monitor their bodies, attitudes, and style of dress and, if necessary, modify
them according to contemporary standards of heterofemininity. Second, as I
discuss in the following sections, is an emphasis on femininity as a bodily
property and a revival of ideas of natural sexual difference. Encompassing all
of these characteristics is a shift from sexual objectification to sexual
subjectification: a new “technology of sexiness” in which “sexual
objectification can be (re-)presented not as something done to women by
some men, but as the freely chosen wish of active, confident, assertive
female subjects” (Gill 2007, 152-153).

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Like Jen, Lisa, and Ivy, the students I talked to described a need
(for women especially, but for men as well) to have the ‘right’ body type and
physical appearance. When I asked respondents to describe a “hot” college-
aged woman, they offered these criteria: “thin,” “skinny,” “big boobs,” “blond,”
“tan,” “long hair,” “fit,” and “a good ass.” One sophomore fraternity brother
named Sean summed it up: “Blond, 5’5”, zero waist, C cups. I mean, that’s
not my personal preference, but it’s the glorified ideal.” In other words, as one
sorority sister named Kathryn sighed, “As close to Barbie as you can get.”
In addition to feeling pressure to have the ideal feminine body, women
also felt the need to have the right ‘look.’ I was surprised to hear multiple
women, in separate focus groups, confess to having a “whore side of the
closet.” Jamie, a senior, described the standard attire for females hoping to
hook up: “Whenever a girl dresses up to look hot, she wears a shorter skirt,
lower shirt, more skin.” My respondents also described the behavioral
expectations for women who want to hook up: they should be “confident,”
“saucy,” “flirty and fun,” and “give off this vibe that they’re ready for it.” And
although they were directed primarily at women, these pressures weren’t lost
on men: as a junior named Andy observed, “The girl has to put on a show.”
While women were the primary targets of gendered norms in the
hookup scene, men, too felt the pressure to conform to gendered

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expectations. Steve, a junior, believed that hookup culture “establishes a
constant tension between the two genders.” He continued, “I feel like it
makes girls evaluate guys all the time.” His friend Dylan chimed in, “You can’t
just chill out. You can’t be like, ‘Hey, whatever,’ not really give a shit for the
day. You sort of always have to be on edge … not on edge, but … you have
to be presenting yourself all the time.” Nonetheless, the students I spoke to
insisted that the pressure to have the right look was much more pronounced
for women than for men. “Guys just, like, scratch their balls, put on a t-shirt
and go out for the night,” Rosario noted. “Ugh. God, so unfair.”
As these comments suggest, although men did feel some pressure to
“be presenting yourself all the time,” the demand for self-surveillance and
self-discipline, and especially a makeover paradigm, was for the most part
directed at women. Gill (2007) writes that the postfeminist makeover
paradigm “requires people (predominantly women) to believe, first, that they
or their life is lacking or flawed in some way; [and] second, that it is amenable
to reinvention or transformation by … practicing appropriately modified
consumption habits” (156). From the “girl from Kansas” struggling to fit in with
the scantily clad popular girls to the “whore side of the closet” that many
women named as paramount for social attention and approval, we can see
that a makeover paradigm is a central feature of postfeminist hookup culture.

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The postfeminist demand for self-surveillance and self-discipline,
combined with the centrality of a makeover paradigm, ensures that women
must continually monitor and modify their behavior and physical appearance
in accordance with a rigid scale of feminine attributes: flirty demeanor, high
heels, long hair, big boobs, skinny waists. And, even as women gained some
control in the context of initiating hookups and choosing mates, this power
was severely limited by a heterosexual double standard that continues to
celebrate men who have frequent sexual encounters while condemning such
behavior among women. However, as I argue in the next section, the stigma
against women who are seen as having “too much” casual sexual experience
shows up in postfeminist culture in ways that are related to, yet distinct from,
those in previous eras.
Deploying “Slut”
The Traditional Double Standard
In the conversation that began this chapter, Lisa remarked that while she
was glad “girls aren’t so suppressed anymore,” she believed that “girls are
held to a higher standard, fairly or unfairly.” Her comment suggests that while
contemporary women may enjoy more sexual freedom than their mothers,
they continue to face a persistent double standard that simultaneously
condemns their sexual activity and condones it among men.

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Other students echoed Lisa’s sentiments. “Girls get called whores
if they sleep around,” pointed out a senior named Beth, “whereas guys get,
like, praised for it.” Tom, a freshman, offered a similar assessment: “I feel like
it’s a … gender difference. There’s such a stigma on a girl hooking up with a
lot of people, whereas a guy, it’s like, ‘Yeeeah! Fuck yeah!’” A sophomore
named Trishelle mused, “I mean, think about how much sex a guy on the
football team has—and then the girl who has sex with him? She’s a slut.”
The persistence of the sexual double standard is, of course, linked to
hetero-normative constructions of masculinity and femininity. For example,
when I asked how a girl might obtain ‘slut’ status, a junior named Kwame
explained:

I think a slut is someone who starts displaying an attitude
toward sex that’s maybe similar to a masculine view of it. Like,
if you heard a girl that’s just like, ‘Aww, man, I hooked up with
three different people this week!’ you’d be like, ‘Wow, I wasn’t
expecting that.’ If I heard a guy say that, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I got
it dude.’ You view them [men and women] differently.

In addition to defining women who hook up “too much” or with too many guys
as sluts, some students also felt that women who hooked up regularly were
unfit for “real” relationships. “I know guys who have said, ‘When I finally
decide to settle down, I don’t wanna be with a girl who I had sex with’,”
reported a senior named Willow. Lorraine, a sophomore, agreed: “Guys will

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always say, ‘I don’t wanna be with a ho.’” Kai, a regular participant in the
hookup scene, put it bluntly: “You’re not bringing a girl you hooked up with
home to your mom.”
The above excerpts illustrate what has become our common sense
understanding of the sexual double standard: women and men who engage
in similar sexual behaviors are judged differently based on their gender. In a
review of two decades of research on sexual double standards, Mary
Crawford and Danielle Popp (2003) report that traditionally, men and women
have been judged according to different “rules” of sexual conduct: women
faced stigmatization for engaging in any sexual activity outside heterosexual
marriage whereas similar behavior among men was expected and celebrated
(13). Although in most social groups the expectation that women remain
virgins until marriage is largely gone, women continue to be held to a stricter
standard than men when it comes to having casual sex (England, Shafer,
and Fogarty 2007). The story is familiar: women who hook up with “too
many” partners, or too often, are labeled as “sluts” and deemed unsuitable
for relationships, while men who engage in similar behaviors face little risk of
social condemnation.
Reiss (1967) predicted that various factors, including evolving gender
roles, liberalized sexual norms, better health resources, and changing

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patterns of courtship, would ultimately lead to increased gender equality
and decreased double standards. To some extent, he was right: recent
research shows that the traditional double standard is slowly eroding, with
young people applying similar standards to both men and women who
engage in casual sex (Allison and Risman 2012; Reid, Elliott, and Webber
2011). In a 2012 analysis of OCSLS data, for example, Rachel Allison and
Barbara Risman discovered an increasingly “level playing field” in college
students’ responses to the statement: “If (wo)men hook up or have sex with
lots of people, I respect them less.” 48% of all students judged men and
women who engaged in frequent hookups similarly and negatively (Allison
and Risman dub these students “egalitarian conservatives”); 27% lost no
respect for women or men who hook up frequently (“egalitarian libertarians”);
12% judged women negatively but men positively (“traditional double
standard”); and 13% judged men negatively but women positively (“reverse
double standard”).
These findings suggest that the orthodox double standard may carry
less weight than it did thirty years ago, as men who hook up “too much” are
now being judged alongside women; however, gendered disparities in
students’ attitudes toward casual sex remain. For instance, 25% of men
agree with the traditional double standard, compared to only 6% of women.

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Of these men, male athletes and men involved in the Greek system are
more likely to say that they have less respect for women who hook up
frequently (Allison and Risman 2012). Thus while contemporary double
standards appear to tolerate more sexual freedom for (some) women, they
still “represent a covert means of controlling women’s sexuality by judging its
expression more harshly than men’s sexual expression is judged” (Crawford
and Popp 2003, 23). Moreover, this research suggests that it is men, more
so than women, who are most invested in maintaining the traditional double
standard.
But if we look closely at college hookup culture, we see that there is
something else going on. Contrary to what a simple “battle of the sexes”
approach would suggest, my findings demonstrate that it is women, not men,
who are often at the helm of today’s slut-shaming ship. Because postfeminist
culture implies that gender equality has been achieved; encourages self-
surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover paradigm; defines femininity as
a bodily property; and marks a shift from sexual objectification to sexual
subjectification, it allows women to (re-)construct and (re-)deploy the term
“slut” in ways that were unimaginable in previous eras. Over the course of my
interviews I learned that when viewed through the lens of postfeminism, the

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question is not “Why do young women call other women ‘sluts’?” but
rather, “How is ‘slut’ deployed by young women to signify a postfeminist
sensibility?”
“Slut” as Degradation
The term “slut” is deployed in postfeminist hookup culture in at least two
important ways. The first aligns with more traditional uses of the term that
define a “slut” as a woman who has casual sex too often, or with too many
men. Here, women use the gendered insult much in the same manner that
men did in years past: it is a way to call into question a woman’s social status
by referencing her sexual behavior.
Take, for example, the following excerpt from my interview with Jen,
Lisa, and Ivy. Midway through our conversation, I inquired about the
tendency for girls to refer to each other as “sluts.”

Jess: Why do you think girls call other girls “sluts”?
Jen: It depends. For some people it’s jealousy.
Lisa: That’s what a lot of it is.
Ivy: Girls are conniving and really, like, spiteful.
Jess: What’s that about?
Ivy: I think jealousy gets to them a lot.

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Jess: What do you think they’re jealous of?
Lisa: It’s always guys.
Jen: It always comes back to a competition thing.
Jess: What’s the competition for?
Ivy: If you’re wanted more. If you’re given more
attention.
Jen: Validation.
Lisa: And girls wanna feel pretty, so if some other girl—
if they think someone else is prettier, if that girl
makes you feel less pretty, then it’s like, oh, well,
‘Slut.’ If she’s hooking up with this boy that I like,
regardless of who’s hooked up how many times,
she’s the slut. ‘Cause she’s getting in my way. It’s
sort of a way of degrading a girl who you feel
inferior to.

As this conversation illustrates, college women often use the term “slut” to
degrade the status of another woman whom they believe is “prettier” or
“wanted more.” Because in a postfeminist context it is up to women to police
not only their own expressions of heterosexual desire and desirability, but

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those of other women as well, “slut” becomes a general dis that uses
(presumed) sexual behavior as leverage in the ever-present competition for
male attention. Thus if a girl is “jealous” of another girl who appears to be
“getting in the way” of her own efforts to win men’s attention, “slut” is a
readily available insult to bring her competitor back down to size.
“Slut” as Re-Appropriation
While both women and men cited “jealousy” and “competition” as central to
the usage of the term “slut” as a girl-on-girl insult, this was not the only way
women deployed the term in contemporary hookup culture. Later in my
conversation with Jen, Ivy, and Lisa, I returned to the question of why (or
more precisely, how) women refer to other women as “sluts.” Their
responses, like those of other women I interviewed, reveal an understanding
of the word “slut” itself that is distinct in important ways from the traditional, ‘a
girl who sleeps around’ definition, one that signifies a sort of postfeminist re-
appropriation. They also show how in a postfeminist context, the terms of
gender assessment have shifted from an emphasis on sexual behavior to an
emphasis on the physical body as the primary marker of heterosexual
attractiveness.

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Jess: What’s up with girls calling other girls “sluts”?
Ivy: Well, when it’s your friends, they’re just doing it as
a joke. I feel like if they really know you—as slutty
as girls are, I feel like they don’t want to think that
they’re, like, actual sluts. So you just don’t take it
seriously.
Lisa: I feel like joking about it almost turns it around, in
a way?
Jess: Why do you think it’s so common?
Jen: Because guys started calling girls that, and
thinking it was okay, and then when girls do it it’s
like—
Lisa: That it can’t hurt—that it hurts less when boys say
it to you because you say it yourself.

Here, Jen, Lisa, and Ivy are redefining “slut” in a way that lines up with a
postfeminist sensibility. By calling other women “sluts,” these women are
reclaiming the term’s power; as Lisa explains, it “hurts less” when men use
the term if women become comfortable using it themselves. Writing about the
phenomenology of reclamation, Farah Godrej (2011) argues that women

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“reclaim words and phrases so that we refashion their meanings to
correspond to our particular goals. We rescue or salvage them from their
earlier—often derogatory—meanings so that they have the authority of our
ownership behind them” (111). Of course, women in hookup culture are not
the first to “reclaim” a previously derogatory term in this way; similar re-
appropriations have occurred with the term “queer” among LGBTQI activists
and with both “nigga” and “bitch” in hip hop cultures (see Ferguson 2006;
Galinsky et al. 2003).
In my view, the re-appropriation of “slut” by young women as a term of
endearment or self-conscious reversal can only be understood within the
context of contemporary postfeminism. Two points are crucial here: first is
the importance of irony and “knowingness” in postfeminist culture; second is
the presentation of femininity as a bodily property.
Irony and Knowingness
Recall from the previous section Ivy’s response when I asked about girls
referring to one another as “sluts”:

Well, when it’s your friends, they’re just doing it as a joke. I feel
like if they really know you—as slutty as girls are, I feel like they
don’t want to think that they’re, like, actual sluts. So you just
don’t take it seriously.

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Her comment points to the centrality of irony and “knowingness” in
postfeminist culture. Irony, as Rosalind Gill (2007) writes, “has become a way
of ‘having it both ways’, of expressing sexist, homophobic or otherwise
unpalatable sentiments in an ironized form, while claiming this was not
actually ‘meant’” (159). Like Ivy, the women I spoke to commonly described
the use of “slut” among girls in precisely this way: something not “actually
meant” but rather as a joking term of endearment. By calling one’s friends
“sluts,” women were able to signal to others (especially men) that they were
“in on the joke” and no longer burdened by old-school notions of gendered
political correctness (see McRobbie 2009). The regularity with which women
deployed “slut” as a term of irony and knowingness reflects another, related
tenet of postfeminism as well: the notion of femininity as a bodily property.
Femininity as a Bodily Property

Jess: Is being called a slut the worst thing someone
could call you?
Jen: I’d rather be called a slut than fat, I think.
Ivy: ‘Cause if you’re a slut, you’re at least wanted. But
if you’re fat or ugly, no one wants you.
Lisa: That’s so sad, but it’s kind of true.

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Jen: One of my friends—some guy in the 9-0 [a
popular bar near campus] was like, I guess she
completely rejected him, and he was like,
‘Whatever you’re fat anyways,’ and she was like,
‘Oh, but you’re ugly, I can lose weight, you can’t
do anything!’ I would probably shoot myself.
Ivy: I would cry. That would suck. I would cry.
Jess: I’d think being called ‘slut’ would be worse than
‘fat.’
Ivy: No. It’s not.
Jen: No. I mean, if someone walked by me and was
like, ‘She’s such a slut,’ then it’s just like,
‘Whatever—you are.’ But if someone walked by
and said, ‘She’s so busted,’ I’d be like, ‘Whoa.’
Lisa: And I think now, saying ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ is just like,
a general dis. It could be a synonym for like, ‘jerk.’
So it’s not, like, necessarily, actually what it
means. But when you call someone fat, that’s
what you mean.

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This conversation illustrates how, in contrast to earlier discursive
formations that defined femininity as a social, structural, or psychological
practice, contemporary postfeminism presents femininity as first and
foremost an embodied property. Gill (2007) has argued that young women’s
obsession with having a “sexy body” is one of the most striking
characteristics of postfeminist culture. She writes:

Instead of regarding caring, nurturing or motherhood as central
to femininity … in today’s media, possession of a ‘sexy body’ is
presented as women’s key (if not sole) source of identity. The
body is presented simultaneously as women’s source of power
and as always unruly, requiring constant monitoring,
surveillance, discipline and remodeling (and consumer
spending) in order to conform to ever-narrower judgments of
female attractiveness (2007, 149).

It may seem counterintuitive for young women to claim that “fat” is a far
worse insult than “slut”; nevertheless, when read through the lens of
postfeminist culture, such claims make more sense. A “fat” girl is not living up
to the standards of hetero-feminine beauty that rank a slim figure, perhaps
above all else, as the primary marker of feminine attractiveness. A “slut” does
not trouble idealized femininity in this way; on the contrary, it demonstrates
that the woman in question has succeeded in constructing her body
according to hetero-feminine standards. In other words, a “slut” paradoxically
affirms notions of femininity as a bodily property: the fact that she is able (or

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is at least perceived to be able) to have sex with “too many” men is a
reflection of her desirability as a heterosexual body; if she were “fat” or
“busted,” she would likely have no casual sexual experience at all. In college
hookup culture, embodied femininity becomes a kind of currency, rewarding
those that can make themselves over in the image of the “ideal” girl with
social status and leaving those that cannot exposed to the risk of being
assessed as inappropriately feminine.
As illustrated in the previous sections, such emphasis on femininity as
a bodily property goes hand-in-hand with two other central characteristics of
the postfeminist sensibility: the emphasis on self-surveillance, monitoring,
and discipline, and the dominance of a makeover paradigm (Gill 2007, 149).
It is up to women to continually assess, construct, and reconstruct their
bodies according to the (often unattainable) standards of postfeminist culture,
and they spend a significant amount of time, energy, and money trying to live
up these ideals. The centrality of a makeover paradigm and the emphasis on
self-surveillance and discipline, as other scholars have documented, have
immediate effects upon women’s bodies: the rise in eating disorders and
cosmetic surgery are but two examples (see Bordo 2003). In the context of
postfeminist hookup culture, too, we can easily see a shift in the terms of
female assessment from an emphasis on sexual behavior, wherein a

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woman’s desirability is determined by whether or not she has “too much”
casual sex, to an emphasis on femininity as a bodily property, wherein
heterosexual desirability is defined according to a “rigidly enforced scale of
feminine attributes” (McRobbie 2009, 120), particularly having the “right”
body, the “right” look, and the “right” attitude. Thus we hear Jen, Ivy, and Lisa
saying they’d rather be called a “slut” than “fat,” and then explaining their
choice via a logic of desirability: “if you’re fat, no one wants you.”
Dude, Where’s My Orgasm?
Not only are college women and men under constant pressure to conform to
the gender and sexual ideals dictated by the contemporary hookup scene,
the practice of hooking up is itself laden with gendered norms and
inequalities. Somewhat surprisingly, given the recent explosion of popular
and scholarly interest in hooking up, very little has been written about gender
and sexual inequality during hookups; most observers have instead focused
on gender relations within hookup culture more broadly.
One notable exception is the work of Paula England, Emily
Fitzgibbons Shafer, and Alison C. K. Fogarty (2007), whose findings provide
an important starting point for the present study. In their analysis of data from

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the Online College Social Life Survey, a survey of over 4,000
24
US
college students, England and her colleagues find striking disparities in the
percentage of women and men who orgasm and receive oral sex during
hookups. Overall, men are much more likely to orgasm during a hookup: 44%
of men compared to 19% of women. If the hookup includes only oral sex,
57% of men experience orgasm compared to 25% of women. If the hookup
involves vaginal penetration but no oral sex, 70% of men experience orgasm
compared to 34% of women. If both oral sex and vaginal intercourse take
place during a hookup, 85% of men reach orgasm compared to less than half
of women. Their findings also suggest disparities in who receives oral sex
during hookups: men are on the receiving end of oral sex 45% of the time,
yet they perform oral sex a mere 16% of the time. The gender gap in orgasm
and oral sex, however, is not constant. Additional analyses of OCSLS data
show that the gender gap is largest in first-time hookups, smaller in repeated
hookups with the same partner, and smallest in exclusive relationships
(Armstrong et al. 2010; see also Armstrong et al. 2012).
These studies illuminate the structure and extent of gendered
inequalities in the sexual practices of college students, yet they do not

24
To date, the OCSLS has surveyed over 19,000 college students. More recent analyses
(e.g., Armstrong, England, and Fogarty 2010; 2012) reflect similar patterns in rates of
orgasm and oral sex.

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explain the mechanisms and processes by which these unequal
outcomes occur. Why, for example, do such a small percentage of women
orgasm during a first-time hookup, compared to a relatively large percentage
of men? How do students construct the cultural imperative for women to
perform, but not receive, oral sex? Taken together with data from existing
studies, my qualitative findings offer some preliminary explanations for the
existence of the orgasm and oral sex “gaps” that appear in the collegiate
hookup scene. While the students I spoke to varied in their explanations of
gendered disparities in orgasm and oral sex during hookups, their responses
can be grouped into four general categories: (1) men’s apathy and/or lack of
sexual knowledge; (2) women’s discomfort or self-consciousness; (3)
biological constraints; and (4) social expectations. In students’ talk, these
categories were often used in tandem, woven together to construct an
ideology of natural sexual difference.
Men’s Lack of Sexual Knowledge
Some of the students I interviewed maintained that men are simply untrained
in the arts of orgasm and oral sex. According to Summer, a sorority woman
who hooked up regularly, “[G]uys aren’t really educated in that.” Another
Greek woman lamented, “I really wish—I know this could never happen—but
I wish there could be a tutorial for men.” Others, like Wendy, more

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generously conjectured that men may be “insecure about their
performance” or that they “don’t realize that they could get a lot more out of a
hookup if they performed oral sex.” Most women, however, believed that men
aren’t losing any sleep thinking about women’s orgasms, or lack thereof.
Lydia, a white senior who was sporadically involved in the hookup scene,
summed it up: “I think they don’t know what they’re doing and I think very few
guys really care.”
Women’s Discomfort
Some women described feeling uncomfortable about cunnilingus—an
apparently justifiable concern since, as Leanne protested, “You have to be,
like, totally naked!” and, as Beth added, “That’s, like, inside.” Others, like
Summer, claimed that oral sex was something that men, unlike women, did
not have to prepare for in advance: “For girls, that opens a whole new door of
hygiene in this area, like shaving versus not shaving. I didn’t shave today, so
I’m gross—he can’t possibly enter that area.”
Students also identified a cultural expectation for women to be willing
to have casual sex, but not to overtly desire it. Krissy’s comment is typical:
“Girls shouldn’t be as needy and horny, like, ‘I need this.’ They shouldn’t
seem like it.” As I discussed in the previous section, the women I interviewed
were aware of the continuing stigma attached to “too much” female sexual

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desire; as a result, they rarely articulated their sexual disappointments.
Hollis insisted, “No girl is gonna stand up and be like, ‘I want a hookup that’s
good!’ We’re just not gonna be, like, too outspoken about it.”
Biological Constraints
By far the most common explanation I heard for gendered disparities in
hookups was, “It’s biological.” Students often invoked biology to explain
perceived differences in men’s and women’s behavior in hookup culture; for
instance, a sophomore named Dave had this to say when I asked if men
want sex more than women:

Yeah. I really think—just cuz I’ve taken a bunch of psychology
classes, like the biology of it is like, women can—if you’re
talking about in terms of like, giving birth and natural selection
or whatever, women have like one egg at a time, whereas men
can just like impregnate the world if they have to. Like, the
natural drive for men to spread is like, way stronger. I feel like
that’s true.

Students also resorted to biological explanations for inequalities in rates of
orgasm and oral sex, reporting that reaching orgasm is simply “harder” for
women and “just happens” for men. My respondents rarely questioned the
conventional wisdom that it “takes girls longer” to become sexually aroused,
and were thus unfazed by statistics showing disparities in hookups. “It takes
us, like, 14 minutes of foreplay to get to the same level of arousal as a man

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to have an erection,” explained Rosario, a sexually active critic of the
hookup scene. “So it’s like, obviously, females don’t get that foreplay.” Many
students also reported that, like it or not, a man’s orgasm signals the end of a
hookup. As Lydia declared, “It’s officially quote-unquote ‘over’ when he gets
his.”
Social Expectations
Another common explanation for unequal rates of oral sex and orgasm was
that it is more socially acceptable for men to demand oral stimulation than it
is for women to make such requests. As Leanne put it, “Blow jobs for guys
are more acceptable—boys’ stuff always comes first.” Steve explained why
men receive the lion’s share of oral sex: “Cuz girls are willing to! Cuz they
will. And most guys will not.” For many of the women I spoke to, asking a
partner for oral sex or orgasms felt “weird” and “embarrassing.”
A junior named Katie recalled her own experience: “Guys do the push-
down thing! They push on your shoulder all subtle—sometimes not so
subtle— girls never do that! Girls should be able to do that, like, ‘Get your
head down there!’ Imagine!” Jenny, a senior, protested, “Women aren’t
saying, ‘I want you to go down on me and not have to give you a blow job.’
We should be able to say that.” However, most of the women I spoke to

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believed that if they were to make such demands, they would be seen as
“needy” or “really over-eager and psycho.”
Many female respondents also used “social pressure” arguments to
defend men’s behavior in the hookup scene. “I think the culture sets guys up
to think that way,” argued Patty. “Like, they think they have to go to the Row
and find theirs, you know what I mean?” Lisa agreed: “It’s easy, like, group
dynamic, to get into the flow … I think a lot of times boys don’t know that
they’re being the way they are.”
Respondents regularly invoked biological and social explanations in
tandem. For example, many students believed that reaching orgasm is “more
work” for women, a problem which is only exacerbated by rampant alcohol
use. When I asked a group of three fraternity men if they thought the
percentage of women and men who orgasm during a hookup was equal, they
burst out laughing.

Nick: No way!
Chad: Definitely not.
Dan: Girls don’t [orgasm] a lot more. I think in terms of
like—I dunno about drunken hookups, cuz like
most of the time I can’t tell. [They all laugh.] But

154
like—it definitely, in terms of having an orgasm,
you could—a guy it’ll just happen, it just happens.
But it’s, like, work for a girl to have that. I feel like
the more drunk you are, the more fucked up you
are, they harder it is to make that happen.
Nick: Sticking things in the wrong things. [They all
laugh.]
Jess: In terms of giving and receiving oral sex, do you
think it’s equal?
Chad: Oh, guys get way more. [Laughter.] Absolutely.
Nick: I don’t know why that needs to happen, but I’m
okay with it. I mean—I dunno why that is, but I
guess it sort of makes sense. ‘Cause I feel like
guys are just like, “Yeaaahhhh, whatever. Who
cares.”

In this conversation, Nick, Chad, and Dan combine the cultural
rationale that men don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to pleasuring
women sexually—they either “can’t tell” or don’t care—with a logic of
biological difference that claims it takes more “work” for a woman to reach

155
orgasm. Furthermore, their laughter betrays another, more implicit reality:
their inability, or at least unwillingness, to speak about women’s sexual
pleasure in any serious or thoughtful way. (When I spoke to women about
disparities in rates of oral sex and orgasm, they were not laughing.)
Both men and women also regularly invoked the “blue balls” defense.
For those unfamiliar with this age-old guilt trip, Dylan explained: “For a guy, if
I don’t orgasm when I’m hooking up with someone, it’s really frustrating. And
I don’t think that’s true for girls.” Kai agreed: “Yeah, like horribly—blue balls
are just … no good.” Girls, too, worried about leaving their partners
“unsatisfied.” According to Beth, “If you’re hooking up with a guy and it’s
progressing and you’re somewhere alone and you realize that you’re not
gonna have sex with him—I dunno, you feel bad. Like you’re gonna leave
him with total blue balls.”
Interestingly, men rarely described using the blue balls defense as a
way to get women to “do more” during hookups; rather, the a priori
assumption that if women did not perform fellatio or have intercourse to the
point of men’s ejaculation then blue balls would ensue, was in itself enough
to ensure the reproduction of gender inequalities in oral sex and orgasm. In
other words, the specter of blue balls structured patterns of gender relations

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and sexual behavior in the hookup scene in a way that prioritized men’s
pleasure over women’s and reinstated a cultural logic of biological difference.
Students also asserted that women are naturally “eager to please” and
often put men’s sexual and psychological needs before their own; as a
freshman named Lorraine explained, women are “caregivers” who “put
themselves second.” “Everyone always talks, like, boys are immature, girls
are mature—this is so sexist—but girls are gonna be moms, girls are
supposed to be nurturing,” said Lisa. Others, like Wendy, believed that “girls
think about it more” and are “more aware of what the other person is feeling”
during sex. Women also described feeling personally responsible for the
outcome of a hookup, as illustrated by Trishelle’s comment about a hookup
gone wrong: “Sometimes when it doesn’t happen, like when they go limp, I
feel like I should’ve done something differently even though it’s probably not
me, it’s probably some weird biological issue.” Ultimately, students agreed
that women actively participate in constructing hookups around male
pleasure. According to sorority sisters Katie, Beth, and Leanne, girls “cater to
guys,” “want men to be happy,” and “wanna make the guy feel good about
himself.” “We want them to be happy with the hookup, with the orgasm or
whatever, and with us,” explained Mandy, a senior. “And our ability to create
that for them.”

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Constructing Natural Sexual Difference
Like other studies, these findings illustrate that hookup culture is structured
around (what students perceive as) men’s needs and desires. Students
unanimously corroborated existing statistical data that shows men reach
orgasm and receive oral sex much, much more than women during hookups.
As a junior named Rakim explained, “The emphasis is so much more on
pleasuring the male that men aren’t trying to pleasure the female, and I think
that’s where the stimulation comes from—in the build-up—and if men aren’t
trying, then … [trails off].” Kwame, a senior, concurred: “I feel like a lot of
times, or just naturally, it’ll become the guy controlling the situation. So the
guy’s getting what he wants and the girl’s not.” According to my respondents,
any sexual pleasure gained from a hookup was likely to fall upon men. “I
think the girls are just fillers,” Lydia remarked. “They’re literally just there to
let the guy get off. Girls are just along for the ride.”
Gill (2007) argues that a key feature of the postfeminist sensibility is
the resurgence of ideas of natural sexual difference. She writes:

Discourses of sexual difference … serve to (re-)eroticize power
relations between men and women. On one level this simply
means that difference is constructed as sexy. On another,
discourses of natural gender difference can be used to freeze in
place existing inequalities by representing them as inevitable
and—if read correctly—as pleasurable (158).

158
At LAU, discourses of natural sexual difference worked in precisely this
way: students simultaneously constructed gender difference as “sexy,”
prompting women to spend significant amounts of time and energy in order
to live up to ideals of feminine beauty, and used an ideology of sexual
difference to explain gendered inequalities in the hookup scene.
Overall, students took it for granted that men and women are
“naturally” different. For some women, the ideology of natural sexual
difference worked to their benefit; as Rosario commented, “It’s pretty easy
being a girl to let a guy know I wanna hook up, because guys are, like,
obviously more physical than females, so you kinda just put yourself out
there and flirt a little.” For others, constructions of natural sexual difference
worked to explain perceived gender differences in desire and expectations.
Take, for example, Lydia’s response when I asked if men and women want
different things in hookups:

Well, I think 20 percent of girls will say, “I’m just hooking up,”
but of those 20 percent there’s still 15 percent that want
something else. And I would say that’s because of hormones.
Like, being literal -- I went to a seminar, and it changed my life,
like, it was on, like, hormones and females -- when you touch
somebody, as a female, for 20 seconds or more, a hormone is
released in your body that makes you trust that person and
want to be around that person more. And so, how could you,
like, deny that? With guys, the opposite hormone is released
when they’re our age that says they want to spread their seed.

159
So it’s like, actually, physically, I cannot help wanting
something more if I hook up with somebody.

The idea that gendered disparities in time to arousal or climax are “obvious”
or inevitable, the notion that men “naturally” control hookups, and the
reduction of socially constructed expectations to “hormones” are all part of a
postfeminist ideology of natural sexual difference that both undergirds and
reproduces gendered inequalities in hookup culture.

Jess: Do you think girls and guys are different in terms
of how much they want to have sex?
Michael: Yeah, totally.
Tom: They’re def—it’s definitely different.
Ben: I feel like it’s on guys’ minds all the time, whereas
it’s not, like, on the other end.
Dave: Well, girls aren’t thinking about it all the time, but
they definitely do a lot.
Michael: Guys are just fucking horndogs.
Ben: And also I think girls just have a lot higher
standards than guys.
Jess: What do you mean?

160
Ben: It depends. I feel like because it’s less acceptable
for girls to be sluts, umm, they kinda hide their
horniness? But inside they’re just as horny as
guys.
Tom: I feel like it’s a … gender difference. There’s such
a stigma on a girl hooking up with a lot of people,
whereas a guy, it’s like, ‘Yeeeah! Fuck yeah!’”
Dave: It has the appearance that guys are thinking
about it more.
Michael: But I think that’s true to an extent, like, yeah, guys
are thinking about it more. Because it’s like, a girl
is a slut but a guy is a player.

The persistent commitment to notions of natural sexual difference, as
illustrated above, combined with the liberal feminist ideals of equal
opportunity and “choice” that I described in Chapter 3, leads to the
emergence of a gender ideology that Michael Messner (2011) calls “soft
essentialism.” As a hegemonic ideology, soft essentialism describes the
“currently ascendant professional class postfeminist articulation of ‘choice’ for
girls and women and an unreconstructed view of boys and men” (Messner

161
2011, 153). Soft essentialism, in Messner’s view, arises within the socio-
historical context of work-family tensions due to an unfinished feminist
revolution; a postfeminist celebration of individual choice among professional
class women alongside a renewed valorization of women’s maternal roles;
and continuing biological assumptions about boys and men (ibid.). While
Messner’s analysis draws from his interviews with coaches and parents
involved in youth sports, we can see soft essentialism at work in college
hookup culture as well: students drew on a discourse of soft essentialism that
framed men’s desire as natural or inevitable—”guys are just fucking
horndogs”—and reaffirmed the existence of a traditional sexual double
standard that created barriers against overt expressions of female desire. In
this way, college men’s pursuit of casual sex as an end in itself is left
uninterrogated while college women who engage in similar behaviors must
couch their actions in a discourse of “choice.”
Sexual Subjects
Compared to their mothers and grandmothers, today’s young women have
more freedom to engage in casual sexual activity without fear of public
reprimand. Yet at the same time, they feel immense pressure to conform to
contemporary standards of feminine beauty and heterosexual attractiveness.
If in the past women had to choose between openly acknowledging their

162
desire for sex (at the risk of social stigma) and conforming to social
standards of morality, young women today must navigate a postfeminist
terrain that compels them to become appropriate heterosexual objects while
at the same time denying them full social or sexual equality.
When I asked students if they thought men and women are different in
terms of how much they desire sex, or what they want from a sexual
encounter, their responses tended to reaffirm an ideology of natural sexual
difference. However, this reaffirmation was often crosscut with another
postfeminist narrative, one that points to the central, if contradictory, impulse
for women to construct themselves as worthy heterosexual objects and also,
at the same time, “sexual subjects.” When I asked Mandy, a sophomore
sorority member, if men and women both enjoyed hooking up, she was
openly frustrated by the assumption that men are the only ones who desire
sex as an end in itself.

I wish that you could just, like—if you both just wanna have sex,
you can both just have sex, and if you both want something,
then you can, like, openly say it. If you could just say it! Girls
want sex too! Guys always think girls want them way more than
they want them. And it’s so not true. I want to have sex cuz I
want to have sex. If guys would just get over themselves and
realize that girls don’t always want a relationship, I think it
would be so much easier. And then girls are always like, “Oh,
she’s a slut”—whatever. I like looking hot! I like knowing that
guys want me. I’m not trying to be a bitch, but there are some
girls that just don’t get it.

163
Mandy’s comment points to one of the most important tenets of
postfeminism: a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification. As
Gill (2007) explains:

[The shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification]
is crucial to understanding the postfeminist sensibility. It
represents a modernization of femininity to include … a new
‘technology of sexiness’ in which sexual knowledge and
practice are central. Furthermore, it represents a shift in the
way that power operates: from an external, male judging gaze
to a self-policing, narcissistic gaze. It can be argued that this
represents a higher or deeper form of exploitation than
objectification—one in which the objectifying male gaze is
internalized to form a new disciplinary regime. In this regime,
power is not imposed from above or the outside, but constructs
our very subjectivity (152).

As we have seen, the postfeminist construction of women as sexual subjects
has its roots in the neoliberal demand for an autonomous, freely choosing
social actor whose behavior is understood as wholly unconstrained by
structural or cultural forces. It is worth remembering Katie’s comment from
Chapter 3: “Girls get the slut label and stuff, but in a way they ask for it. I
don’t think it’s a culture thing; I think it’s how you make yourself seem to other
people.” In the context of hookup culture, this means that when women (or
men) encounter sexual double standards or gendered imbalances in rates of
orgasm and oral sex, they lack the language to analyze these inequalities in
any sociological way. Instead, they draw on biological explanations and a

164
neoliberal logic of individual “choice” to make sense of gendered
inequalities in the hookup scene.
The trouble with the shift from sexual objectification to sexual
subjectification is that women’s efforts to live up to standards of heterosexual
desire and desirability are presented as “the freely chosen wish of active,
confident, assertive female subjects” (Gill 2007, 153). Consequently, in a
postfeminist context women become responsible for monitoring their sexual
and emotional relationships, protecting themselves against pregnancy,
sexually transmitted diseases, and bad reputations and, perhaps most
importantly, constructing themselves as desirable heterosexual mates
(including learning how to please men sexually and psychologically). By
contrast, men “are hailed as hedonists just wanting ‘a shag’” (Gill 2007, 151).
We have seen this process at work in college hookup culture in at
least three important ways: first, that women monitor their bodies and
behavior according to prevailing standards of hetero-feminine beauty;
second, that women feel responsible for pleasing men both sexually and
emotionally; and third, that women work to defend their own sexual
reputations by deploying “slut” in culturally strategic ways. There is a fourth
mechanism at work here, too, whereby students use discourses of soft

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essentialism to define men as “naturally” drawn to casual sexual
encounters while presenting similar desires among women as a matter of
“choice.”
The other, and perhaps more insidious, problem is that the
postfeminist shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification
involves the suppression of women’s actual sexual desires in favor of the
embodiment or performance of feminine sexiness. Other scholars have
noticed this as well: for instance, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2004) argues that
while discourses of “girl power” abound in contemporary popular culture, “girl
power” ideology does not include a model for how to access this newfound
“empowerment” except through representation (130). Or, as historian
Stephanie Coontz (1992) contends, the “acknowledgement of female
sexuality” that developed out of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s
“also meant its incorporation into a competitive, consumerist model of
behavior” (195). In this way, young women and men have been conditioned
to accept representations of sexuality much faster than the regulatory
structures of society could de-stigmatize female sexual desire in reality
(Coontz 1992, 200). Coontz concludes that this cultural trend created an
environment in which college students are experts on imitating the image of

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sexy, but know staggeringly little about how to actually have fulfilling sex
(1992, 203).
As Coontz predicted, the women I spoke to had mastered the cultural
craft of looking and acting sexy, and knew exactly what men were looking for
in a sexual partner. Yet they knew surprisingly little about what they wanted
from a casual sexual encounter. In fact, despite their constant sexploit
chatter, none of the women I interviewed cited their own sexual pleasure as a
reason for their enjoyment of hookup culture, and only two referred to sexual
desire as a possible incentive to hook up. And, for all their apparent
willingness, none of my female respondents reported actually enjoying
fellatio. When asked how they felt about performing oral sex, sorority sisters
Hollis, Beth, and Leanne had this to say:

Hollis: It’s gross.
Beth: Nobody likes it.
Leanne: I’d rather not have to do it ever again in my life, but I feel
like I have to.

These sentiments notwithstanding, college women have learned to, as
Summer explained, “put mind over matter” and “get through it”—one sorority

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sister even described reciting multiplication tables backward from 100
while she performed oral sex to “take her mind off” the unpleasant task.
In a framework that defines hooking up simply as a matter of casual
sex, comments like these make little sense. Most scholars and popular
commentators have used this approach, and invariably concluded that
women are “losing” the hookup game: they have to do stuff they don’t want to
do, and they don’t get stuff in return. Yet it is precisely this kind of analytical
framework that has stifled so much of the conversation about hooking up: if
we only measure “pleasure” by rates of orgasm and oral sex, then it appears
that women are either victims or just confused, and we have trouble
comprehending their continued participation in—and enjoyment of—hookup
culture. But if we pay attention to the narratives of college women, and
situate these narratives within the context of postfeminism, then their
“choices” become much clearer. For many women, whether hooking up is
sexually pleasurable or not isn’t a primary concern. Rather, exhibiting the
appropriate willingness and desire to engage in sexual activity (however
unpleasant) is part and parcel of the postfeminist sexual contract that
requires young women to be desiring and desirable sexual subjects.
In other words, even though women may not reap the sexual benefits
of hookup culture, my research indicates that they do receive other, less

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tangible rewards for their efforts. While every student I interviewed was
cognizant of the unequal gender dynamics within hookup culture, many
believed that hooking up still represents a step forward for women. Mandy
put it this way: “Personally, I’m a fan. I think it’s an improvement. It’s just like
anything else—like, putting more equality, even though—at least we can do
it.” Summer agreed, adding, “I think it actually makes the female sexual
experience more important—like, it’s not something you push under the rug
into a marriage.” Other students, like Lydia, believed that hooking up was an
opportunity for young women to explore their sexuality in new ways: “I think
there are more ways now that girls can find pleasure other than the, like,
internal G-spot.” Kristen added,

I think it’s better—you know about sex [when you’re] younger,
you know about the consequences and disadvantages. Like, I
watched this video about the female orgasm—it was really
good, but the girls on there were like, ‘How many of you knew
what masturbation was?’ And nobody knew. No one talked
about it. I think it’s a lot better, mentally, for people to accept
that sex is natural, it happens, and it’s something that
everyone’s gonna do eventually.

More than any other benefit, though, students argued that hooking up
is a crucial marker of heterosexual approval, a “status-booster” that provides
women with a sense of “self-validation” and “accomplishment.” For this
reason alone, women may pursue hookups as a way to “feel better” about

169
their appearance and “prove” their attractiveness to men. Willow
explained, “I want self-satisfaction—like, I feel better about myself now—
some guy wants me.” Or, as Beth added, “When a girl hooks up, it’s like if a
guy tells you that you’re pretty, but more intense than that.” Many of the
women I interview reported that the post-hookup “follow-up” (usually in the
form of a phone call or text message) was a highly coveted event among
women in the hookup scene—not because it represented a potential
romantic relationship, but because it confirmed their status as desirable
heterosexual objects.
For those women who pursue hookups in the name of women’s
liberation, hookup culture can be, as a junior named Patty described it, “a
double-edged sword.” On one hand, as we have seen, many respondents felt
that expressions of female sexuality are less stigmatized today than in
previous eras. “The fact that you could blatantly say, you know, ‘I had sex,’
it’s not a big deal,” Mandy explained, “whereas thirty years ago—not thirty
years ago, but a while ago, the fifties—it would be like, ‘You whore!’” A
freshman named Harold declared, “A while ago, a female saying [she had
sex] was completely unacceptable, and now it’s the way it is. It’s more like a
normal thing, like, ‘Okay, she did that.’”

170
On the other hand, though, contemporary women continue to be
publicly reprimanded for overt expressions of heterosexual desire. “Even
though we’re moving away from that double standard,” Lydia sighed, “there’s
still, like, the ‘slut’ thing.” “It’s the same double standard that’s evolving,”
Rakim noted. “Like, when women are being freed up in a lot of ways but [are]
also expected to have more responsibilities. Now it’s okay if girls hook up
with a bunch of people … sort of.”
These findings suggest that hooking up may represent, at least in
some ways, for some women, a form of sexual liberation. As England and
Thomas (2005) contend, “[I]f it is accepted (at least in some groups) for
women to do more sexually, but they retain the choice to say no, it must be
an expansion of their freedom and a victory from a feminist point of view” (4).
However, as I have argued, this newfound “freedom” is severely limited by a
postfeminist logic that continues to reproduces sexual double standards and
define women as heterosexual objects (er, subjects) for male pleasure.
Sexual liberation thus remains situated within, and fully compatible with, a
heteronormative and patriarchal gender order. The research presented in this
chapter demonstrates that contemporary young women do find pleasure and
power in college hookup culture, but—and this is a big but—this pleasure
and power is achieved via strictly enforced gender and sexual performances.

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CHAPTER 5
EXCLUSIONS, EXCEPTIONS, AND EATING THE OTHER
I got this Spanish chica, she don’t like me to roam
So she call me “cabron” plus “maricon”
Said she like to cook rice so she like me home
I’m like, “Un momento, mami, slow up your tempo”

I got this black chick, she don’t know how to act
Always talking out her neck, making her fingers snap
She like: “Listen Jigga Man, I don’t care if you rap
You better R-E-S-P-E-C-T me”

I got this French chick that love to French kiss
She think she Bo Derek, wear her hair in a twist
“Ma cherie amour, tu es belle”
Merci you’re fine as fuck but you’re giving me hell

I got this Indian squaw, the day that I met her
Asked her what tribe she with: red dot or feather
She said: “All you need to know is I’m not a ho
And to get with me you better be Chief Lots-a-Dough”

Now that’s Spanish chick, French chick, Indian and black
That’s fried chicken, curry chicken, damn I’m gettin’ fat
Arroz con pollo, French fries and crepe
Appetite for destruction but I scrape the plate

Jay-Z, “Girls, Girls, Girls”

“I think this exotic thing is getting really big—like, people who are mixed.”

Toni (21, black, sorority member)

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Angela McRobbie (2009) argues that it is no coincidence that
postfeminism has become so widespread at this socio-historical moment.
Rather, it is precisely because more and more women have come forward in
education and employment and gender equality has (allegedly) been
achieved that postfeminism emerged to re-secure the gender order.
Moreover, as women of color become increasingly visible in the academy,
the public sphere, and popular culture, contemporary discourses have
adapted in order to reinforce gender and racial hierarchies and ensure that
systems of compulsory heterosexuality and white privilege remain intact.
In an attempt to address these issues, scholars have described the
ways in which a postfeminist sensibility functions as a mechanism of power
and exclusion. Focusing primarily on representations of postfeminism in TV
shows such as “Sex and the City” (Arthurs 2003; Hermes 2006) and “Ally
McBeal” (Hermes 2006; Moseley and Read 2002); films like Bridget Jones’s
Diary (McRobbie 2009); and the ubiquitous “Girls Gone Wild” video franchise
(Mayer 2005; Pitcher 2006), these scholars explore the relationship between
feminism, femininity, and sexuality as it appears in popular culture. Notably,
most of the academic literature on postfeminism examines cultural
representations featuring women who are young, heterosexual, middle-class,

173
and white.
25
Those scholars who have critically examined the racialized
character of these representations conclude, almost uniformly, that
postfeminism works to exclude women of color and reproduce racial
inequality by reinstituting (Western) whiteness as a dominant cultural norm.
For example, McRobbie (2009) contends that young women’s
increasing participation in the labor market is accompanied by a cultural
politics of disarticulation. For her purposes, McRobbie defines disarticulation
as that force which undermines potential inter-generational solidarities
between and among women through the widespread dissemination of values
that characterize feminism as embittered and passé, the territory of ancient,
furry, man-hating lesbians. Moreover, disarticulation works to foreclose
potential cross-cultural ties and transmissions by imagining non-Western
women as sexually constrained and victimized, in (false) contrast to the
“sexually free” women in the West. The postfeminist sensibility that
“celebrates the fashion-conscious ‘thong-wearing’ Western girls” recreates

25
Banet-Weiser (2007) and Springer (2007) are two important exceptions. Others have
examined themes of self-production, sexualization, and commodification in relation to
women of color, for instance Rose’s (2008) examination of black women’s participation in hip
hop subcultures and Molina-Guzmán’s (2010) work on the construction of Latina media
bodies (see also Molina-Guzmán and Valdivia [2004]; Aparicio [2003]; Beltrán [2002];
Negrón-Muntaner [1997]); however, in these studies postfeminism is not named as an
explicit context.

174
and reinforces notions of Western superiority while weakening potential
alliances based on feminist post-colonialist critique (McRobbie 2009, 27). As
processes of disarticulation reinforce the boundaries of (white/Western)
femininity, the postfeminist masquerade works to “re-secure the terms of
submission of white femininity to white masculine domination, while
simultaneously resurrecting racial divisions by undoing any promise of
multiculturalism through the exclusion of non-white femininities from this rigid
repertoire of self-styling” (McRobbie 2009, 70). In its assumption of a white
subject and its suggestion that anti-racist struggles are a thing of the past,
postfeminism functions, in McRobbie’s view, as a subtle mechanism of racial
exclusion.
In college hookup culture, processes of exclusion and disarticulation
most often happened through symbolic boundary work (for a review of this
concept, see Lamont and Molnár 2002) of the sort McRobbie (2009) and
others have observed in postfeminist media representations. The students I
interviewed often appealed to “us versus them” narratives in their
explanations of racial/ethnic and sexual inequalities in the hookup scene. By
privileging a white, heterosexual, middle-class subject, and locating the
epicenter of hookup culture in Greek life, these postfeminist narratives
erected a spatial and social division between insiders and outsiders, and

175
ensured that systems of white privilege and compulsory heterosexuality
remained largely unchallenged by cultural “others.”
The Row
Without fail, students at LAU framed their position in hookup culture relative
to one central institution: the Row. Every student I interviewed knew where
and what the Row was: a street close to campus that housed all of the
fraternity and sorority houses, and thus a central site for campus parties.
Whether or not they were themselves members of a fraternity or sorority,
students defined the Row as the place where hooking up happened on
campus.

Jess: Do you think hookup culture reflects your own
sexual experiences?
Beth: That world is the Row. That’s our world.
Mandy: I think it goes beyond Greek life, though?
Hollis: Yeah, but that’s the only part that we’re, like, in.
Kathryn: I think also the fact that we’re at LAU and like …
it’s not like a party school, but I mean—
Hollis: People know how to party.

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Beth: Yeah, and the frats are wealthy and can throw
these huge parties with unlimited alcohol, and that
definitely like—
Mandy: Helps. A lot.

As this conversation suggests, the Row was defined as the center of the
social world on campus, not least in part because it’s where alcohol is most
readily available. Women and men—both those who were in the Greek
system and those who were not—also agreed that students in fraternities
and sororities have greater access to potential hookup mates, as illustrated
in this conversation between three non-Greek students:

Jess: Do you think your experiences with hooking up
are similar to other students’?
Kai: I think frat guys get way more ass than I do.
[Laughter.] Like, absolutely.
Steve: I mean maybe—I think I’m pretty average.
Dylan: Yeah, I think I would get more ass if I was in a
fraternity.
Steve: Yeah probably.

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Dylan: Oh man, sorry—I like totally forgot this was going
into a transcript. “More ass.” [Laughs.]
Jess: [Laughs.] You’re OK. Can you tell me why you
think you’d get more ass if you were in a frat?
Dylan: I mean I feel like it’s kinda because it’s stacked.
It’s like—for one, they’ve got, like, exchanges,
and like dashes
26
and all this shit. It’s like, “Whoa,
let’s just get a bunch of girls with a bunch of our
guys in a room, put a lotta alcohol in there, and

26
According to the LAU Interfraternity Council website: [sic throughout] “All fraternities
throughout each semester host invites, date dashes and exchanges in addition to formals.
Invites are special events whereby brother find dates in advance and after formal dinners,
the chapters and their respective dates head to venues in Malibu, West Hollywood, and
Beverly Hills, among other places for a night of dancing and socializing. Many fraternity
invites are formal (i.e. suits, ties, dresses, etc.) while others are themes at the discretion of
the fraternity. Exchanges are exciting, unique ways to engage with entire sororities. Unlike
invites, exchanges are limited to two chapters, one fraternity and one sorority. For an
exchange, the entire fraternity heads over to the sorority they are exchanging with and after
serenading the ladies, both the fraternity and sorority head to an off campus venue to dance
and socialize. Exchanges are always themed. Date dashes are fast-paced, more casual
social events that each fraternity hosts at least one of throughout each semester. Brothers
are told the day of that their chapter has a date dash and they have to find a date before
heading to a venue of some kind for a night including but not limited to bowling, ice skating,
laser tag, and roller coasters. Often the highlight of any given semester, each fraternity hosts
a formal that involves a weekend off campus to destinations such as Vegas, Palm Springs,
Lake Havasu and Catalina Islands, to mention a few. Similar to invites, each brother brings a
date along for a weekend filled with jet skiing, beach parties and musical performances
brought full circle by world-class resorts and five-star dinners. In addition, many fraternities
crown their new ‘Sweetheart’ during their formal, the highest honor given by each fraternity
to the girl most devoted to and best friends with the chapter. Formals are a must for any
gentleman of a fraternity.”

178
we’ve got like exclusive rights to the sorority right
now.” And it’s like, there’s no pre—it’s like the
pretense is like, “We’re tryin’ to get laid.”
Steve: That’s true.
Jess: And you think that’s different from your
experience?
Kai: I mean, there’s definitely a hookup culture for an
independent [non-Greek] but I mean, our lives are
not kind of entirely created around hooking up.
Dylan: It doesn’t, like—I feel like for people who are
independent, it doesn’t just, like, happen. You
have to pursue it.
Steve: The thing is, too, is that—well, at least for us three
in particular—is that girls are really into guys who
are in frats. Like, the first thing a girl will ask you if
you’re at a party is, “What frat are you in?”
Kai: Like, [in a mocking high-pitched voice], “Ohmigod,
what frat are you in?!” [Laughter.] I’m like, “You
know, that one—you know, it’s down the street,
it’s right on 18
th
!”

179
Steve: It’s on the Row. [Laughter.]
Dylan: I don’t know if I speak for you guys, but like—
have you guys all lied about being in a frat
before?
Steve: No.
Kai: Yup.
Dylan: I’ve like, highly considered it. They’ll be like,
“What frat are you in?” And I’m like—”Fuck you!”
Cuz it’s like—one, it’s a fucking stupid question to
ask, I think, personally. I mean maybe it’s not, I
don’t know, I don’t have the perspective on it. But
like, lying about it, I almost wouldn’t feel bad
about it cuz like, they’re probably gonna end up
being stupid anyways.
Kai: Well, like, one thing that’s really frustrated me—
it’s why I lie about it—like, I’ve been dancing with
girls and they’ve asked, “What frat are you in?”
And I’ve been like, “I’m independent,” and they
just walk away. That’s happened to me before,
like multiple times.

180
Steve: Damn. [Chuckles.] That’s brutal.
Dylan: It’s very unfairly stacked.

As these excerpts illustrate, the Row is the central location for the enactment
of postfeminist hookup culture at LAU. Students defined their own sexual and
social experiences in relation to what they perceived was happening on the
Row, which many, like Kai, characterized as “entirely created around hooking
up.” Fraternity brothers and sorority sisters were held up as models of
hegemonic masculinity and femininity, and undergraduates commonly
framed their own successes or failures in the hookup scene relative to these
students, even though they admitted that the odds of hooking up were “very
unfairly stacked” in favor of Greek members. In this way, the Row worked to
reproduce existing inequalities of gender and sexuality. It also, as I will argue,
re-inscribed differences of race, ethnicity, and social class.
Existing research on hooking up shows that colleges with a “party
emphasis,” usually connected to a strong Greek culture, tend to reproduce
social and economic inequalities more than other schools. For instance, in a
2013 book entitled Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality,
sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton detail how moderately
selective four-year institutions (such as LAU) structure their academic and

181
social frameworks in ways that privilege their “socially minded” student
population. Undergraduates on the “party pathway” often have significant
family resources and connections that allow them to prioritize social activities
over educational pursuits—these are students who are well positioned for
employment after college, regardless of GPAs, double majors, or letters of
recommendation from faculty. Low-income students on the “mobility
pathway” are similarly distracted by the party framework, but with different
consequences: with little social or economic support, many struggle to
succeed in classes, either dropping out or transferring to regional universities
or community colleges, and are left with few job prospects.
At the university in Armstrong and Hamilton’s study, only 17% of
students were involved in the Greek system, yet they dominated the social
scene on and off campus, including a party culture centered on alcohol and
hooking up. The same is true of LAU: while only one-fifth of the student
population is a member of a fraternity or sorority, it is well known as a
campus defined by Greek life. The party scene, too, is much like the one
Armstrong and Hamilton describe: controlled by fraternities and sororities
(and condoned by campus authorities), it perpetuated social hierarchies
based on wealth, physical appearance, gender, and race.

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While all of the students I interviewed knew that the Row was the
center of hookup culture at LAU, not everyone wanted to, or could, be part of
it. For instance, as an Asian American junior named Connie pointed out, the
Greek system at LAU “kind of has this stereotype that they’re all pretty, and if
you look at it—there’s like, very few nonwhite people.” However, while these
kinds of racialized patterns did appear in the hookup scene, students tended
to frame them as, once again, a matter of “choice.” As Connie added: “At the
same time, I think me not fitting into that scene is mostly just me not wanting
to. If I wanted to go to the Row and hook up, I could.”
Who’s In, Who’s Out
In the hookup culture at LAU, the construction of cultural boundaries
happened via two related processes: exclusions and exceptions. Students
either believed that hookup culture was effectively “closed” to some groups of
students—for example, “super religious” students, “fuglies,” and students
with physical or developmental disabilities—or that some students were, for
various reasons, simply not interested in hooking up.
One of the most salient, yet rarely articulated, forms of exclusion was
based on socioeconomic class. In a longitudinal study of women at a
university in the Midwest, Hamilton and Armstrong (2007) found that
privileged women were expected to follow a self-development imperative that

183
encouraged deferral of family formation in favor of education and career
investment throughout the mid-twenties and early thirties. This class-based
imperative makes hookups an attractive alternative to committed
relationships that siphon time and energy away from self-development;
hookups, by contrast, “offer sexual pleasure without derailing investment in
human capital and are increasingly viewed as part of life-stage appropriate
sexual experimentation” (Hamilton and Armstrong 2007, 594). Privileged
women must negotiate the tensions between, on the one hand, class beliefs
that suggest women should delay relationships while pursuing educational
goals and, on the other hand, gender beliefs that suggest women should
avoid casual sex in favor of committed relationships; this tension, in Hamilton
and Armstrong’s view, creates a dilemma for middle- and upper-class women
who find themselves caught in a “double bind” of contradictory expectations.
At the same time, less privileged women are confronted with a sexual
culture that seems altogether foreign. Arriving at college with an orientation to
sex and romance that differed from that of their wealthier peers, less
privileged women “had less exposure to the notion that the college years
should be set aside solely for educational and career development,” and did
not tend to see relationships as incompatible with college life (Hamilton and
Armstrong 2007, 606). The proclivity for less privileged women to move into

184
adult roles relatively quickly, and to attempt to foster both relationships
and career while still in college, made them “outsiders” (see Becker 1963) on
campus. These women were often ostracized by their classmates for their
failure to acclimate to the self-development imperative and hookup culture; in
fact, 40% of less privileged women in Hamilton and Armstrong’s study ended
up leaving the university before graduation, compared to only 5% of more
privileged women. In every case, these women cited the mismatch between
the sexual culture of their hometowns and the campus hookup culture as a
factor in their decision to leave (Hamilton and Armstrong 2007, 607).
The students in my study were predominantly from middle- or upper-
class backgrounds, and they did not explicitly refer to class exclusions when
discussing hookup culture. However, in their descriptions of the Row, and of
Greek life more generally, they regularly characterized fraternity and sorority
members as “wealthy” and “well-off.” We can conjecture that because the
Greek system, like the university itself, is a classed structural location
characterized by the preservation or enhancement of economic position,
including a self-development imperative that promotes individual
achievement, personal growth, and casual sexual experimentation decoupled
from early marriage or parenthood, that students from working-class or poor
backgrounds may very well feel excluded from the culture of hooking up.

185
Although students tended to eschew class-based interpretations in their
accounts of who is excluded from hookup culture, they readily identified two
other groups that they defined as “outsiders”: gay and lesbian students and
“fuglies.”
Exclusions
Gay and Lesbian Students
Little has been written about how gay and lesbian
27
students experience
hookup culture. In studies of hooking up, heterosexuality is presented as
either the explicit (e.g., Hamilton and Armstrong 2009; Kalish and Kimmel
2011) or implicit (e.g., Armstrong, England, and Fogarty 2012; Bogle 2008)
context. In this framework, non-heterosexual students are defined as a group
outside the bounds of hookups.
2829
For instance, the three gay students

27
The labels surrounding sexual identity categories are subject to ongoing debate among
scholars and within the communities who use such labels themselves. I use the terms gay
and lesbian here to denote nonheterosexual identities because it most accurately reflects the
usage of my respondents as well as the relatively narrow definitions of sexuality within
hookup culture.
28
This is an interesting conclusion since hooking up bears a close resemblance to “cruising,”
a form of gay male sexual interaction that became popular in the 1970s and 80s and
continues into the present day. The connection between cruising and hooking up is a topic
worthy of analysis, but I do not explore it here.
29
The (in)visibility of sexual orientation as an identity category makes the discussion of
‘other-than’ heterosexual participation in hookup culture even more complicated. For
example, many college students come to identify with an orientation during their years in
school, while others may be “out” to other people and in other places, but not with/in those
most involved in the hookup scene, i.e. Greek houses and the Row. Acknowledging these

186
Bogle (2008) interviewed reported that they were “not involved with the
dominant hookup culture on campus” and “had difficulty finding other gay and
lesbian students for potential sexual and romantic relationships” (68). Like
other scholars, I had difficulty finding non-heterosexual students to
participate in my study, as I discuss in Chapter 1. Accordingly, the only
conclusions I can draw come from straight students’ assessments of how gay
students “fit” (or not) into the hookup scene at LAU.

Jess: How do gay guys and lesbians fit into the hookup
scene?
Willow: Well, there’s like an … LGBT thing.
Jess: So they have a campus organization, but do you
see them out?
Willow: Not at frat parties.
Jamie: I think, in general, they wouldn’t be in the Greek
scene. Cuz a guy’s not gonna be gay and like, in
a frat, hooking up with girls.
Jess: Are they hooking up at all?

complexities, the discussion of exclusions here relies on students’ understanding of sexual
identity categories as relatively static, visible, and mutually exclusive.

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Willow: Oh yeah. There’s a guy on my floor who hooks up
with this guy all the time.
Jess: How do you think they find people to hook up
with?
Willow: I think you can just tell, cuz it’s such a small
population.
Jamie: Mutual friends, clubbing.
Jess: But you’re not seeing them out at parties.
Willow: No.

As this interview excerpt demonstrates, heterosexual students made several
assumptions about gay and lesbian students’ sexual practices. First, they
reported that while the worst insults for women in the hookup scene were
“slut” and “fat,” nearly every student insisted that calling a man “gay” was the
surest way to undermine his desirability in the hookup scene.

Jess: What’s the worst thing you can call a guy in
hookup culture?
Andy: Gay. No doubt.
Jess: Why do you think that is?

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Andy: It means you don’t have game; you can’t get girls.
You’re not a guy’s guy.

Students also maintained that gay and lesbian students were largely
excluded from campus social life. As a junior named John pointed out, “If
everyone’s straight at the parties, that doesn’t really work for them.” Yet their
relative absence on the Row did not lead students to conclude that
nonheterosexual students never hooked up; on the contrary, many believed
that gay students hooked up more than straight students—just in different
places.

Jess: How do you think gay men figure into hookup
culture?
Lydia: They have their own culture.
Rosario: Yeah, definitely.
Lydia: Like, they’ll hook up, but—
Kwame: This past weekend, I went out with five of my
friends, and one of them is gay, and he was tellin’
us how completely different it was, and just
hearin’ that, you never think about that—like, he

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was basically saying he had to like look on
Facebook and look at people’s profiles, and I was
like, “Wow!” I never think about that, and he was
like, “You know, for your guys it’s such an easy
thing.” He felt like it was a lot harder for him.
Lydia: And it’s like, gay rules don’t apply to straight rules.
Like, I can’t ask a gay guy for hookup advice, cuz
they’ll just be like, “I don’t understand.”
Jess: How do you think the rules are different?
Rosario: Well, the gay guy that I’m close with is extremely
promiscuous, so that’s probably the wrong person
to have as my example, but yeah—there’s this
whole, like, gay club scene, so it’s pretty much if
you’re there, you’re fair game. Like, you can make
out, or you can go a lot further. The way he
explains it, he’s probably had so many partners
he could never count. [Laughs.] Umm, you know,
it’s like new guys every week.
Kwame: From what I do hear—I do have a few gay friends,
you know, and I think because they’re gay it kinda

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accentuates it even more, but it just seems like …
more. It just happens a lot more. Even though it’s
like a secret, hidden world, I just hear about it,
like, “Oh, you did that?” And like, my straight
friends wouldn’t say that. Just hearin’ about it, it
kinda seems like in the gay community the
amount of hookups is a lot higher. From what I
hear from them.
Chris: I also think that, you know, you have to find out
who’s available since there is a smaller
selection—you can’t just walk up to the Row
where all these girls are most likely straight, so
that once they have the opportunity—this is just
speculation—but they might wanna take
advantage of it more.
Lydia: The gay people here have parties all the time.
Rosario: They have their own parties.

Here, we can see a familiar narrative about gay men’s promiscuity emerge
that defines “the gay community” as a place where casual sex is more

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frequent than in college hookup culture. These students conclude that
gay and lesbian students have “their own culture” with “different rules” from
those found in the heterosexual hookup scene. As Kwame and Rosario
suggest, because it is “harder” for gay students to find suitable hookup mates
on the Row, they “have their own parties” or turn to the gay club scene. In
this way, straight students were able to justify the invisibility of lesbian and
gay students in the hookup scene and reconstruct heterosexuality as the
moral and spatial center of campus social life.
Other students described their gay and lesbian friends’ experiences
with hookup culture less optimistically. For instance, Dylan and Kai recalled
their friend Erik’s experience:

Jess: How do gay guys and lesbians fit into hookup
culture? Do they hook up?
Dylan: Just percentage-wise, like, it’s so hard. Like, our
friend Erik was talking about the gay culture here,
and he’s saying that because it’s such a limited
population, like there’s so few gay people, like,
you don’t have very much of a choice. And so if

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the community isn’t, like, your fit—because, you
know, there’s like, different personalities.
Kai: Yeah, like when we were at a club, Erik came and
found us and was like, “Oh, I’m so glad I found
you guys!” Cuz he was with his friends and these
other two guys who were hooking up with his
chick friends from home and he was just like, “I
wanna hook up with somebody, I wanna hook up
with somebody,” and he couldn’t find, like,
anybody in the whole place. So he was really
upset.

Many students believed that the exclusionary character of college
hookup culture may be especially pronounced for lesbians. While they often
reported having “a gay (male) friend” or seeing a few “token” gay men at frat
parties, students seemed to have little or no contact with queer women.
Some students, like Connie, had trouble understanding how a lesbian
hookup would even be possible.

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Jess: Do you guys know any gay or lesbian students at
LAU?
Connie: At LAU, no.
Jess: Well the ones you know at other places, do you
think they hook up?
Connie: I think gay guys hook up a lot. I don’t know
about—like, with lesbians, you aren’t sure what’s
exactly sex, cuz there’s no penis—so I guess
that’s less hooking up?

Connie’s comment points to the normalized, assumed character of
heterosexuality in hookup culture. In her view, the absence of a penis in
lesbian partnerships created confusion about “what’s exactly sex” and
rendered lesbian sexuality not just invisible, but incomprehensible. Other
students believed that lesbians, more so than gay men, were
underrepresented in hookup culture, and on campus more broadly.

Jess: How do gay guys and lesbians fit into the hookup
scene?

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Beth: I think, like, lesbians might have a problem. Like,
they don’t really have—
Leanne: I told you about my awful experience, right? There
was this girl, that’s like a lesbian, and they were
talking about their sexuality and how they have all
this frustration about it, and I’m just sitting there,
and she was saying how all the sorority girls are
sooo hot, and she’s sooo confused, like she
doesn’t know … it was like, really, just weird for
me sitting there. But from it I took that like,
lesbians don’t really go out—they feel like they
can’t really fit.
Kathryn: It’s true. It’s such a heterosexual game out there.
Hollis: Or at least portrayed by the Row.
Beth: I think people are more familiar … I personally
know more gay males than females.
Kathryn: And even at like, theater parties, it’s like gay guy
on gay guy. I haven’t seen one—there’s plenty of
gay guy hookups at theater parties, like, that’s all

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over the place. But I don’t see any lesbians. Like,
where is their representation on campus?
Summer: It has to be way more deliberate. Like, there’s this
one girl in my French class who’s like really
involved in like … LGBT? Yeah. And they have,
like, second chance prom or something? She was
talking about it in French class and everyone like
seized up and was like really uncomfortable about
it, cuz there isn’t like an outlet for like, lesbian
culture. It has to be so deliberate—like, second
chance prom. And I know that like LAU was
ranked as like one of the top schools for gay
people but I don’t see that. Like, at all.

As these sorority sisters argue, despite LAU’s reputation as a top university
for LGBT students, there are few “outlets” for lesbians on campus. Students
were, on the whole, “more familiar” with gay men; while almost everyone
knew at least one gay male student, very few mentioned having lesbian
friends or acquaintances. Because of their relative invisibility, students
assumed that lesbians “have a problem” or “can’t really fit” into campus

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hookup culture, and that their representation on campus has to be “way
more deliberate” than that of other groups.
Overall, students painted an ambivalent picture of gay and lesbian
students’ involvement in hookup culture at LAU. On one hand, they believed
that gay students were part of a hyper-sexualized subculture that offered
them relief from the dominant heterosexual scene on campus. On the other
hand, they understood that the heterosexual character of the Greek system
often made it difficult for non-heterosexual students to find sexual partners on
campus.
Fuglies
In each group interview I asked students if there were some types of people
they would not hook up with (or, if they did not hook up, who they believed
other people would not hook up with). Invariably, students reported that
“fuglies”—a cruel combination of “fat” and “ugly,” or sometimes “fucking
ugly”—were the group most likely to be excluded from hookup culture.

Jess: Are there some types of people you just would not
hook up with?
Kwame: I’d say the really heavy girls. The f—
All: Fuglies. [Laughter.]

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Jess: Which means?
Erika: Fat and ugly.
Regina: So true. You never see them out.
E’Chelle: But they’re also … they’re rare. [Other nods their
heads in agreement.] There are not that many big
girls on this campus. Or just ugly people in
general. But yeah, I really doubt they’re hooking
up.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the cultural rejection of “fuglies” was closely linked
to the centrality of gossip (see Chapter 2) in the hookup scene.

Jess: Are there some types of people you just would not
hook up with?
[Laughter, nodding.]
Rosario: Fuglies. People who are—
Andy: Fat and ugly.
Lydia: Obviously!
Andy: I think part of that is that you wanna be hooking
up with somebody that you not only think is

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attractive but that you also—like, that if you go
and tell someone about it that they’re not gonna
be like, “Oh, what?!” Someone that you think your
friends would approve of as well. You almost want
attractiveness on a broad level—cuz you might be
able to say, “Well I think she’s cute” but then if
you can’t spin that into a good story, that’s not
gonna work.

As this conversation suggests, the ability to “spin” a hookup into “a good
story” was crucial. Students regularly reported having avoided a hookup for
precisely this reason: because they would have been embarrassed to tell
their friends about it, it was not worth doing. Notably, many of the most
“regrettable” hookups that students told me about involved partners who they
described as overweight (“he was like, a total chub”), unattractive (“she
looked cute in the bar, but was so busted the next day!”) or both.
Students’ assessment of “fuglies” as outside the bounds of hookup
culture was closely linked to the centrality of femininity as a bodily property
and notions of the ideal (read: white, slender) feminine body. For overweight

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women, and women of color in particular, these ideals were often a
source of anxiety and self-loathing. Kamau recalled this story:

One of my good friends from freshman year—it’s funny
because in my dorm, umm, there was not a lot of black people
in that dorm at all, just like most of this campus, but anyway—
this one black girl, she happened to be the heaviest out of all
her friends, and she wasn’t even that heavy but it’s just like—
everything she did, she just buckled, broke down crying, she
just felt like she was so unattractive. And she wasn’t even a
bad looking girl! It was just, compared to the other girls here,
you know. She ended up dropping out.

As I discussed in Chapter 4, contemporary postfeminism presents femininity
as an embodied property, making women’s heterosexual desirability
inseparable from having a “sexy body” (Gill 2007, 149). If a college woman is
“fat” (I use quotations here because contemporary definitions of “fit” and “fat”
are painfully narrow), it means she is failing to live up to normative standards
of beauty that designate slimness as a primary indicator not only of feminine
attractiveness, but of femininity itself. In college hookup culture, as I have
argued, the performance of embodied femininity rewards thin, “fit” women
with social recognition and status and leaves everyone else at the risk of
social stigma.
And, although it is primarily women who feel compelled to continually
assess and remodel their bodies according to the rigidly defined standards of

200
postfeminist culture, men, too, are regularly marginalized for being
overweight or unattractive. When I asked Rosario if there were some types of
guys that she would not hook up with, she had this to say:

Rosario: It’s a major turn-off if a guy isn’t confident. I’m a
pretty straightforward person, so if the guy’s
gonna be a little bitch, then he can’t handle me.
You know, I’m not gonna mess around. Self-
confidence, intellect obviously, and umm … I think
confidence is huge.
Andy: But would over-confidence also be a turn-off?
Rosario: Over-confidence is fine, as long as they can back
it up with a brain in their head. And you know,
unattractive guys, or extremely heavy guys—I can
handle a little bit of chub, but if they’re like, really
overweight? It’s just like, you’re not taking care of
yourself. Confidence plays in that, too.
Confidence is the biggest factor—if they don’t
have that, it’s not gonna happen.

201
Here, Rosario explicitly links weight to confidence and masculinity; in her
view, if a man is “really overweight” it is a sign that he is unable or unwilling
to take care of himself and, worse, that he lacks confidence and is thus
inappropriately masculine (and male). She is not alone: a majority of the
women I spoke to claimed that they would not hook up with a guy who was
“not confident,” and they regularly linked confidence to men’s body weight
and appearance.
In general, like they did with gay and lesbian students, the
undergraduates I interviewed took an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to
understanding how non-normative bodies were involved (or not) in hookup
culture. That is, they readily named the groups that were excluded from the
hookup scene, but reasoned that these students either had “different
cultures” that allowed them to “hook up with each other” or, as the
conversation below implies, that since these students are not highly visible
on campus, their experiences are largely irrelevant to hookup culture.

Jess: Are there certain types of people you wouldn’t
hook up with?
Amy: Fuglies. [Laughs embarrassedly, but her friend
Carol nods in agreement.]

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Carol: It’s true—but you don’t really see that many, like,
ugly or overweight guys on the Row. I mean …
same with like overweight girls in sororities. I’d
say for the most part we all fit this like, same body
mass index … area. You know? We may all be
different shapes and sizes but I think at the end of
the day we’re all healthy, fit-looking people.

Here, Carol is engaged in classic symbolic boundary work. Like many of the
students I interviewed, she constructs a visible “us”—in this case, “healthy,
fit-looking people” involved in Greek life and hookup culture more broadly—in
contrast to an invisible “them”—”ugly, overweight” students that did not
participate in Greek life or hooking up (see Dworkin and Wachs [2009] and
Gimlin [2002] for a discussion of fatness as “social sin”). She then justifies
these exclusions by pointing to “diversity” among sorority and fraternity
bodies (“we may be all different shapes and sizes”) and defining
heterosexual attractiveness merely in terms of “health” and “fitness.”
Because “fuglies” and gay and lesbian students were regularly stigmatized
and denied access to mainstream hookup culture at LAU, students “in” the
hookup scene were able to construct an imagined community where

203
conventional, heterosexual—and, as we will see in the next section,
white—femininity and masculinity were seen as the only desirable and
available options.
Racial Exclusions
The cultural rejection of “fuglies” was sometimes explicitly, and often
implicitly, connected to racial stereotypes. One of the most striking examples
of racial exclusion I heard was during an interview with Dylan, Steve, and
Kai.

Jess: Are there some types of people that you and your
friends probably wouldn’t hook up with? Like, is
anyone off-limits?
Dylan: Umm … Arab girls.
Steve: They’re really—they’re hit or miss.
Kai: Really?
Steve: I feel like they’re either like, really really hot, or
like, not at all.
Dylan: Yeah, I … [is visibly embarrassed.]
Kai: Fuckin’ racist. [Laughter.] You fuckin’ racist.
Dylan: I mean, for me, it’s just like … they’re unattractive.

204
A few minutes later, I asked whether they had experienced racism on
campus firsthand. Kai, who is Indian, recalled the following story:

Kai: For example, like, yesterday I ran into [this girl I
know] and—I mean, I just really dislike her
because there was this one time I ran into her at a
party and she was like, “Hey! You’re not in a frat,
right?” And I was like, “No.” And she was like,
“That’s what I fucking thought cuz you’re too
fucking Asian to be in a fucking frat.”
Jess: Whoa.
Dylan: Did you slap her?!
Kai: I was just, like, “Really?” And she just went up
and asked a bunch of frat guys, like, “Isn’t he too
fucking Asian?” And like, one of them was an
Asian guy, and I was like, “Wow.” And then I see
her yesterday and she, like, does not remember
that and she was like [in his best screechy girl
voice]: “Ahhh! What’s up!?” And I’m like, “Oh my
god.”

205
Steve: Yeah, that’s totally racist, but knowing her, I’m not
surprised.

This is an extreme example of racial discrimination in the hookup scene at
LAU; however, I heard many others students tell similar, though less explicit,
stories of racial “others” being stigmatized and stereotyped. “Arabs” and
“Asians” were two racial groups that students often described as “off-limits” in
hookup culture. Like Dylan’s comment above, students believed that “Arab”
or “Middle Eastern” girls were unattractive; several students cited “strong
body odor” and other racialized stereotypes to justify this view. They also
pointed to international students as a group who were generally excluded
from hookup culture. As a sophomore sorority member named Jamie
observed, the “international Asians” are “usually studying and don’t really
party, and they don’t speak English very well, so I don’t think they hook up.
Well, maybe with each other, but not with us.”
30

30
The position of “Asian Americans” relative to hookup culture at LAU is an interesting
question. There are “Asian frats” on campus, but like the “African American frats” and “Latino
frats,” they are geographically and culturally segregated from mainstream (white) Greek life
on campus. When I asked if Asian students were among those that hooked up regularly,
most students said something along the lines of Nicole’s comment: “Asian students do hook
up. But they’re like, whitewashed Asians—they’re not like, Asian-Asian, you know?”

206
In addition to “Arabs” and “Asians,” students identified two other
racial groups that were rarely seen on the Row: African Americans and
Latinas/os. Students generally agreed that while Latinas/os tended to be
attractive—many even described them as “hot”—they were not generally part
of mainstream Greek life. When I asked Beth, a senior sorority member, if
she ever saw Latinas/os at parties, she said: “Not really. I think they kinda
party together. They kinda do their own thing.” Or, as Nicole, a junior who
was born in Mexico, explained: “In the Greek system you don’t see very
many, like, Hispanic people at all. No. I feel like they—they, they, uh, we,
they—like, they definitely hang out with only Hispanic people. It’s weird.”
Like their assessment of Latinas/os, students tended to describe
African American students as doing “their own thing,” having “their own
parties,” and generally avoiding the dominant Greek scene on campus. Most
of the students I interviewed maintained that with the exception of athletes,
most black students at LAU did not hook up.

Jess: Do you think students from different racial groups
hook up the same amount?
Kwame: No. Most of the black students don’t. Well,
athletes, but—

207
Regina: They’re a special case.
E’Chelle: And it depends on what sport it is.
Erika: Yeah. Track team—not them. It’s mostly football,
basketball. And most of the time they do it they’re
not hooking up with black girls.
E’Chelle: Like, almost never.
Jess: Why do you think that is?
Erika: The fact that it’s not very commonplace in the—
Kwame: It’s not very commonplace in the black culture.
Erika: Yeah.
Kwame: Like, even the party scenes are different—I would
say a typical black party is, uhh … like, there’ll be
some vulgar dancing and stuff, but the fun
surrounds, like, the music, the hype, and the
dancing itself. What we see on the Row—yes,
there’s music, but it’s more just red cups and
drunk girls everywhere. [Everyone agrees.]
Erika: I would say drinking heavily has a lot to do with it.
The black party scene—it’s there, but not as
much.

208
E’Chelle: Well like, as far as drinking at black parties? You
will never see alcohol at a black party—like,
people will drink before they come. I really think it
has to do with how the rules here are enforced,
cuz black students get their parties shut down so
fast.
Jess: Like, more than frat parties?
Regina: Oh yeah. [Everyone agrees.]
Erika: So we don’t really bring alcohol cuz we’re not
tryin’ to get shut down.
Jess: Where do the athletes party?
E’Chelle: On the Row. [Others agree.] They don’t come to
parties with the rest of us.
Jess: So you guys never go to the Row?
All: No.
Regina: I actually hate the Row. [Others agree.] I refuse to
go.
Jess: Do other black girls go to the Row?
Kwame: In sprinkles. [Everyone laughs, agrees.] In
sprinkles.

209
Jess: What do you mean?
Kwame: Very few. There are the tokens, who like, want to
fit in to that crowd. That just ain’t us.

There are several things going on in this conversation that provide important
insights into the racialized character of social life at LAU. One involves the
relationship between students and campus authorities, particularly when it
comes to partying and alcohol use. I repeatedly heard complaints from
students of color that the university did not treat students fairly when it came
to monitoring and disciplining their parties: there was unanimous agreement
that campus authorities—including Department of Public Safety (DPS)
officers, as well as LAPD—favored white students. Both Greek and non-
Greek students reported that campus authorities “looked the other way” when
underage drinking and drug use occurred on the Row, yet “cracked down” on
parties in other areas of campus that were predominantly attended by non-
white students. This unequal treatment undoubtedly fueled a sense of
resentment among students of color, and helped perpetuate racial disparities
in hookup culture.
The second thing this conversation reveals is how athletes—
particularly football and men’s basketball players—fit into the racialized

210
hookup scene on campus. When I asked which groups of students were
most likely to participate in hookup culture, almost everyone mentioned
athletes from these two teams. It is important to note that at LAU, like many
other “sports schools” across the U.S., football and basketball players are
disproportionately black. They are often recruited out of high school (and
even middle school) and given full scholarships as well as, according to
students’ reports, several undisclosed perks such as parking spaces, cars,
and apartments. Unsurprisingly, given the immense popularity of the football
and basketball programs and their position at the ideological center of sport
(Messner 2002), not to mention the money they bring to the university, these
students become local celebrities the moment they arrive on campus. There
is a well-known stereotype about “jersey chasers,” or “groupies” who follow
these athletes around campus in hopes of “scoring” an autograph (or more).
Students conveyed ambivalence about the presence of these athletes on the
Row. Some, like Nicole, expressed feeling threatened by athletes: “The
athletes who come to the Row are like the giant black guys. It’s intimidating.”
Others, like E’Chelle and Erika above, seemed to feel that when black
football and basketball players went to the Row and hooked up with white
girls, they were displaying a sort of racial betrayal: “they don’t come to parties
with the rest of us.”

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This sense of racial betrayal was not just reserved for black male
athletes; students of color were also critical of the few black and Latina
women who partied on the Row and participated in hookup culture. As
Kwame explained, these women were commonly described as “tokens” that
“want to fit into that crowd.” As I show in the next section, the symbolic
boundaries between these racial “tokens” and “the rest of us” (students of
color, particularly African American and Latinas/os) served to reinforce
another cultural narrative that was related to, but distinct in important ways
from, the kinds of physical, sexual, and racial exclusion I have discussed
here.
Despite clear racial differences in who hooks up and who doesn’t, very
little has been written about the significance of race in college hookup
culture. Like scholars of postfeminism, most scholars of hooking up have
concluded (if they say anything at all) that students of color are simply
excluded from the hookup scene. For example, Bogle (2008) contends that
students of color do not participate in hookup culture because it is “not a
viable option due to their minority status” (69). While it is clear from stories
like the one Kai described at the beginning of this section that exclusions are
indeed formulated on the basis of race, this is not the only way that racial
boundaries are constructed in the hookup scene. In fact, far more than

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stories of exclusion, minority students used narratives of racial and
cultural superiority to explain their aversion to hooking up.
Exceptions
I met Kwame and Rosario during my second year of graduate school, in a
general education course for which I was a teaching assistant. From the
beginning, they struck me as intelligent, critical thinkers with astute insights
into the racialized character of campus life at LAU. At the time of our
interview, Kwame, a dreadlocked “mama’s boy” from south Texas, and
Rosario, a long-haired beauty raised in Pasadena by a Venezuelan mother
and an Ecuadorian father, were both sophomores, and close friends. Though
neither hooked up regularly—indeed, Kwame remained a virgin until his
senior year—both were heavily involved in campus social life, and had strong
opinions about the hookup scene.

Jess: Do you think what goes on in hookup culture
describes your own sexual experience?
Kwame: No. No, no, no. It does not describe my
experience.
Rosario: Me either.
Jess: Tell me about that.

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Kwame: I don’t hook up. Period. It’s just not how I was
raised, it’s not how—I mean, I don’t know if it’s
like a regional thing, but where I’m from, south
Texas, if you do that it’s kinda looked down upon.
It seems like college it’s like more … like, I’ve
kinda gotten use to it but when I first came here I
was like, “What are they doing?”
Rosario: Totally. I’m kind of in the middle, like, I have
participated but extremely rarely. Like, it takes a
lot for me to do that. Like Kwame, I wasn’t raised,
like, “tra-la-la” … I don’t think most of us were, but
you know, culture-wise, it’s just something that I
don’t really take part in a lot. But it does happen.
Jess: What’s the “tra-la-la” part about?
Kwame: Like, way too casual.
Rosario: Yeah, but at the same time it’s like, do what you
want, I guess.

Kwame and Rosario were not excluded from hookup culture. Both frequently
attended Greek parties (Rosario was even a member of a sorority her

214
freshman and sophomore years), and reported having been “hit on” on
the Row many times. But for them, hookup culture was simply not appealing.
As they explained, the casual, “tra-la-la” nature of hooking up was antithetical
to “the way they were raised.”
Michele Lamont (1997) suggests that the cultural mechanisms that
help reproduce and/or disrupt systems of racial inequality often revolve
around morality. Similarly, in her study of Filipina American girls, Yen Le
Espiritu (2001) argues that “female morality—defined as women’s dedication
to their families and sexual restraint—is one of the few sites where
economically and politically dominated groups can construct the dominant
group as other and themselves as superior” (421). These “morality
narratives” most often revolved around family life and family relations.
The majority of the students of color I spoke to drew on similar
morality narratives, emphasizing “family background” as a primary reason for
their decision to abstain from hooking up. As Rakim, an African American
sophomore, told me:

I honestly think it has to do with your background, like your
home background, the morals that are instilled within you,
what’s right, what’s wrong. I think that seeing people like us, I
think that we kinda grow up with this mindset that this is tacky.

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In addition to general “that’s not how we were raised” narratives, students
of color also offered more specific justifications based on family background.
For example, when I asked Kwame and Rosario to elaborate on their
reasons for not hooking up, they explained:

Kwame: Mine was like, a religious home, so it makes it
seem weird. And both my parents are originally
from the South, which is very conservative. It’s
just not the thing to do.
Rosario: Yeah, I’m from a conservative home. Hispanic
Protestant, so.

Here, Kwame and Rosario identify religion and social conservatism as
important facets of their family backgrounds that contributed to their
disapproval of hookup culture. Kwame also surmises that his family’s
conservatism is a “regional thing” and that in the southern U.S., casual sex is
“just not the thing to do.”
Other students explicitly contrasted white and nonwhite families in
their assessment of racial differences in hookups. Several Asian students,

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like Connie, mentioned “honor” as one reason that they and their peers
hooked up less frequently than white students.

Jess: Do you think there are certain groups of people
who tend to hook up more or less than others?
Connie: I think with Asians it’s pretty rare—like, for
example, being a virgin has a pretty big emphasis
for us, just cuz of like, basic honor stuff. I don’t
know about—with like, rich white people, you
know, it’s different because you think maybe
because they have so much money that’s there’s
just, like, more places to do that.

Connie’s comment invokes both cultural differences and social class
differences to explain why she thinks Asian students hook up less than white
students. She references “basic honor stuff” and an emphasis on virginity
among Asians in contrast to “rich white people” (who, ostensibly, do not
share these cultural values), and then speculates that “because they have so
much money,” white people may have more opportunities to escape the
confines of the home/family and engage in casual sexual practices.

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Like the women in Espiritu’s (2001) study, many nonwhite women
I spoke to partially constructed themselves against cultural
conceptualizations of the contemporary, emancipated (postfeminist) white
woman. Rather than being simply excluded from postfeminist hookup culture,
these women saw themselves as different from—and morally superior to—
white women in the hookup scene: they were sexually modest, “honorable,”
and dedicated to their families, while white women were sexually
promiscuous, unprincipled, and hyper-individualistic.
Students of color, and black students in particular, also described
differences in “community” as a central reason for avoiding hookup culture.
Regina’s comment was typical: “In the black community you’re seen as a
slut, roller, whore.” Others framed their decision not to hook up in more
general terms; as a black senior named Angela explained, “There’s just a
different dynamic about hooking up—we’re just not really involved in it.”
Interestingly, nearly all of the African American students I talked to used the
word “nasty” to describe hookup culture, and commonly referred to students
who hooked up as “loose” and “easy.”

Jess: Do you think what goes on in hookup culture
reflects your own experiences?

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Angela: No. I just think it’s nasty. It’s degrading. Cuz I
think that you’re making yourself very easy and
very vulnerable. I think that it’s very unattractive,
honestly, to see someone who’s just loose with
themselves who is willing to … engage in this
thing [hooking up].

Much more than white students, students of color also made reference to the
risks associated with casual sex. Tanisha reported: “It’s just really nasty cuz
it’s just too many—there are too many possible things that you could get from
hooking up that stick with you—mentally, physically, emotionally—it’s just too
much to risk on somebody you don’t even know.”
Overall, while students of color did experience racial discrimination in
the white-dominated Greek scene and hookup culture at LAU, they did not
tend to frame their decision to abstain from hooking up and other forms of
mainstream social life in terms of exclusion. Rather, they described
themselves as exceptions to the social rule: for a variety of reasons, they
chose to “opt out” of postfeminist hookup culture. More often than not, these
reasons centered on a moral logic of racial and/or cultural superiority that
characterized the sexual practices of white students as “loose” and “nasty” in

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contrast to the “honorable” and “respectable” familial and cultural
backgrounds of students of color.
As I have argued, students of color were often positioned—either for
reasons of exclusion or exception—outside the symbolic boundaries of
postfeminist hookup culture at LAU. However, this did not mean that students
of color never hooked up, or that they were unaffected by the discursive
deployment of postfeminism on campus. In fact, as Banet-Weiser (2007) and
Springer (2007) argue, within a neoliberal postfeminist context women of
color are often constructed as desirable commodities in mainstream white
culture. The postfeminist “commodification of otherness” serves to
simultaneously reward (some) nonwhite subjects with (limited) social status
and perpetuate existing notions of whiteness as the racial standard, all the
while serving as justification that we are living in a “post-racial” world.
Eating the Other
In recent years, various colleges have earned unwanted media attention for
being sites of racist “theme parties.” For example, after members of the Chi
Omega sorority at Penn State University hosted a Mexican fiesta-themed
party in 2012, a picture of the sorority sisters holding signs that read: “will
mow lawn for weed & beer” and “I don’t cut grass I smoke it” made the
rounds online. That same year, pledges to the University of Chicago’s Alpha

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Delta Phi fraternity were required to wear “Mexican labor outfits” and
listen to Mexican ranchera music while mowing the frat house lawn (Wade
2010, 1). Halloween seems to be the most popular holiday for these kinds of
racialized costumes; however, race-themed events occur throughout the
year. In “honor” of Martin Luther King Day, students at Clemson University in
South Carolina, Tarleton State University in Texas, and the University of
Connecticut School of Law dressed up as various racist stereotypes: one
picture posted online shows a group of “ghetto” girls sporting exaggerated
posteriors, hoop earrings, and gold chains; another depicts a student wearing
a t-shirt that reads “I love chicken”; a third features a blonde woman dressed
up as Aunt Jemima. Other students have hosted “South of the Border”
parties, including one at Santa Clara University in California where students
showed up as pregnant women, domestic workers, and “slutty” gang
members. And while “ghetto” seems to be the most common party theme,
with students dressing up in blackface or with “pregnant” costume bellies,
other racial and ethnic groups have been targeted as well. One email invite
for an “Asia Prime” fraternity party at Duke University in February 2013
(renamed “International Relations” in light of opposition on campus) opened
with “Herro Nice Duke Peopre” and closed with “We look forward to having

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Mi, Yu, You, and Yo friends over for some Sake … Chank You,” sparking
a wave of protests from students.
The undergraduates at LAU knew about these parties, and many
confessed to attending similar events on campus. They are not always
explicitly racialized—common themes include “Juveniles and Pedophiles,”
“Creepy Guys and Cutie Pies,” “Pirates and Booty,” “Greedy Hos and CEOs,”
and the ever-popular “Dress to Get Lei’d”—but, as their titles suggest, these
events are often gendered, and almost always require women to wear as
little clothing as possible. Betsy, a junior sorority member, had this to say:

There’s always a lot of costume parties, like at exchanges
[when fraternities and sororities host parties together] and stuff.
My roommate told me something like, she asked one of the
boys in SAE what the theme was for the party last weekend,
and he was like, “Lumberjacks and Sluts.” And she’s like, “What
do you mean, I thought it was Lumberjacks and Cats?” And
he’s like, “Yeah, Lumberjacks and Sluts.” And it’s not just
here—I’ve talked to my brothers about it, and they have theme
parties and stuff, and they said they try to come up with the
most random things to see if the girls could somehow make it
slutty. And every single time they do. It’s so funny—it’s not
even like, a theme—it’s like, wear lingerie.

Ask any woman in the U.S. between the age of 15 and 35 if she has ever
gone shopping for a Halloween costume. Chances are, she’ll offer you an
anecdote about how all the costumes for women are “slutty” versions of
“regular” costumes: slutty schoolgirl, slutty nurse, slutty police officer. Some

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will say that this bothers them; most will just laugh and pull out their
smartphone to show you the photos of last year’s slutty cat outfit. This is
what scholars mean when they say postfeminism commodifies feminism: we
are now being sold, both literally and figuratively, the idea that because
gender equality has been achieved, women are now “free” to wear, and enjoy
wearing, “slutty” costumes on Halloween. The consumer-based logic of
postfeminism conflates feminism and femininity, individualism and liberation,
and consumption and activism to the extent that “women apparently choose
to be seen as sexual objects because it suits their liberated interests”
(Goldman, Heath, and Smith 1991, 338).
And, just as postfeminist discourses commodify feminism, so too do
they construct racial and ethnic differences as commodities within the global
marketplace (see, for example, Yúdice 2003). As Banet-Weiser
demonstrates in her research on children’s programming on Nickelodeon,
within a neoliberal postfeminist context brown-skinned girls are regularly
depicted as “urban” and full of ethnic “flava” that adds to—but rarely
challenges—representations of white femininity (2007, 202). Or, as Springer
(2007) argues in her work on representations of African American women in
popular culture, “Racialized postfeminism does not move very far from bell
hooks’s assertion that particular forms of cultural engagement merely amount

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to ‘eating the other’: a ‘commodification of otherness’ in which ethnicity
becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream
white culture” (252). As these scholars suggest, the incorporation of women
of color in postfeminist popular culture does not necessarily disrupt the
central tenets of postfeminism; rather, the increased visibility of nonwhite
postfeminists often serves as further justification that “old school” gender and
racial politics are no longer necessary (Banet-Weiser 2007, 205).
When I asked undergraduates about the types of students they
thought were the most attractive, they usually offered descriptions that we
might expect, given the dominance of white femininity in postfeminist culture:
“skinny, blond, tan.” But commonly included among this group of “hot”
students was another, perhaps more surprising group: “mixed” or “biracial”
women and men. The following conversation between Toni, Tanisha, and
Teresa is typical:

Jess: In general, who do people consider to be a “hot”
girl?
Tanisha: Little.
Toni: Thin. [Others agree.]
Teresa: Not, like, anorexic-thin, but—

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Toni: Fit.
Tanisha: Anorexic plus ten pounds.
Toni: Large breasts.
Teresa: Blond? Maybe? Not necessarily though.
Toni: I think this exotic thing is getting really big—like,
people who are mixed.
Tanisha: Yes! Dudes are always saying they like mixed
girls.
Teresa: I know a lot of white girls who say they want
biracial babies. It’s like, a thing.

These three black women are pointing to a common trend in postfeminist
hookup culture: the fetishization of (some) racially ambiguous women and
men. Several white students confessed to fantasizing about hooking up with
“mixed” students, who they described as “sexy” and “exotic.” Students also
drew on gendered and racialized stereotypes—for example, that black men
have “big dicks” and Asian women “give good head”—as reasons for wanting
to hook up with racial “others.”
31
In precisely the way Banet-Weiser (2007),

31
The sexual objectification of nonwhite bodies is not new. As Patricia Hill Collins (1991)
argues, popular representations of black women—for example, the welfare queen and the

225
Springer (2007), and hooks (1992) describe, however, the appeal of
“mixed” students in hookup culture was less an indication of racial tolerance
than a commodification of otherness in which ethnicity becomes “flava” that
can add to, but rarely challenges, the white standard.
32

For White Girls Only?
Despite the increasing visibility of women of color in contemporary popular
culture, the processes by which they are incorporated into media
representations may, in fact, reproduce hierarchies of difference and
dominance. As Herman Gray (1995) argues, the inclusion of people of color
in popular television programs often follows an assimilationist mode of
incorporation in which “the privileged subject is necessarily that of the white
middle-class; whiteness is the privileged yet unnamed place from which to
see and make sense of the world” (86). This is certainly true of postfeminism:

Jezebel—are often hyper-sexualized (see also Springer 2007). Native American women
(Green 1975), Chicana women (Mirande 1980), and Puerto Rican and Cuban women
(Tafolla 1985) have been similarly depicted as sexually excessive, erotic, and exotic. In
postfeminist culture, these bodies are presented as consumable insofar as they do not
disrupt the centrality of white femininity.
32
The “commodification of otherness” in postfeminist hookup culture at LAU was not limited
to race and ethnicity; it included sexuality as well. Many students, and sorority women in
particular, described the trend of having a “gay best friend.” A senior named Beth reported, “I
feel like gay guys are such a commodity. They become, like, an accessory on campus.” Her
friend Leanne added: “Every girl wants to be friends with them cuz it’s like, the cool thing to
do.”

226
as Projansky (2001) asserts, when women of color are depicted in
popular postfeminist representations, they appear “as assimilated ‘equal’
beneficiaries of the same ‘rights’ that feminism has supposedly provided to
white women” while “the specific intersection of gender and race oppressions
that women of color may face in the US is ignored” (87). Similarly, Springer
(2007) notes that black women may engage with postfeminist media, but only
insofar as they conform to normative conceptions of race, class, gender, and
sexuality (266). She writes: “for African American women, the postfeminist
message is that black women need to know their place within the racial and
gender hierarchy even if they are permitted, in small numbers, to assume
places in the middle class” (272). Such containment does not just apply to
black women: as Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2010) has shown, mainstream
media representations of Latina bodies as inherently exotic, foreign, and
consumable work to affirm traditional notions of the United States as a white,
Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation. Thus, while postfeminism can and does
make space for women of color within its boundaries, it strictly regulates and
polices the forms their participation may take.
Clearly, the versatility of postfeminist hookup culture functions as a
double-edged sword with regard to students of color and gay and lesbian
students. On one hand, it allows nonwhite and nonheterosexual women and

227
men to participate in its deployment and enjoy its rewards (albeit in
narrowly circumscribed ways). On the other hand, it works to conceal the
underlying power relations that reproduce hegemonic ideas about race,
gender, sexuality, and class on the contemporary college campus. And, just
as it does for white women, postfeminist hookup culture requires its nonwhite
participants to reject political activism in favor of capitalist consumption (or,
perhaps more accurately, consumability) and cultural visibility.
This was certainly the case in hookup culture at LAU. I heard many
stories from students of color about their friends “giving in” to the pull of
postfeminist hookup culture, like this one from E’Chelle and Erika:

Jess: Do you know black girls that do hook up?
Erika: Yeah, I saw it happen to my roommate actually,
last year. Like, she was sooo against it at the
beginning, and then, like, she joined a sorority
and I guess she saw it—like her big [sorority]
sister, all she did was hook up. So, I mean, I
guess she just accepted it. And I guess when you
go and all your friends leave you—cuz in the end,

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you’re the only one. So I guess they just wanna
also … partake in that.
Jess: Why do you think that is?
E’Chelle: I think for some black females, it’s like—it’s like a
fame thing, almost.
Erika: Mmm hmm. [Nods in agreement.] I think it’s partly
a self-esteem thing.
E’Chelle: Yes. It happened with my old roommate, too.
Erika: Oh, right! We all knew her.
E’Chelle: Yeah. Background information on her is, she’s
black—she has two black parents—but she looks
… she’s tall, she’s light-skinned, very light-
skinned, and she sort of looks like she could be a
mix of five different things. So, like, she takes on
this image of people wanting—well, she looks
exotic or whatever, so she feels the need to fulfill
those fantasies. [Erika laughs wryly and shakes
her head.] She does! She feels the need to fulfill
those fantasies because she craves attention

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from males so much that when she gets it, it’s …
it’s like an addiction.

But there was a surprising difference in what I expected to find and what I
actually heard the majority of students of color say about their experiences
with hookup culture. While students did note that the few women of color who
participated in the hookup scene avoided politicized identities in favor of
cultural visibility, like the women E’Chelle and Erika describe above, this was
not the case for everyone. In fact, unlike their white peers, every single
African American student I interviewed (as well as two Latinas) readily
adopted a politicized label that, as we have seen, carries so much negative
cultural baggage: “feminist.”

Jess: So, do you guys consider yourselves feminists?
Regina: I’d consider myself a feminist.
Jess: Meaning what?
Regina: Meaning that I wanna do everything in my power,
everything that I can to sort of uplift the, you
know, past subordination that women have had to
undergo, in every way possible.

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E’Chelle: I agree.
Angela: Yeah, I’d just add that it’s looking at the way
things are done and seeing women’s role in that.
And if that’s not right, just tryin’ to fight that and fix
it. There can be things where, you know—like,
black people, African American culture, there’s a
lot of like—we’ve helped uplift black people, but
it’s like, what about the black woman?
Regina: Mmm hmm.
Jess: So if you were in class, and I asked you to raise
your hand if you were a feminist, would you raise
your hand?
Kamau: I would.
[Everyone else agrees.]
Jess: Kamau, would you use the same definition that
they did?
Kamau: Yeah, I would say, like, women’s rights … just
like, the uplift movement. Yeah, I took “Black
Women in US History,” and I was like, “Yeah, it’s
okay for a man to be a feminist!” [Laughter.]

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Kamau: And I think there’s nothing wrong with that.
Angela: I feel like there would be no need to be a feminist
if there was equal gender relations.
Jess: That’s the next question—do you feel like there’s
a need for feminism?
All: Yes. Yes.
Regina: I feel like there’s always a need to focus … like,
whenever a certain group can’t, in every aspect of
their life, have some sense of control, that there is
sort of a need to be pro-that group.
Jess: Do you think we need feminism on this campus?
E’Chelle: I think people need to understand the definition of
feminism, cuz it has, like, a negative connotation.
They’re like, “Look at the feminists, they’re like,
‘Oh, you want to be everything, women’s stuff’”—
Kamau: “Butch.”
Angela: Yeah! Like, “You’re butch, anything you hear or
say you’re just gonna be like, ‘Women don’t get
this, women don’t get that.’” So we need to first
develop an understanding of what feminism is.

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Kamau: It’s other people looking at it as complaining as
opposed to uplifting.
Angela: Yeah. And then from that, like, look at the
problems here for women, and then develop a
group that has specific stances on what they
wanna do.

I am still amazed when I reread this conversation. It is depressingly rare to
hear undergraduates defend feminism, never mind refer to it as “uplifting.”
Yet unlike the vast majority of students I interviewed, these students had a
clear understanding of why we need feminism, as well as the many
misconceptions surrounding the term. Notably, they explicitly linked their
support of feminist goals to race. Kwame realized that “men can be feminists
too” after taking “Black Women in U.S. History,” and Angela locates her
support for feminism within the context of the civil rights movement. These
students implicitly rejected the hyper-individualism of their white peers (see
Chapter 3) in favor of a group-based politics: as Regina points out,
“whenever a certain group can’t, in every aspect of their life, have some
sense of control … there is sort of a need to be pro-that group.” In line with
existing research that suggests African Americans are more likely than

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whites to embrace feminist identifications, have egalitarian gender
attitudes, and engage in collective action (Hunter and Sellers 1998), these
students repudiated the postfeminist premise that gender equality has been
achieved, insisting that feminism is indeed still relevant and necessary.
Yet to say that these African American feminist students reject the
tenets of postfeminism wholesale is not the full story. At the same time that
they championed feminist ideals and the fight against women’s
subordination, this support did not always extend to women in the hookup
scene. In fact, black students were among the most critical of what they saw
as white women’s “loose” sexual practices. When I asked how hookup
culture might be improved, Rakim announced: “That’s not us, so I don’t know.
For a lot of people, I think—it’s not them so they don’t care.” Regina
continued, “It’s a matter of a person having something to do with the
situation. It’s a matter of control. Those people can’t control it; they acted this
way. I can’t help you.”
For these students of color, racial identities appeared to be more
salient and politicized than gender identities, potentially creating a barrier
against the development of full-fledged feminist identification (Hunter and
Sellers 1998). And, far from being outside the reach of postfeminist culture,
African American students, like many of their white, Asian, and Latina/o

234
peers, wholeheartedly subscribed to several of postfeminism’s other
central tenets: notions of femininity as a bodily property; the importance of
self-discipline, self-surveillance, and a makeover paradigm; the centrality of
heterosexuality and natural sexual difference; and discourses of
independence, choice, and female empowerment.
Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Postfeminism
As Kimberly Springer (2007) has astutely commented, “studies of
postfeminism have studiously noted that many of its icons are white and cited
the absence of women of color, but the analysis seems to stop there” (249).
It is possible to argue that the overwhelming focus on middle-class white
women in scholarly analyses of postfeminism simply reflects a paucity of
postfeminist cultural forms that feature women of color. Or, as McRobbie
(2009) implies, perhaps the discursive space of postfeminism is effectively
closed to non-white women. However, the argument that postfeminism
simply excludes women of color—or worse, that women of color do not
appear in postfeminist popular culture—seems both overly simplistic and
empirically unfounded.
For one, we can see women of color enacting postfeminism simply by
turning on the television. Popular reality TV shows such as “Basketball
Wives,” “Bad Girls Club,” “Jersey Shore,” “Candy Girls,” “Love and Hip Hop,”

235
“Flavor of Love,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “America’s Next Top
Model,” “The Real World,” and the ubiquitous “Keeping Up with the
Kardashians” franchise; the video series “Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style” (a
“hip hop” version of the original series, hosted by rapper Snoop Dogg); and
films like “Think Like a Man” (2012), all showcase women of color. Add these
to the highly successful—and highly sexualized—musical careers of En
Vogue, Salt-N-Pepa, Lil’ Kim, TLC, Destiny’s Child, The Pussycat Dolls,
Mariah Carey, Shakira, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Jennifer Lopez
(to name just a few), and it becomes clear that the postfeminist “girls” who
are going “wild” are not all white and middle-class. The women of color
featured in the above representations clearly embody and enact
postfeminism: they embrace femininity and the consumption of feminine
goods; they espouse a vocabulary of independence, choice, empowerment,
and sexual freedom; and they construct themselves (or are constructed by
others) as heterosexual subjects.
Like previous normative conceptions of gender, postfeminism
promotes a limited version of femininity. Like previous normative conceptions
of sexuality, it shores up heterosexism. Like previous normative conceptions
of race, it reinstates whiteness as the standard. However, while it may be
true that “the central figure of postfeminist discourses is a white,

236
heterosexual, middle-class woman” (Projansky 2001, 12), this does not
necessarily mean that non-white, non-middle-class, and non-heterosexual
women are altogether excluded from, or somehow unaffected by,
postfeminist discourses. Foucault (1978) warns: “We must not imagine a
world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded
discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as
a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various
strategies (100). While discourse transmits and produces power (in this case,
white hetero supremacy), it also “undermines and exposes it, renders it
fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (Foucault 1978, 101). Indeed, as I
have suggested, there is no shortage of women who appear to be
appropriating the language of postfeminism in unexpected, and thus
potentially disruptive, ways (see Butler 2013).
Let me be clear: I do not think that Projansky (2001) is incorrect in her
assertion that postfeminist discourses assume a white, heterosexual female
subject. Nor do I think that McRobbie (2009) is mistaken when she contends
that the postfeminist masquerade reinforces racial divisions and reinstates
whiteness as the racial standard. I do believe, however, that conceptualizing
postfeminism as primarily exclusionary obscures the ways in which this
discursive formation includes (albeit in specific and limited ways) nonwhite

237
and nonheterosexual subjects. It is this inclusion that, in my view,
remains undertheorized. Furthermore, it is important to remember that
hookup culture doesn’t stop at the end of the Row. Rather, the postfeminist
sensibility of hookup culture influences both included and excluded students
and their experiences in, understandings of, and narratives about gender and
sexual relationships. It may be tempting to treat hookup culture as a
subculture of middle-class, white, Greek students and the select “others” they
admit. However, as I have shown in this chapter, hookup culture is not so
simply bounded.
While “fuglies,” gay and lesbian students, and racial minorities were
regularly constructed as cultural “outsiders” in the hookup scene at LAU, this
division was only partly exclusionary. At the same time that students
constructed the Row as the center of social life, many also used narratives of
moral superiority to construct symbolic boundaries between “us” and “them.”
Yet even as they distanced themselves from some tenets of postfeminist
hookup culture, nonwhite students continued to measure their own
experiences against the practices, meanings, and values that this culture
promotes. In this way, we can see how hookup culture traverses the
symbolic boundaries its participants erect and presents itself as something
with which all students must contend.

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In his examination of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, Foucault
(1978) identified the transformation of sexuality into discourse as “applied
first, and with the greatest intensity, in the economically privileged and
politically dominant classes” (120). However, this did not mean that the
deployment of sexuality established an exclusionary principle, available only
to the privileged few; it represented instead a self-affirming experiment with a
new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers (Foucault 1978,
123). Extending the work of McRobbie (2009), Projansky (2001), and others,
I argue that the formation of postfeminist discourses in the contemporary
United States takes a similar shape: rather than simply an exclusion of racial
and sexual “others,” postfeminism primarily represents an affirmation of a
white heterosexual subject. It is, in Projansky’s words, “a way to redefine
feminism in order to perpetuate heterosexual whiteness as universal” (2001,
16). In other words, the argument that postfeminist discourses exclude
women of color or queer women is not wholly incorrect, but, as I have argued
in the chapter, it is an inadequate rendering of the relations of power that
produce them. Instead of assuming, for instance, that women of color are
somehow unaffected by postfeminist discourses, it seems that a more
productive route is to rethink postfeminism in terms of “cultural ownership,” or
what kinds of claims and boundaries are constructed by different social

239
groups across a variety of social contexts. Such an approach allows us to
(1) interrogate the ways in which postfeminism provides space for “others”
within its discursive boundaries, and (2) explore how non-white and non-
heterosexual women and men adopt, internalize, negotiate, and challenge
hegemonic postfeminist conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality.

240
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
Writing a dissertation about college hookup culture comes with both
drawbacks and perks. I have learned to ignore the bemused looks from
senior scholars when I tell them about my (seemingly silly?) project at
conferences or in the copy room, and I have spent many Thanksgiving
dinners explaining to my family why studying casual sex is a worthwhile
pursuit. I have also learned more about the sex lives of my students, and
their friends, and their friends’ friends, than I ever hoped (or needed) to know.
The first two experiences are exhausting. The last one, though, has proved to
be highly valuable for my understanding of how hooking up works at LAU and
across the country. Almost every day, someone tells me a personal story or
sends me a link to a blog post, magazine article, or Twitter feed that adds
another piece to the hookup culture puzzle. While at times this can be
overwhelming—I have an email folder with over 1,000 messages about
hooking up—it usually feels invigorating, and reminds me that the stuff of
everyday life, even drunken college life, is worthy of scholarly attention.
I’d like to conclude with one of these puzzle pieces. A few months ago,
one of my former students sent me an email that included nothing but a
hyperlink. I clicked on it, and was taken to a Facebook page called “LAU

241
Hook-Ups.” The page, which is still active today despite calls from
concerned parents, students, and university staff, allows LAU students to
anonymously post details of their hookups. The page’s description reads:

Comment with your craziest story, raunchiest hookup, or best
one night stand. This page is specifically designed to help the
fellow drunk locate his/her Bobcat Hookup. If you recognize
your story post with your name or number. We will keep
everything anonymous until we find a match.

Disclaimer: This Facebook page is a joke. Please don’t take it
personally. If you have a story about you and you want it taken
down, then send us a message.

The page features hundreds of posts from LAU students describing their
hookups.
33
The creator of the LAU Hook-Ups page is, judging from the
administrative posts, a guy. Take, for instance, this pre-spring break status
update:

Excuse the lack of posts for the next week, Ill be knee deep in
the Cabo puss

33
Several students I talked to about the LAU Hook-Ups page expressed doubt about the
validity of its posts. It is certainly possible that some of the posts are fictions; however,
regardless of whether or not the posted hookups actually happened, the page provides a
window into the culture of hooking up at LAU. It is also direct evidence of the importance of
discursive renderings of hookups-as-practice.

242
However, as the posts below illustrate, many of the page’s anonymous
posters appear to be women. Some students choose to post from their own
Facebook pages, allowing other to see their names, but most of the posts
included on the page’s wall are anonymous. Here are posts #166-172:

#166 To ****** a few weeks ago at St. Fratty’s Day: Your dance
moves were incredibly sexy and it definitely translated to the
bedroom. I loved the red lipstick as well. Give me a call when
you’re ready for round 2 ;)

#167 To the guy that was screaming when we were banging.
Your screaming sounded like you were in pain...not enjoying it.
Simmer down, my rides aren’t THAT great.

#168 Met you during spring break last week.. I know nothing
about you except that your name is ****, you’re from New York,
and that your first kiss was with a dolphin (sorry, I know you
said its a secret). I did mention that I go to [this school] so
hopefully you’ll somehow stumble on this page. Cos the sex
was amazing even though your 2 roommates were passed out
on the other bed..thanks for cuddling with me before continuing
on to round 2 :)) i want more of you !!

#169 Guys: if you want to booty call a girl, just do it. There’s a
90% chance she’s wants to do the same to you.

#170 Hello everyone...I’m a Ohio girl and I love [this school]....I
hooked up with this Indian guy I mean international Indian, and
it was surprisingly great. To him if he is here, my friend would
like to meet you too, time to eat a sandwich ;)

243
#171 To this cute guy going to gerontology all the time, I
wanted you to have my number and call me but the damn
camera in the cruiser would have caught me. I want you to eat
me in the car next time :))

#172 To the guy with the kokpelli tattoo on his arm,
You gave me a serious case of the chapped ass. You call that
lube? #worstanalever

These selections are, compared to the rest of the site, relatively tame. There
are posts that come dangerously close to describing sexual assault, both
from victims and perpetrators. There are posts that “tag” actual students,
offering both positive (“best head ever!”) and negative (“worst sex of my life”)
assessments. The comments, too, are rarely polite: for example, when
students post about a particularly bad hookup, a slew of comments
speculating about the person’s identity—by tagging real people—usually
follows.
Reactions to the page have been mixed. Judging from the staggering
amount of “likes” on both posts and comments, many students enjoy reading
the intimate details of their peers’ sex-capades. Some students, however,
have publicly expressed concern about the page’s normalization (and at
times, celebration) of misogyny, racism, and even rape.
In a letter to the editor of LAU’s student newspaper on February 13,
2013, one student described the LAU Hook-Ups page as “heartbreaking.”

244
“There will always be nasty people in the world who take some
satisfaction in the mortification of others,” she wrote, “but I sincerely wish I
hadn’t seen so clearly how many there are and how cruel they are at LAU.”
Another student argued in a blog post that LAU’s hookup culture is “violent
and a danger to all students.” She explained:

The problem I have with this Facebook page is not that it
encourages casual sex or that it celebrates having many sexual
partners—things I consider to be morally neutral. The problem
is that “hookup” culture, as of now, does not advocate respect
for the individual. Rape, sexual assault and coercion are norms
within it, and worse, within this culture it seems that people
cannot even recognize sexual violence, even when it is literally
in their faces on their computer screens (Lollie 2013, 1).

In March 2013, the Undergraduate Student Government unanimously voted
to approve a resolution that calls on administrators to actively investigate the
page and limit its negative impacts. Authored by concerned students working
with administrators from Diversity Affairs and the Women’s Student
Assembly, the resolution contends that in its numerous allusions to sexual
assault and rape, the LAU Hook-Ups page does not support the LAU Code of
Conduct’s Policy and Procedures on Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Assault
and “paints a negative portrait” of the university (Callas 2013).
Rape culture is a real thing, and it’s important to think and talk about
the risks associated with a hookup culture that celebrates hegemonic

245
masculinity, promotes rampant alcohol use, and perpetuates notions of
women as sexual objects. I do not mean to have downplayed the threat of
rape and sexual assault that several of the women I spoke to admitted
feeling on a daily basis at LAU. However, saying that hookup culture is rape
culture, and thus dismissing its participants—men and women alike—as
cultural dupes or, worse yet, willingly supporting a culture of violence and
degradation, is not a wholly accurate rendering of how students understand
the practice and meanings of hooking up.
In fact, by focusing primarily on the physical and psychological risks
associated with contemporary hookup culture, scholars and popular
commentators have sidestepped important questions about how hooking up
reflects, and helps reproduce, other cultural ideas about femininity,
masculinity, and sexuality. Part of the reason I have avoided discussing rape
culture in these pages is that it is what many others have already talked
about; no one, however, has examined other kinds of “culture” that, like rape
culture, help shape casual sexual practices on campus.
I hope to have shown in this dissertation how college hookup culture is
connected to a broader set of cultural beliefs, values, and assumptions:
namely, postfeminism. In Chapter 1, I argued that hookup culture is an ideal
place to extend existing research on postfeminism by exploring how

246
postfeminist discourses are enacted “on the ground.” Because there is a
higher proportion of young, unmarried, sexually active college students on
campus today than ever before in our nation’s history, and because women
now attend college at a higher rate than men, college hookup culture is an
ideal site for analyzing the contemporary postfeminist claim that gender
equality has been achieved.
Chapters 2 and 3 used evidence from qualitative in-depth group
interviews to explain first how hooking up is a shared culture, and then to
show why, and in what ways, this culture is postfeminist. In Chapter 2, I
argued for a conceptualization of hooking up as a culture with underlying
rituals, rules, and assumptions of which most college students were aware,
regardless of their personal level of sexual activity. I discussed the centrality
of alcohol and the importance of gossip in the hookup scene, as well as the
cultural demand for hookups to be both casual and random.
Chapter 3 examined how hookup culture is connected to postfeminist
culture. I detailed the socio-historical context out of which postfeminism
emerged; reviewed various definitions and scholarly analyses of postfeminist
media culture; and offered my own definition of postfeminism as a neoliberal
sensibility. I used interview data to map several points of convergence
between college hookup culture and postfeminism: an explicit claim to

247
operate beyond gender; an emphasis on female empowerment and
individual choice; and a “grammar of individualism” (Gill 2007, 153) that
undermined notions of the social or political and reinforced the central
postfeminist tenet that feminist activism is no longer necessary or desirable.
Chapters 4 and 5 focused specifically on how college hookup culture
intersects with postfeminist discourses to produce new subjectivities and
reproduce old forms of inequality. In Chapter 4, I examined the gendered
character of hooking up, including the pressure for women (and, to a lesser
extent, men) to monitor and modify their bodies and behavior according to
prevailing gender and sexual ideals, as well as the continued stigma against
women who have “too much” casual sex. I argued that postfeminist notions
of femininity as a bodily property and irony and knowingness were central to
students’ assessment of “sluts” in the hookup scene. Chapter 4 also included
an analysis of gendered disparities in rates of orgasm and oral sex. Drawing
from interview data, I outlined students’ explanations and justifications for
these differences, arguing that a postfeminist revival of ideas about natural
sexual difference helped explain both men’s and women’s acceptance of
unequal gendered outcomes. Chapter 4 concluded with some preliminary
thoughts about the shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification

248
and the ways in which postfeminist hookup culture worked to construct
new gendered subjectivities.
Chapter 5 analyzed the construction of symbolic boundaries among
students “in” and “out” of the hookup scene. I examined interview data that
revealed three related narratives: exclusion, exceptions, and “eating the
other” (hooks 1992). By locating the epicenter of hookup culture in Greek life,
privileging a white, heterosexual, middle-class subject, and promoting the
commodification of difference, these postfeminist narratives reproduced key
racial and sexual stereotypes and inequalities, and ensured that systems of
white privilege and compulsory heterosexuality remained largely
unchallenged by cultural “others.”
In many ways, college hookup culture is an ideal site to examine
questions of intimacy, feminism, and neoliberalism in the late modern era.
Because hookup culture and postfeminism both rely on an overarching
framework of purported gender equality, individual choice, and sexual
freedom, they can, and often do, work together to conceal existing and new
forms of inequality. In its specific focus on the connections between hooking
up and postfeminism, my research speaks to the stalled “revolution” in sexual
politics, as well as issues of gender, sexual, racial, and class inequality, and
suggests a new way of thinking about contemporary sexual interaction.

249
Possibilities for future studies about postfeminism and hookup
culture abound; indeed, some have already begun. For instance, Wilkins and
Dalessandro (2013) used in-depth peer interviews with undergraduates to
investigate the practices and meanings of “monogamy” and “cheating” for
college women. Other studies have examined postfeminist culture in other
places “on the ground,” like Pomerantz, Raby, and Stefanik’s (2013)
exploration of how adolescent girls navigate the tension between celebratory
postfeminist narratives and continuing sexism in Canadian schools. These
studies suggest that sociologists may be paying more attention to the
significance of postfeminism in everyday life.
Yet there is still work to be done. The dearth of thoughtful analyses of
the relationship between race and postfeminism in the contemporary U.S. is
troubling, particularly because it seems to indicate a continuing tendency
among feminist scholars to treat race as secondary to gender, despite
repeated calls from feminists of color to understand race and gender as
mutually constitutive. Similarly, with a few exceptions, scholars of
postfeminism seem to have sidestepped questions of sexuality, even as
queer theorists continue to emphasize the central role of heterosexism in the

250
reproduction of inequality.
34
Exploration of the many postfeminist cultural
forms that feature nonwhite, nonmiddle-class, and nonheterosexual women;
ethnographic or interview-based accounts of the women who participate in
these forms; and further critical examination of how postfeminism shores up
white supremacy, male dominance, and heterosexism would all be welcome
additions to existing research. By focusing solely on how hooking up is
physically and psychically dangerous for its female participants, we
unnecessarily impose a myopic vision of hooking up as both monolithic and
primarily a problem of participation. Instead, I suggest we acknowledge rape
culture and sexual violence as a disturbing and problematic aspect of
contemporary college sex practices, while also investigating the full cultural
complexity of hooking up as a postfeminist sensibility.
With regard to hookup culture, I am cautiously optimistic that we are
slowly moving away from the question of whether hooking up is “bad” for
young women and beginning to understand college hookup culture—in all its
paradoxical intricacy—as a topic worthy of scholarly analysis. This includes
taking seriously the reality that women, as well as men, have a hand in

34
See Hermes (2006) for an analysis of heterosexuality and queerness in popular
postfeminist television and Gill (2008) for a discussion of the proliferation of lesbianism in
contemporary advertising.

251
constructing and perpetuating the cultural logic of hooking up, and
interrogating how postfeminist narratives of backlash and sex-positivity,
gender equality with sexual difference, individual choice and empowerment,
femininity as a bodily property, sexual freedom, and the commodification of
difference come together in the contemporary hookup scene to produce new
gendered subjectivities.
In my view, college hookup culture is a particularly useful site to study
contemporary formations of gender, sexuality, race, feminism, shared cultural
meanings, and the possibilities for social change precisely because of its
paradoxical and seemingly incoherent nature. Contemporary postfeminism is
similarly defined by tension and contradiction; thus, it is important for feminist
scholars to attempt to understand postfeminist cultures on their own terms
(Banet-Weiser 2004, 136-37). I have argued that hooking up is one such
culture—one that is fundamentally contradictory, paradoxical, and
ambiguous, and one that deserves to be acknowledged on its own terms
rather than in comparison to an imagined ideal of romance or “real”
relationships. If hookup culture is one place where feminism and femininity
converge, then it is incumbent upon us—both as feminists and as scholars—
to understand what this ideological mélange means to the people involved.

252
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Creator Butler, Jess (author)

Core Title Sexual subjects: hooking up in the age of postfeminism

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 07/24/2013

Defense Date 06/04/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag college,gender,hooking up,hookups,OAI-PMH Harvest,postfeminism,sexuality

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Language English

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Advisor Hays, Sharon R. (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Messner, Michael A. (committee member)

Creator Email jbut83@gmail.com,jlbutler@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-299686

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