Casual sex in college β known colloquially as "hooking up" β gets a lot of attention for supposedly being unhealthy for women. But a new study finds that hooking up may actually allow women more sexual agency than traditional dinner dates. The researchers don't advocate a world without dates, but they do find that college students often harbor a sexual double standard around dates that is relatively relaxed when it comes to in-the-moment hookups. In hookup scenarios , the study found, students are open to a woman taking the sexual lead.
When analyzing a dating scenario, however, the students tended to fall back on traditional gender roles, more often assuming that men were only interested in sex and women in trying not to seem "slutty. That's not to say that hookups are a paradise for women, said study researcher Sinikka Elliott, a sociologist at North Carolina State University.
It's just that dating might not be the refuge that it's made out to be. Indeed, contrasting no-strings-attached encounters with committed relationships is not as simple as it seems. A study published in the journal The Gendered Society Reader found that 67 percent of students in a long-term relationship had started out with at least one hookup and one date before the relationship became exclusive. And the students weren't hooking up willy-nilly: 47 percent of women and 35 percent of men said they'd harbored interests in a relationship with their last hookup partner before the sex took place.
Elliott and her colleagues originally launched their experiment as a classroom exercise into the sexual double standard β the idea that promiscuous guys are "studs," while women who have sex are "sluts. That's not what happened, Elliot said. Surprised by the results, the researchers analyzed the responses in-depth. A total of undergraduates had read a story in which a man and a woman meet at a party, hit it off, and have "a night of wild sex.
In half of the stories, the hookup happens at the woman's house, and then the man asks her out for a date. In the other half, the hookup happens at the man's house, and the woman initiates the dinner date. Next, the students, all undergraduates around the age of 19, were asked to write what happened in the situation from either the man or the woman's point of view. The students' explanations for both the man's and the woman's behavior were nuanced, sometimes echoing traditional gender stereotypes and sometimes breaking with them completely.
