Hooking

For what it’s worth, I agree with this author’s conclusion. 

During a class discussion on adolescence, a high school teacher recently asked her students whether they go on dates. We don’t “date,” the 12th-graders reported. We “hook up.”

If you’re in your 40s, “hooking up” might mean catching a friend downtown for lunch. But to people in their teens or 20s, the phrase often means a casual sexual encounter — anything from kissing onwards — with no strings attached.

Now a new book on this not-so-new subject is drawing fire in some quarters for its conclusion: That hookups can be damaging to young women, denying their emotional needs, putting them at risk of depression and even sexually transmitted disease, and making them ill-equipped for real relationships later on.

For that, Laura Sessions Stepp, author of “Unhooked” and a writer for The Washington Post, has been criticized as a throwback to an earlier, restrictive moral climate, an anti-feminist and a tut-tutting mother telling girls not to give the milk away when nobody’s bought the cow.

We used to have a word for girls who hook up with any guy who happens to walk by.  And the boys (yes “boys,” not “men”) who engage in this are equally pathetic.  Hooking up is just plain hooking, but at a cheaper price. 

On a related note, I wonder what the trend toward hooking up has done to the prostitution industry.