By Laura Sessions Stepp Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 19, 2003; Page F01
By today's standards, the high school girl from Montgomery County was a slow starter when it came to sex, having reached ninth grade before she kissed a guy. She just couldn't see how to fit a boy into heavy loads of honors homework, soccer matches and baby-sitting.
By 11th grade, she had found the answer: "buddysex," or sexual encounters with friends, in this case a half-dozen private-school boys, no strings attached. At parties mostly, and on the weekend. In closets and bathrooms, parents' bedrooms and friends' parents' bedrooms. Helped along by Smirnoff Ice or, on one occasion, bottles of Dom Perignon.
"September through December is a blur," she recalls as winter sunlight glints off her shoulder-length blond hair and warms her Cafe Mocha. "Let's see, I hooked up with . . . hmmm, I'll call him Rob. Then Rob introduced me to Paul. Then there was Colin, and B.T., and Brad, and Steve. I was having so much fun I didn't even think of having a serious relationship. There was no romance. None." These arrangements didn't include intercourse, she says, but did include mutual oral sex in some cases, "by the second or third time." "We're still all friends, though not in that way," she insists. Really? Yes, really: "I talked to B.T. just last night. And I'm going to Paul's basketball game on Friday." So casually said, as if she were describing courses from the catalogue of the college she hopes to attend.
In earlier decades this girl and others like her might have been shunned, but no longer. For one thing, adolescents no longer see oral sex as sex. For another, sexual liberation of the late 1960s shattered the rules and rituals of romance for women in their twenties. It was just a matter of time before their younger sisters embraced the same freedoms, while still pining on occasion for the dinners, flowers and wooing they had abandoned.
"I know so many girls like this one," says Julia Kay, who graduated from Montgomery Blair High School last year and now attends Brown University.
The girl hookup culture is known in some circles as Ally McBeal feminism. Dozens of young women described it for this story, some as participants, others as observers. The gist of what they said is this: Many girls don't have the time or the energy required for an intense relationship right now, or they can't find a guy who wants one. But they possess enormous sexual energy and believe they have every right to enjoy it in whatever form they choose, just as the Fox network's lusty lawyer did.
They don't hook up with just anyone; usually, it's with someone they know at least casually, or, if intercourse is included, with a less printable version of "sexbuddy." They tell themselves they stand less chance of waking up pregnant or infected that way.
At Brown, so many freshmen hook up with other freshmen in their dorms that they've given it a name: unitcest. Ryan Rogers, a senior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, says she knows only three girls at that school who are involved in serious relationships. "That's it. For most of the rest, hooking up is it."
Whitman's beach week last year, the annual fling of the newly graduated at Delaware's Dewey Beach, gave new meaning to the informal aspects of buddysex. Social life that week "transcended boundaries and cliques," says Marisa Rainey, now a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley. "People who never talked to you at school opened their doors and said come in."
Anticipating such freedom, some students arrived "with lists of people they intended to hook up with," says Marina Eisner, now at Cornell University.
A mischiefmaker among the seniors -- a guy, as it happened -- leaked word of the hookups to a junior girl still enrolled at Whitman. This girl then sent an e-mail to various members of the Whitman community, listing about 40 names of graduates and who had hooked up with whom. Some names showed up several times with different partners, according to students who saw the list.
Such stories do not surprise a team of social scientists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who have interviewed 1,300 Toledo area students in grades 7-11 about dating and relationships. Its federally funded survey, highly unusual for the intimate nature of its questions, showed that among the teens who had engaged in intercourse -- from 8 percent of 7th graders to 55 percent of 11th graders - - one-third said they had had sex with someone whose attachment went no further than friendship. The proportion would have been higher if behaviors other than intercourse had been included.
"The kids make a distinction between casual sex and relationship sex," says Monica Longmore, a social psychologist on the team. "But casual sex is not a one-night stand. It's 'He was my boyfriend last month, I'm not dating him anymore but I was feeling kind of blue so I did it,' or 'I used to date him, and we broke up. But the sex is so good, we still do that.'
"Some have a steady hookup. They say, 'On Fridays, that's what we do.' "
Wooing Pitched
Girls haven't become more promiscuous over the last decade, in the old-fashioned meaning of that word. As the incidence of oral sex has increased, the proportion of high school girls engaging in intercourse has declined from 51 percent in 1991 to 43 percent in 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Also, even as they seek the same sexual rush that guys historically have enjoyed, young women confess to dreaming about the romance of the old-fashioned pursuit: being wooed by leisurely strolls, candlelight dinners, small gifts and other gestures of courtship that were more common when their mothers were their age.
Could this explain the large amounts of alcohol some girls say they consume to make hooking up more palatable? So much has changed, so fast, as gender rules have collapsed.
Less than a half-century ago, girls hung out mostly with other girls, guys with other guys. A girl who was interested in a guy never came right out and told him. She'd tell a girlfriend, who would tell a male friend who would tell the guy in question. Then she'd wait for the phone call.
If the call came, the two then might phone each other every night, talking for hours before going out on their first date. The steps after that were understood: a guy would offer a girl his ring and the couple went steady. Maybe she got pinned or lavaliered, then engaged and so forth.
Today the distance between genders has virtually dissolved. Young women have taken PE with guys since elementary school and gone to movies with them since middle school. They compile coed Buddy Lists on their computer screens and think nothing of instant-messaging guys or calling them on the phone. They move into coed dorms at college and, in both high school and college, go out frequently in coed groups.
If a couple wants to do something together, "it's not going to the door and to a movie anymore," says Peggy Giordano, a sociologist on the Bowling Green team. "The activities are the same things you'd be doing with your friends anyway."
Dating implies commitment, says Eupil Muhn, a young man in his first year at Georgetown University, and guys shy away from that. "They tell me they're too young."
At Brown, advertisements for the annual fall ball, a dress-up affair, made a big deal out of the fact that students could come without a date. "Otherwise, no one would have gone," says Kay.
Calling up a guy to go out, or handing him your phone number, is no big deal in this world. When Rahima Kalala, a junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, saw a gorgeous guy on the Metrobus one day "with the eyes of Lil Bow Wow," she didn't hesitate to slip him her home number before he got off. "If you want something you have to take the initiative," she says. She's in control. That's what many girls want, says Shannon O'Hern, also a Brown freshman. O'Hern has a friend at another college who hooks up regularly with a guy in the dorm. "She decides when he can come to her room. She says, 'It's up to me.' That's important to her." Cornell's Eisner relates a similar story about a friend who hooks up with a young man she has known for a while. "She's wants the guy to know she's using him as much as he's using her."
Men might argue that women have always possessed more control over relationships than was acknowledged. Perhaps, but now it's in the open, and we're not just talking about who pays for the burger. We're talking attitude, the same assertive attitude you see in the classroom and on the athletic field. "There's none of this 'Ooh, I'm wearing your jacket' stuff," says Julie Nemirovsky, a freshman at Emory University in Atlanta who has a boyfriend on campus. Over winter break at home, she went out for coffee with a guy she has known for years and it didn't occur to her to tell her boyfriend. Why should she? "He's not my keeper," she says.
The Bowling Green researchers were surprised by how secure girls were about their relationships. Girls expressed significantly more confidence than guys that they could refuse a date, for example, or break up with someone they no longer wanted to go out with, or control what a couple did together. Boys were more likely to say they would change themselves for a girl than the other way around. (Teen girl magazines encourage these makeovers. "Find a look he -- and you -- will love," gushes Seventeen's current prom issue, suggesting a guy wear black Euro pants, a Ben Sherman shirt and hair gel that will match the color of the girl's dress.)
Girls' sexual confidence shows up in surveys. In the Toledo research, girls were more likely than guys to say they decided how far a couple would go. In a nationwide study soon to be released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young women ages 15 to 24 were less likely than young men to report feeling pressured to engage in intercourse. The average age young women go all all the way the first time? It's the same as it is for boys, sixteen and a half, according to a separate release from Kaiser.
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Dating's Destiny
Oh, but there is something left to lose, what dramatist Ben Jonson 400 years ago called the "coupling of two souls." Young women talk about this, too. If romance is reserved for the truly serious, what guy will choose serious when he can get the other stuff without committing more than a few hours of his time?
"Lots of guys don't even know what a date is," says Rainey. "Wistful" is the only way to describe her tone. She is sitting in a Bethesda coffeehouse over winter break, sharing stories with old high school friends. She tells them about the time that she and a guy at Berkeley went to a party with friends "like we always do. Afterward, because there was a possibility of something romantic between us, he assumed he took me on a date. It wasn't even close. It's kind of a cheap shortcut, guys don't have to put in any effort, not even a night of being alone and having to converse with only you." She sighs, as her friends all nod knowingly.
"I don't see a traditional date, ever," complains Brooke Mason.
Such discussions risk stereotyping all guys as unfeeling cowboys and that's neither true nor fair. Senior boys in a class at Eleanor Roosevelt High School recently talked about the charm of pulling out a chair for a date, pouring one's heart out to a mate, and the difference between lust and love.
Maybe they were trying to impress -- who knows? What we do know is that in formal and informal surveys, girls place a higher value on relationships than guys. Psychology professor Longmore was reminded of girlish desire when her 3-year-old daughter turned to her after watching Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" and asked, "Mommy, when I grow up, will a man want to dance with me?"
Longmore watches her female students study comfortably with their male colleagues every day. She suspects that in years to come they may not worry, as some of their mothers did, that their identity and independence will be compromised in the marriage bed or the corporate suite. But when will they learn that just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should? Who will teach them that there is power in holding back?
If they don't date, how will they learn the skills of discernment, empathy and patience that keep a marriage going? "A series of fleeting liaisons will not help those traits," Longmore says. "That's why we want them to have dates, so when they get married they'll have them. But if all they're doing is screwing, forget it."
Among the little coffee group in Bethesda are a couple who have been dating since their senior year, last year: Alice Barr, now a freshman at Northwestern University, and Georgetown's Muhn. Barr and Muhn hold hands, and smile at each other, and, with some urging, tell about their first kiss after a choral concert. They get up to leave. They hug the other girls, then stroll out the door arm-in-arm. Four pairs of eyes follow them out.
"I think it would be nice to be courted," Mason sighs. Her friend Julia Jacobson agrees: "I'm known as a big feminist on campus, but I want to feel wanted."
