Book Review: Unhooked

Unhooked was one of the books I read recently as I’ve been exploring the question of “what does it mean to be a Christian woman?” As I remarked in my review of A Return to Modesty, the baseline question seems to be “what does it mean to be a woman in today’s culture?” In other words, I need to know where I’ve been and where I’m at now, in order to properly understand the different way that I’m called to be as a woman following Christ.

Unhooked is a fascinating book for me. Laura Sessions Stepp explores the phenomenon of “hooking up” in a very forthright and honest fashion, by following a number of young women through a year of their lives at college, to document their experiences and draw conclusions about what this new sexual and social culture is like, and what it does to the people involved in it.

I suspect that Unhooked is, like Shalit’s A Return to Modesty, a bit difficult to take by many people. Some readers may be offended by the way Stepp avoids questions of morality when she describes how these young women lead their sexual lives. To a certain extent, I would say they’re right: I think that when Stepp struggles to find a way to explain why and how so-called casual sex is harmful to the women she follows, she is hampered by the lack of the word “sin” in her conceptual vocabulary. Her explanation doesn’t quite cut it, and it seems to me that the reason for that is she’s trying to retain our culture’s model of the self while exploring a topic that leads to a very counter-cultural conclusion.

On the other hand, I suspect that her work won’t go down well with other readers for a very different reason: she is quite clear that these casual relationships are doing women no good. She’s also clear that the separation of physical sensation (sex) from emotional connection (love) and the separation of both from commitment (marriage) is destructive. That goes against the grain of our materialistic, sensation-seeking society. It also means that men and women may have different needs, which (as Shalit also discusses) doesn’t set well with a superficially egalitarian society that insists that men and women, being equal (yes) are therefore the same (no).

So what does Stepp have to say? She argues that despite all the messages in the media and in college culture to the contrary, for many women, perhaps most women, “hooking up”, casual sex, is not what they really want. What they want is connection, a true emotional relationship, sex that has meaning. These women recognize intuitively what my priest describes as the sacramental nature of marriage – that you are giving yourself to another person and you become one flesh. To have sex outside of that sacramental relationship is to have all the negatives and none of the positives – to take something out of its proper and healthy place and discover that by itself it is hurtful. Casual sex is all about “me me me” – what I want, my desires. It is not about a relationship – what we do together, our lives together.

Yet our culture pushes young women toward this ideal of casual sex. Stepp will perhaps draw the ire of feminists by pointing out that feminism is one of the factors in causing this state of affairs – that is, if the hard-core feminists will even recognize that there is something wrong with this state of affairs to begin with.

Yet I don’t think it’s unreasonable to note that something may have unintended consequences. I am enormously grateful to the work of pioneering feminists who worked to give me the vote, the chance to work at a meaningful career, the chance to make important choices about my life and my body. In that regard, I reject Shalit’s embrace of pre-feminist paternalism as healthier. But what Stepp reveals is that, in another’s words, “just because all things are possible, doesn’t mean all things are good.” Feminism broke down the artificial barriers but perhaps has broken down more than it ought to have.

Certainly I have been realizing lately that rejecting my feminine nature is not helping me. I am not a generic biological being who happens to have two X chromosomes while other fellow beings have XY. I am a woman. That has a positive meaning, and I don’t think that radical feminism is doing women any favors by trying to pretend that we are all exactly alike. Equal, yes – in fact, I would say that our culture does not by any means understand how radically equal we all are – but not alike. That’s a tough nut to crack and I have to work on it some more, but I think Stepp has some insights there.

Our current culture treats the body as just another material possession… an attitude that purports to be liberating but, in our consumer culture, is ultimately destructive in all sorts of ways. When it comes to sex, Stepp reveals in her interviews that young women are discovering that it’s not the same thing as enjoying a nice meal or a pleasant physical game. It means something. No matter how much we try to make it not mean anything, no matter how uncomfortable our culture is with it meaning something, these young women (myself included) have learned the hard way that it does mean something.

The trouble is, we are generally learning this the hard way… and that vague sense of meaning remains nameless and uncertain. But I don’t think it has to be that way – if we can get out of this quagmire of subjectivity and relativism and actually talk about what’s true about human nature. Before we get there, though, I think it’s helpful to recognize another of the forces that keeps us from facing up to reality: consumer culture.

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1. Book Review: A Return to Modesty