American Hookup

By Lisa Wade,

Book cover of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

Book description

The hookup is now part of college life. Yet the drunken encounter we always hear about tells only a fraction of the story. Lisa Wade offers the definitive account of this new sexual culture and demonstrates that the truth is both more heartening and disturbing than we thought. Offering invaluable…


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Why read it?

2 authors picked American Hookup as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’ve long had a professional crush on sociologist Lisa Wade as her work is a deadly combination of brilliant and compulsively readable.

Her study was published while I was writing my book and serves as a companion piece to understanding how hookup culture operates on American college campuses. As de facto speakeasies, fraternity houses serve as the campus party and, by extension, hookup headquarters.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not always a good thing either.

Changes in sexuality during the 20th century have provoked popular panics in American society.

The most recent swirls around hook-up culture, a version of undergraduate social play popular since the late 1990s. Lisa Wade does a masterful job of unpacking the meanings of hook-up culture and the ways it has shaped undergraduate sexuality at many American universities. 

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