Summary Of Bogle's Hooking Up

In the book Hooking Up, Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, the goal Bogle seems to have in mind in her research was to contribute to the growing body of literature on the changing nature of relationships. She pays particular attention to the beginning of a relationship, how it takes root and forms. This entails how individuals find each other, and upon meeting, how they proceed. The beginning stages of relationships varies depending on the time period, and when holding the time period relatively constant, the place. College, she identifies, is a petri-dish of sorts where relationship norms take a very unique mutation of what it is like elsewhere, it manifests itself in hooking up.
Bogle uses a socio-historic lens to address the nature …show more content…
A large part of the book explores this phenomenon and how it fares with both sexes, both during undergrad, as well as post-grad. Bogle uses data collected via interviews of undergrads and graduates from two institutions to create an analysis of the expectations, experiences, and perceptions of students in regards to hooking up. She finds that the responses from both colleges align, despite the difference in private/public and religious affiliation/lack of. From there, in the analysis, she sees that the term “hooking up” is ambiguously used, and students themselves have trouble identifying what it means. This stems partly from the emphasis on personal choice that was normalized somewhere between the dating era and the hook up era. It is also a result of the nature of campuses, in that it is very public. Hooking up is socialized into being through what each individual views as the norms. Some view norms as extreme versions as what actually occurs, in terms of the number of hookups, and the nature of said hookups, and this shifts the general public’s expectations of …show more content…
Though these points were minor, they were still glossed over with assumptions that could have been further debunked. An example of this is in the case of interviewing men and realizing that “perhaps men were afraid to cite less extreme behavior as promiscuous, given that they don’t know anything about my beliefs” (pg 107). Here she is saying that her male interviewees may have felt uncomfortable sharing the full extent of their beliefs because of their female interviewer, and this could have skewed the data. Without giving any support, Bogle dismisses it saying that “I believe that the distorted perceptions of what others were doing is most likely behind the extreme examples cited by several men” (pg