Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

Of course, author Laura Sessions is only worried about what hooking up does to women. Men are presumably immune to the bad psychological ju-ju accumulated by less than long-term coupling. Ann Friedman pans Sessions' latest book (HT: Feministing):
She fails to show how women lose when they “delay love.” This would seem to be an equally important part of Stepp’s argument—after all, she claims that casual hookups have a negative effect on young women’s lives beyond the morning after. And yet Stepp devotes only one skimpy chapter to what happens after graduation to girls who’ve enjoyed a lot of hookups in college. Perhaps the most important part of her argument, that this behavior damages girls’ ability to form serious and lasting relationships later in life, isn’t even weakly supported in her final chapters. She mentions, but casually dismisses, experts like Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who “suggests that most college graduates become serious about pairing up in their middle to late 20s and then start the rehearsals that will prepare them in their 30s for marriage.” Steinberg also notes that the divorce rate is lower for women who married at age 25 and older.