Teens, Pre-Teens and the "Hooking Up" Culture

What does it mean when one teen says to another, "Let's hook up"? Are they planning to meet at the local mall, or talking about texting one another on their cell phones? It turns out, the amount of time pre-teens and teens spend "texting" may not be their parents' worst current nightmare after all.

The tween/teen and even college-age culture of "hooking up" has been explored by magazines as diverse as "O"in 2002 ("Girls and Sex") and TIME in 2005 ("A Snapshot of Teen Sex"). Hooking up, since at least the year 2000, has become the popular term for having casual sexual encounters within a circle of friends, or even with newly met "friends", with no strings attached. No boyfriend-girlfriend commitment, no promises, just friends.

Within a circle of peers, this is often also called "friends with benefits" - friends with whom kids as young as 12 and 13 (but most prevalent between ages 15 and 20) go after some form of sexual satisfaction without making commitments to each other for an ongoing dating relationship. The teens sometimes also have an unspoken code that they are not to reveal their true feelings for the other person.

And what is "sex"? Various surveys find our youth considering "sex" to only be full-out intercourse, while oral sex, mutual masturbation and anything else is "not really sex".

One problem with "hooking up" is that kids don't know they may become emotionally connected to the people with whom they have shared this experience. During arousal, a hormone called "oxytocin" is released along with the activity of other sex hormones. Oxytocin is also known as the "attachment hormone" (see this 2001 study from the University of Utah or 2005 study from the Society of Integrated Sciences). Produced by the hypothalamus and stored in the pituitary gland, oxytocin is the same hormone that helps establish the bond between a mother and baby during breastfeeding. It is a strong bond.

In a 2004 article for the Boston Globe, "FWB trend distorts the lessons of sex and love", (fwb standing for "friends with benefits"), by Barbara F. Meltz, two psychologists confirm that this type of casual sex can lead to low self-esteem, feelings of emptiness, depression, heartbreak and, later, an inability to form intimate lasting relationships. Psychologist Geraldine K. Piorkowski of the University of Illinois at Chicago noted that hooking up makes them "ashamed for wanting closeness".

How did we get here?

Perhaps some answers can be found in these facts:
At $13.3 billion annually, the porn industry has exceeded the combined earnings of ABC, NCB and CBS (see info here) There are 4.2 million porn websites. Children can be exposed to porn by putting in totally innocent search words, because the porn purveyors are choosing innocent key words to draw youngsters to their sites, or because their parents are among the 40 million adults who view porn regularly and forget to erase it from the computer's history.

Shows like Bravo TV's first season of "Make Me A Supermodel" had episodes where the young supermodel wanna-be's were commanded to pose nude with sheer coverings in one episode, and in another were directed, slightly dressed, in on-the-bed fake couplings with other contestants of both sexes. Oxygen's "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" also put models of both sexes in near nude suggestive poses together. These shows may originally air on late night TV, but are re-broadcast on their respective stations on several days and at various times of day before the next episode comes on. Teen girls and even boys admire the young people that appear on programs like this.

Other TV shows and movies depict teenagers or actors they idolize in casual sexual interludes that appear very romantic and often with no apparent consequences. In a May 20, 2008 ABC News Story, at least one girl, "Lisa" a 20-year-old, admitted that seeing Samantha on "Sex and the City" hook up with random people while considering it no big deal, "helped me justify my own behavior". Lisa started watching Sex and the City at 14, the same year she lost her virginity, and admits to having sex with as many as 7 men in one week.

In January 2008, Glamour Magazine's cover had this title story: "What Good Sex means to a Guy", and Cosmo's cover story was "Dirty Sexy Sex". Cosmo Girl (for younger girls) in February 2008 attracted buyers with "Sexy Hair Looks".

Reputable colleges and organizations have websites for sex Q&A, like Rutgers University's called sex,etc., and kids can go there to have questions on sex answered. But the Q&A's and Forums lead into each other, and this can be confusing - they don't know if they're getting an expert's advice to "go ahead" or being answered by another teen who is having casual sex.

People on both sides of the sex education argument - those favoring comprehensive "safe sex" ed and those favoring abstinence-only education - argue that the fault for early sexual experimentation may be the other side's. Either way, with help from the hooking up culture, STD's among young people are soaring, and they have many misconceptions about how to stay safe and healthy (see my recent Associated Content article, "Gardasil Vaccine Comes Under New Fire from Revealing Reports"). Parents may want to be acutely aware of these issues and be willing to get into the "down and dirty" facts of today's sexual peer pressure.