Here it comes, the latest hysteria over teen sex.  The newest firestorm is about whether young adults, particularly young women, are “hooking up” too often.  This latest panic is spurred by several new books with hooking up in their titles.  The ensuing media frenzy – girls gone wild! -- uses new lingo to revive the same old fear that girls are giving away the milk rather than making the boys buy the cow. 

“Hooking up” may not involve sex at all.  The expression refers to any sexual conduct --from holding hands to “going all the way.”  According to Laura Sessions Stepp, author of the new back-lashing book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, none of these activities should take place outside of a truly committed relationship.  Be warned: young women who hook up will likely end up damaged and, gasp, unmarried. 

Session Stepp despairs over the fact that today’s “busy girls” fail to prioritize “romance” over sports, studying and careers.  Bring on the same tired stereotypes: women want marriage; men just want sex.  “Give” them the sex and you won’t get the ring. 

Once again we are embracing inflammatory rhetoric while shunning a real discussion of young people and sex.  Like the alarm over supposed “rainbow parties”  – that old urban myth about oral sex as a competitive sport among teens keeping score with lipstick -- this latest panic about teen sexuality causes its own harm, particularly to young women.  Hooking up hysteria simply puts a contemporary twist on old ways of chastising young women for “putting out.”  Boys are cleared of any wrongdoing because they are still stereotyped as just naturally wanting sex and not relationships. 

But love, relationships, and sex are far more complicated than these traditional stereotypes.  Continuing to deny that girls and young women have any sexual feelings provides them no protection from the risks of sexual activity, and makes positive sexual experience all the more unobtainable.  Painting all boys and men as simply lascivious ignores their desire for relationships and commitment.

Moreover, there are real problems with sex on campus that we should be spending time talking about: the effects of binge drinking and drug use, lack of consent and ambiguous consent, high rates of sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies, to name just a few.   

Yet the U.S. continues to deny adolescents and young adults even the most basic sexuality education, and continues to have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy  among industrialized nations.  Our national policy promoting abstinence-only education  precludes giving even basic contraceptive information to teens and instead simply labels all sexual activity outside of marriage as harmful and morally wrong. 

Instead of teen sex hysteria, we need to promote comprehensive reproductive education that honestly discusses the risks and benefits of “hooking up” or not.