Two Factors, Not One

Poor me, I never even heard of this book, Unhooked, I am so out of it. But Google News this morning has 130 stories linked, people arguing about whether what this lady says is true or not, and of course, if it is true, is this the end of the world?

Here's a typical article, an AP story carried in this morning's Baltimore Sun:

During a class discussion on adolescence, a high school teacher recently asked her students whether they go on dates. We don't "date," the 12th-graders reported. We "hook up."

If you're in your 40s, "hooking up" might mean catching a friend downtown for lunch. But to people in their teens or 20s, the phrase often means a casual sexual encounter - anything from kissing onward - with no strings attached.

Now a new book on this not-so-new subject is drawing fire in some quarters for its conclusion: That hookups can be damaging to young women, denying their emotional needs, putting them at risk of depression and even sexually transmitted disease, and making them ill-equipped for real relationships later on.

For that, Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked and a writer for The Washington Post, has been criticized as a throwback to an earlier, restrictive moral climate, an anti-feminist and a tut-tutting mother telling girls not to give the milk away when nobody's bought the cow.

The author "imagines the female body as a thing that can be tarnished by too much use," wrote reviewer Kathy Dobie in Stepp's own paper, and suggested that Stepp was, in one part, trying to "instill sexual shame." For Meghan O'Rourke, literary editor at Slate.com, Stepp is "buying into alarmism about women," and making sex "a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous thing than it already is." The fight over casual sex

I'm going to sidestep the argument about the empowerment of women and whether it's old-fashioned to make boys wait. It's interesting, but I want to tie this to a discussion we're having in Montgomery County.

I usually think of the Sexual Revolution as something that started in the 1960s, with Kinsey and birth control pills, and ended in the 1980s with first herpes, then AIDS -- diseases with no cure. Playboy glamorized the so-called revolution, but nobody I knew actually ever went to a party like what you saw there, with women running around naked and people having sex endlessly and indiscriminately, all of them groovy and far out.

It seemed to me the Sexual Revolution was something that may have happened to other people, and maybe it didn't actually happen at all, at least the way it was in the movies and magazines.

But there was something, a shift of a greater magnitude, that those magazines and movies may have symbolized. If you're my age, you remember that moms didn't work when we were kids. Now they do. You will also remember that people used to get married before they moved in together. Cohabitation, once a crime, is now a norm.

Things have definitely changed, the balance of power has shifted, at least, and norms have definitely changed in our lifetime. I'm afraid "dating" as a formal convention started going out of style in my generation, and if these books (there's this one, and some others) are correct, it is now mostly a thing of the past. That whole knock-don't-honk, go-in-and-meet-the-parents, the-boy-pays-for-everything business seems to have passed under the bridge.

This book seems to be talking more about people in their twenties, and it is not clear what happens in high school. Seems to me there's a lot of "chilling," which is not "hooking up" but more like "hanging out." But then I'm a geezer, it's not like I'd actually know what teenagers do these days.

OK, here's why I wanted to write about this.

The Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum keep wanting to talk about the dangers of being gay, the health risks. We can see web sites like this one that says:

...unprotected (without a condom) anal sex (intercourse) is considered to be very risky behavior.

This is in response to a question about HIV.

I want to point out one thing here, an assumption in this statement, and in lots of other statements like it.

The assumption is that the reader does not know if the person they are having sex with is infected or not.

Because, listen, if you have anal sex with someone who does not have HIV/AIDS, you're not going to get it. Zero transmission rate there. It doesn't matter if you're straight or gay, if your partner doesn't have an infection there is no risk of transmission.

So the assumption here is that the person asking the question is talking about having sex, essentially, with strangers.

And that's a stupid thing to do. A risky thing.

Apparently, according to this book and some other research, college-age people these days are having sex, what they call hooking up, on a casual basis. That is a situation that presents risk. If you don't really know the person you are having sex with, or if they are also having casual sex with other people, then there is risk, condom or not.

That category of behavior needs to be spelled out.

People like the CRC's Ruth Jacobs who constantly tell us that anal sex is risky are assuming that people -- and especially gay people -- are constantly having anal sex with strangers.

The fact is: promiscuity is a risk factor. Hooking up is a bad idea.

The other fact is: anal intercourse appears to be somewhat more risky than vaginal sex, because of certain differences in the tissues of those orifices. Nobody really knows, there's no good research (because it would be unethical to ask someone to repeatedly have anal sex with an infected person for a research experiment), but it seems very likely that it is easier to catch an infection from your partner that way.

Those who argue that anal sex is horribly dangerous are confusing two things: the slightly higher vulnerability of the rectum to infection, and the stereotype of gay promiscuity. A faithful, monogamous couple, where both people know they are HIV-negative, is at zero risk of infection if they practice anal intercourse, whether they are the same or opposite sex.

I am going to try to portray this the way I think about it, in a two-by-two table. We have two factors: whether the partner is infected, and, let's say, vaginal versus anal intercourse. I will agree that risk is higher for anal intercourse.

                   Risk of Transmission of Infection

                      Vaginal           Anal
                    Intercourse     Intercourse

Infected partner      High Risk       Higher risk

Non-infected          No risk         No risk

Does it seem reasonable to single out anal intercourse as the risk factor here?

Let's not confuse these two things: promiscuity and ... point of entry.

The problem is having sex with a person who carries an infection.

The CRC has their own reasons for talking about anal sex all the time, which have nothing to do with actual risk.