When I critiqued the hookup culture back in 1999, and was summarily dismissed as a prude by my elders, it would have been an enormous comfort to know that less than ten years later my “prudish” position would be considered cutting-edge. But today there is little satisfaction in being buried under the avalanche of recent books like Unhooked (Riverhead, 2007) and Unhooked Generation (Hyperion, 2006), which have put the misery of postmodern sexual (non)intimacy utterly beyond dispute, and on the shelf. Even The Hookup Handbook(Pocket Books, 2005), billed as a chipper “Single Girl’s Guide to Living It Up,” can hardly be said to reflect living, much less “living it up.” The gem of this opus is a sample “hookup contract”—not with prospective partners who will soon be gone, mind you—but with the lady herself. One is encouraged to intone
Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.