Brown and White Vol. 132 no. 22

              The Brown and White Vol. 132 No. 22
Tuesday, May 2, 2017 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
Not everyone is doing it
Lehigh students align with generational hookup trends
By MADISON GOUVEIA
Managing Editor
Americans are having less sex
than ever.
Millennials, in particular, report
less sex and fewer sexual partners
than both their parents’ and grand-parents’
generations did at their
age, according to a 2016 report in
the Archives of Sexual Behavior by
University of San Diego researcher
and author Jean Twenge.
Despite this data, media and pop-ular
culture place millennials at the
center of hyper-sexualized program-ming
from pregnant teens to spring
breakers, leading to the frequently
publicized misconception millenni-als
are sex-crazed and out to ruin
the conventional ideas of dating and
relationships generations before
them enjoyed.
This isn’t entirely true.
Sexologist Brooke DeSipio, the
director of gender violence educa-tion
and support at Lehigh, believes
the only real difference is in the
terminology.
“Hookup culture is not a new
thing,” DeSipio said. “It has been
happening for generations, and it
has just been called something dif-ferent
for every generation. It was
heavy petting, then it was casual
sex then hooking up, but it’s the
same concept.”
Sociologists who study sex agree
casual sex has been happening for
as long as people have been hav-ing
sex, said Sandra Caron of the
University of Maine and author of
“Sex Lives of College Students: A
Quarter Century of Attitudes and
Behaviors.” Today, it’s not the idea
of sex before marriage that’s differ-ent.
It’s college students’ attitudes
that have changed.
“For most people love and sex
are closely linked, except for college
students,” Caron said. “Sex isn’t like
my mom’s generation when you only
had sex with someone you loved.”
So while it’s clear “hookup” doesn’t
always mean “love” for students
today, it remains unclear what the
term does mean.
In a survey of 194 Lehigh stu-dents,
17 percent defined hooking up
as strictly “sex,” whereas a quarter
defined it as strictly “making out” or
“kissing.” The largest group of stu-dents,
around 43 percent, described
activities somewhere between the
two. The remaining 15 percent used
their definitions to emphasize cer-tain
aspects of hooking up such as
non-committal nature or the loca-tions
hookups most commonly occur.
“There’s definitely blurred
lines about (the definition),” Ross
Zimmerman, ’18, said. “If some-one
tells me they hooked up with
someone, there’s usually a follow up
question of, ‘What does that mean?’”
New York University sociologist
Paula England, who surveyed more
than 26,000 college students nation-wide
about hookup culture, said the
definition is deliberately ambiguous.
DeSipio said the ambiguity allows
students to decide for themselves
what their peers are talking about.
“There is this unspoken rule that
men should be having lots of sex,”
DeSipio said. “It’s how you prove
you’re a good heterosexual man,
and women shouldn’t because then
they’re a slut. A woman can say, ‘I
hooked up,’ and it can be assumed
she just meant kissing, whereas
a man can hook up, and it can be
assumed he had sex. So both parties
have their reputation intact without
having to go into specifics.”
Because of this ambiguity, DeSipio
said, students often have a skewed
perception of what their peers are
actually doing and how often they’re
doing it.
DeSipio said when students are
using ambiguous language about
hookups, it leads to the perception
“everybody’s doing it,” which is com-mon
on college campuses and often
keeps people talking about it.
As a result, students develop an
incorrect perception of how they
compare to their peers.
In the survey, just shy of a third
of students described the hookup
culture at Lehigh as “prevalent,”
“pervasive,” “aggressive” or “dom-inating”
campus. And while half
of students said they feel hook-up
culture inhibits the ability to
form relationships at Lehigh, with
72 percent reporting they “never”
UP hosts A$AP Ferg and ILoveMakonnen for concert
Sam Henry/B&W Staff
Rapper A$AP Ferg reaches out to the audience Thursday at the ArtsQuest Center. A$AP Ferg
headlined the concert, which was organized by University Productions.
By MADISON PETERSON-PORTA
B&W Staff
Strobe lights filled the ArtsQuest
Center as students jumped up and
down and danced in excitement to
A$AP Ferg and ILoveMakonnen. The
pair were the headline performers for
Lehigh’s Spring Quest concert, held
Thursday at ArtsQuest.
The concert was sponsored by
University Productions. A music
subcommittee of UP is tasked with
planning three concerts per year: the
Camp Lehigh concert in September,
the outdoors tailgate concert held by
Goodman Stadium during the football
season and the Spring Quest show,
which is typically held at ArtsQuest.
“Quest was a way to bring the
concerts back inside and we wanted
that,” said Sidney Ro, ’17, a music
executive for UP. “Practically, there
would be more of a budget for big-ger-
name artists if there were fewer
events per year.”
Student Senate budgeted out
$100,000 for UP to use on the Spring
Quest show. Ro said roughly $60,000
went toward booking the artists, with
A$AP Ferg receiving the larger por-tion
of that money as the headline
act. The other $40,000 covered ven-ues,
transportation and security.
Since 2014, UP has hosted the
show at ArtsQuest. UP also allows
students to perform in its events.
Opening for A$AP Ferg and
See HOOKUPS Page 4
See CONCERT Page 4
Kelly McCoy/B&W Staff