Edition: U.S. / Global

Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall

Published: May 30, 2004
(Page 7 of 8)

One girl, a brown-haired senior who says she sometimes hooks up with guys she meets through friends, doesn't feel that she's in the dark ages, or that she's powerless. ''If I ask a guy to come over to my house and hook up,'' she said, ''I'm the one benefiting, because I'm the one who wants to. . . . It's not just about pleasing the guy.''

Her friend, a well-spoken senior with shaggy brown hair, faded jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, listened quietly as her friends defended a woman's right to hook up. Finally, and with some hesitation, she voiced an unpopular opinion among her friends.

''I feel like women have less power today,'' she said. ''It's not just that the guy often doesn't respect the girl or the girl's sexuality, but the girl sometimes doesn't really respect and validate herself. I have a friend who's 20, and he goes on the Internet and meets 16-year-old girls from the suburbs.'' He drives out there, she performs oral sex on him and he drives home. ''Who has the power there? I think that a lot of the times girls are really self-destructive.''

''Well,'' the first girl said, slightly annoyed, ''I don't see why a guy can have a random hookup with a girl and no one questions his motives, but when a girl does it, there's this assumption that she's a girl, so she automatically wants more out of a hookup. When I hook up, I don't want more, and it's not self-destructive. And I enjoy it.''

Dr. Drew Pinsky, co-host of ''Loveline,'' a popular, nationally syndicated radio program that has some two million listeners and that was featured on MTV, doesn't buy it. ''It's all bravado,'' he says. ''Teens are unwittingly swept up in the social mores of the moment, and it's certainly not some alternative they're choosing to keep from getting hurt emotionally. The fact is, girls don't enjoy hookups nearly as much as boys, no matter what they say at the time. They're only doing it because that's what the boys want.''

Wendy Shalit, whose book, ''A Return to Modesty,'' embodies what has been termed ''the new chastity,'' also says she believes that girls are being manipulated, but by a society that tries to convince them that they should act like boys, turning sexual modesty into a sign of weakness or repression -- something young women are taught to be embarrassed about. ''In the age of the hookup,'' Shalit writes, ''young women confess their romantic hopes in hushed tones, as if harboring some terrible secret.''

Those who embrace an abstinence-only sex-education program try to influence teenage behavior by explaining that sexual pleasure requires mutual respect and security. Sarah LaBella works for CareFirst Prevention Services, a group that has taught in junior high and high schools since 1998. One gray, frigid February afternoon, I sat in on a class she was giving to teenage girls in an unremarkable suburban Illinois high school with a view of Dunkin' Donuts.

''Do you want to know the difference between girls and guys?'' LaBella asked. Some of the girls listened intently, others doodled or stared blankly out the window. ''Guys are like microwaves. You hit the right button, and they're ready to go. We, on the other hand, are ovens. It takes a little while for us to get heated up. You have to preheat us.''

Most of the girls smiled, and several laughed. LaBella smiled, too, because if you can make teenagers laugh (with you, not at you), you might get them to actually listen. LaBella, who typically delivers her message to coed classes, knows that some teenagers tune her out between the S.T.D. slide show and the claim that ''the best sex'' happens only within marriage. But she says that many teenagers listen intently, as if hearing some life-altering wisdom. ''We know that most teenagers are never really taught what's involved in making a healthy relationship,'' she told me after class. ''They're trying to build relationships out of hookups or casual sex, and those relationships do not tend to be fruitful ones.''

But are teenagers -- and teenage girls in particular -- always ill served by choosing hookups over relationships? Jeanette May, co-founder of the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, a grass-roots advocacy and educational organization based in Washington that argues that teenagers should be supported in making their own decisions about safe sex and their sexuality, is one of the few adults I spoke to who doesn't think so. ''Often, I think girls, if they are getting as much out of it as the guys, are better served by having sex for their pleasure, without a lot of emotional attachment,'' she says. ''Because they would feel more empowered to practice safe sex, use birth control and avoid sexual interactions that would not benefit them. When girls think they are in love or in a relationship that will lead to love, they're more easily manipulated.''
