Unhooked Graphic Organizer Liz Diede

Laura Sessions Stepp, in her book titled Unhooked, talks about the demographics of the culture she is analyzing: students at Duke University. Stepp explains that these students are “among America’s most gifted”, and with high SAT scores and excellent athletic ability, are “more team-oriented, achievement-driven, and polite than the college students of the 1960s and 1970s” (Stepp 20). She later analyzes the term ‘hooking up’, realizing that it holds a very broad range of meanings such and is used to give maximum freedom to the individual by not having an explicit meaning of the word. The influence of media on today’s young adults is astonishing. Shows such as The Bachelorette and Laguna Beach set a precedent for their young viewers who continue to mimic the actions of the characters on shows like these. This may lead to teens having sex earlier, since it is shown on TV as a normal and socially acceptable thing to do. The importance of parental figures in a child’s life is essential, Stepp argues, to the prolonging of sexual activity in an adolescent’s life. “Parents who plan down their kids’ early crushes may be worried that the crushes will lead to sex [. . .] but girls should not be denied the opportunity to have these crushes and talk about them” (Stepp 45). Parental involvement in the lives of their children is beneficial to the adolescents’ behavior pertaining to sex and drinking, claims Stepp.