What do undergraduates really think about parties, hookups, and relationships? After analyzing their own complex social reality, Jennifer Beste's students engage in dialogue with theologians, ethicists, and social scientists about paths to happiness and the best ways to create sexual and relational justice on their college campuses.
Today's Christian adolescents and young adults have grown up with fiercely competing narratives about sex, relationships, and fulfillment. Within a Christian world of church services and formal religious education, they have been warned repeatedly about the dangers (or sinfulness) of premarital sex. At the same time, popular culture has inundated them with a very different message: casual sex is fun, thrilling, expected, and no big deal. Jennifer Beste calls into question the widespread assumption that the media's narrative of sex is positively liberating, while a Christian theological account is repressive, sex-negative, and altogether irrelevant. Her argument is based on a qualitative analysis of college students' own accounts of their social and sexual culture. She draws on the reflections of 126 undergraduate students who set out as sober ethnographers to observe and analyze peers at college parties. Overwhelmingly, undergraduates' perspectives challenge a neutral or even benevolent view of hookup culture embraced by some sociologists, "sex-positive" feminists, and popular culture in general. Beste goes on to share her own and her students' theological and ethical reflections as they explored the intersection between their social reality, the Christian tradition, and other academic disciplines, and sought to discern more deeply: what it means to become fully human; what constitutes happiness and fulfillment; and how to envision and create more socially and sexually just communities.
College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics weaves together original ethnographic research, theological reflection on full human living and loving, and a justice-oriented analysis of sexual norms and campus culture in a way that is engaging, insightful, and thought-provoking even if, at times, it is also unsettling and uncomfortable... For anyone interested in learning more about student experiences and working toward creating more just and supportive environments for college students, College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics is an engaging and worthwhile read.
