As it turns out, for the older generation another old expression has given way to a specific, new and possibly unwelcome definition: "Hooking up," which, in the context of interpersonal relationships, used to mean any general getting together, is now reserved exclusively for sexual dalliances. Unfortunately, those dalliances could have ugly and regrettable consequences for the practitioners.
Press-Republican education reporter Stephen Bartlett wrote an article that appeared in Tuesday's paper about the current practice of college students, particularly, of having casual, frequent and virtually indiscriminate sex with partners happened upon in random circumstances.
While some students questioned for the story eschew such encounters on moral or general health grounds, others readily acknowledge they have hooked up, prompted, probably, by parties in which alcohol was flowing.
Some of the students seemed to lament that bad things can betide the participants, though they also seemed not to be intimidated from repeat performances. Others took some measure of security from the fact that they used contraceptives, particularly condoms.
Several lessons emerge from this phenomenon, famously documented by Washington Post reporter and author Laura Sessions Stepp, whose book, "Unhooked," should be required reading on every campus. In it, she argues that women are the victims of such arrangements and mistake their sense of freedom implicit in the experience for power.
Women, of course, aren't the only victims. Men run an equal risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.
The statistics in this hooking-up rage are staggering. Studies on a campus in New Jersey and another in Virginia indicate 78 percent of women had engaged in the practice. There is no reason to think they are atypical of any university. This is not to infer that the current generation invented casual sex, of course, but the practice is thriving in spite of a new round of diseases that ought to be having something of a deterrent effect.
At the same time as sex seems to be breaking out all over, 45 million adolescents and adults have had genital herpes and a million adults are infected with the HIV virus.
Suddenly, inexplicably, the threat of fearsome diseases is not moderating the sexual habits of an enormous constituency.
What this says is that the campaign for abstinence has failed. Any strategy in addressing sexual behavior must include contraceptives and disease prevention.
Young adults -- and, for all anyone knows, old adults, as well -- are not dissuaded en masse by the preachings of abstinence only. Sex is being engaged in on our college campuses, almost without a second thought, which must lead the insightful to wonder whether high schools can be far behind.
We are doing a brutally dangerous disservice to young people by insisting that abstinence be the only sex education they hear. Since sex has evolved into such a routine in the lives of our youths, they at least must be taught how to insulate themselves as much as possible from disease.
Unfortunately, no contraceptive -- even the condom -- can guarantee 100-percent security. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates condoms are only 85-percent effective in preventing the spread of the HIV virus.
But, for a generation behaving so cavalierly toward sex, contraception is the best chance. Give them the abstinence-only talk if you want. But arm them with knowledge, just in case.
Opinion
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