No Strings Attached Sex (NSA): Can Women Really Do It?
Hookup culture is not for everyone.
According to Donna Freitas, who wrote a book called Sex and the Soul, a hookup is any sexual encounter that is unplanned, casual, and has no promise of a future. She says that it often involves alcohol, and no other forms of intimacy. No Strings Attached (NSA) sex is another term for having sex with nothing (strings) bonding the two parties together.
There is a culture of “hooking up” that has become popular among college students and young adults. There are websites that cater to people who are not interested in a relationship other than a brief sexual encounter, or are interested in an ongoing sexual relationship with no promise of a future or of anything more than the sex. As we delay marriage and have the benefits of contraception, casual sex fills in the gap between the onset of sexual desire and a long-term relationship.
Lisa Wade, a sociological professor who authors a blog called Sociological Images, conducted a small study and found that women who hooked up did feel the freedom to say yes to sex, but they did not feel like equals to men in the modern sexual culture of young adults. Although both women and men reported feeling dissatisfied with a lot of the hooking up they did do, women were particularly dissatisfied, probably related to the fact that their pleasure was secondary to the man’s.
Another study recently released by Julie A. Reid, Sinikka Elliot and Gretchen R. Webber, studied 273 students and found that though students perceive sexual desire to be equal in both men and women, they believed that women were just as capable as men of having no strings attached sex. But a double standard applied: Women still needed to airg manage their sexual encounters to avoid being stigmatized and marginalized for their sexual choices, whereas men had no such issue.
Lastly, Catherine M. Grello, Deborah P.