Relationships, hook-ups, and GPAs: getting past the headlines

The headlines out of the American Sociological Association’s Atlanta meeting this past week have been catchy: Love makes teen sex less academically harmful, study says; Teen sex not always bad for school performance; Sex in romantic relationships is harmless. There’s a nice summary of the conflict between social scientists and journalists in this Oliver Wang piece in the Atlantic.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before reading this very important discussion from Heather Corinna at Scarleteen. I might have written a very different piece had I read it first! Please do read Heather’s excellent analysis, based on having read the actual study quite carefully.

What the study showed, of course, is that encouraging teens to delay sexual activity in order to boost academic performance isn’t necessarily the most helpful strategy adults can take. The study did indeed find that sex within relationships did not have a deleterious effect on adolescent grades, but casual sex sometimes did. From the AP summary:

Teens in serious relationships did not differ from their abstinent counterparts in terms of their grade-point average, how attached they are to school or college expectations. They were also not more likely to have problems in school, be suspended or absent. (But) compared with virgins, teens who have casual sex had lower GPAs, cared less about school and experienced more problems in school. For example, female teens who have flings had GPAs that were 0.16 points lower than abstinent teens. Male teens who have casual sex had GPAs that were 0.30 points lower than those who do not have sex. Teens who “hook up” also were at greater risk of being suspended or expelled and had lower odds of expecting to go to college.

First off, in my experience (a couple of decades worth of work with high school and college students), students who are high-achieving tend to be the ones most likely to be dishonest (or at least, less than entirely forthcoming) about their sexual behavior. Teens are notoriously sensitive to reputation and image. One negative stigma that I’ve often seen teens associate with casual sex is that kids who do engage in sexual activity outside committed relationships lack ambition or seriousness. Remember the tremendous power of the “one mistake can ruin your life” narrative, particularly in the lives of adolescent girls. As a result, teens tend to associate casual sex with recklessness and the absence of motivation. Teens, especially young women, who are sexually active outside of committed relationships and are also intellectually serious and highly motivated tend to feel tremendous pressure (often self-imposed) to be quiet about that aspect of their lives. In the hyper-competitive world in which many bright adolescents live these days, someone who has casual sex isn’t necessarily immoral, but foolish. And for a certain kind of highly ambitious young woman who has been raised to be risk-averse, being called “reckless” or “frivolous” or “unthinking” has almost the same power to wound as “slut.” In other words, who is willing to admit to casual sex may well be tied not only to class and cultural background, but to important perceptions about one’s seriousness. I suspect some hefty underreporting.

But I think this study points to something more important: it is vital that we make the teaching of good relationships skills a priority. The study confirms something we’ve already known, which is that when it comes to teen sex, the real issue is not whether or not young people are having it, but what kind of sex they’re having. In his Atlantic piece, Wang links to this article in Contexts: Is Hooking up Bad for Young Women?, perhaps the most even-handed discussion of teen sex and the much-discussed “hook up culture” I’ve seen. The researchers Laura Hamilton(UC Merced), Elizabeth Armstrong (Michigan) and Paula England (Stanford) make the same case that the ASA study does, but with considerable caution and nuance. On the one hand, there’s no question that the research indicates young women experience much more physical pleasure in relationships than they do in casual encounters. Sexual reciprocity is much more common in the former:

The most commonly encountered disadvantage of hookups, though, is that sex in relationships is far better for women. England’s survey revealed that women orgasm more often and report higher levels of sexual satisfaction in relationship sex than in hookup sex. This is in part because sex in relationships is more likely to include sexual activities conducive to women’s orgasm. In hookups, men are much more likely to receive fellatio than women are to receive cunnilingus. In relationships, oral sex is more likely to be reciprocal. In interviews conducted by England’s research team, men report more concern with the sexual pleasure of girlfriends than hookup partners, while women seem equally invested in pleasing hookup partners and boyfriends.

But that’s not the whole picture. As the researchers found (and as most of us who do youth work know), girls are acculturated to find romantic connections far more all-consuming than are boys. We’ve all seen young women “disappear” into relationships. Though it may well be true that sexual reciprocity and female orgasm may be more common in committed relationships, some women find it much more difficult to articulate their feelings when they’re with someone to whom they are deeply devoted. It’s axiomatic that it’s easier to say “no” to perfect strangers than to the people we love most. And it is boyfriends, not hook-up partners, who are most likely to exhibit controlling behavior (preventing their girlfriends from wearing certain clothes and having male friends, insisting on interrupting her studying). Paula England’s detailed study found:

If relationships threaten academic achievement, get in the way of friendship, and can involve jealousy, manipulation, stalking, and abuse, it is no wonder that young women sometimes opt for casual sex. Being open to hooking up means being able to go out and fit into the social scene, get attention from young men, and learn about sexuality. Women we interviewed gushed about parties they attended and attention they received from boys. As one noted, “Everyone was so excited. It was a big fun party.” They reported turning on their “make out radar,” explaining that “it’s fun to know that a guy’s attracted to you and is willing to kiss you.” Women reported enjoying hookups, and few reported regretting their last hookup. Over half the time women participating in England’s survey reported no relational interest before or after their hookup, although more women than men showed interest in a relationship both before and after hookups. The gender gap in relationship interest is slightly larger after the hookup, with 48 percent of women and 36 percent of men reporting interest in a relationship.

So much for the “hook-ups are bad for women and only make men happy” thesis, advanced by the likes of Laura Sessions Stepp. The way in which hook-ups (often but not always) allows young women to both explore agency while setting emotional boundaries matters. Hook-ups, to the extent that they really are a new phenomenon and not a combination of something that has always existed and the creation of media hype, sometimes offer both young men and women an “umbrella of protection” under which they can begin to find their sexual agency, largely free from emotional entanglements for which they may not be entirely ready. This reality needs to be understood alongside the evidence from this week’s much-touted ASA study about GPAs and relationships.

One thing remains true. Those of us who work with young people, particularly those of us who do some form of sexuality education, need to remember that teaching good relationship skills is among the most challenging and essential of our tasks. It’s as true as anything under the sun that for adults as well as teens, relationships are hard work. Learning to communicate, learning to take risks without being reckless, learning to set boundaries while progressing slowly towards greater and greater intimacy — this is always a challenge. Some teens are readier than others to take on that challenge while still in adolescence. Others may find that sexual exploration outside of committed relationships is safer (and others may find that abstinence is safest still). A one-size fits all approach, as usual, won’t work.

When it comes to the truth about teens and sex, we need to get past the misleading headlines that accompany the release of new studies on how our kids live now. And we need to do the same thing we’ve always known we were supposed to do: listen, affirm, challenge, comfort, inspire, and equip. And we have as much work as ever to do on the last of these.