The End of Sex

Hookup culture dominates the lives of college students today, and many feel great pressure to engage in it. This pressure comes from all directions--from peers, the media, and even parents. But how do these expectations affect students themselves? And why aren't parents and universities helping students make better-informed decisions about sex and relationships? In The End of Sex, Donna Freitas uses students' own testimonies to define hookup culture and propose ways of opting out for those yearning for meaningful relationships. Unless students can find alternatives to hookup culture, Freitas argues, the vast majority will continue to associate sexuality with ambivalence, boredom, isolation, and loneliness instead of the romance, intimacy, and good sex they want and deserve. An honest, sympathetic portrait of the challenges of young adulthood, The End of Sexoffers a refreshing take on this charged topic--and a solution that depends not on premarital abstinence or unfettered sexuality, but rather a healthy path between the two.

Donna Freitas writes both fiction and nonfiction, most recently, Consent on Campus: A Manifesto. She has lectured at nearly two hundred colleges and universities about her research on college students. She lives in Brooklyn.