Is hookup culture a myth?

A new study finds that students are having less sex these days than two decades ago

College party, 1993
(Image credit: Mark Peterson/Corbis)

It turns out colleges probably aren't the hotbeds of casual sex that recent articles about "hookup culture" have made them out to be.

A new study released Tuesday found that American college students surveyed between 2002 and 2010 didn't report having any more sex than their counterparts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fewer than one third had had sex with more than one person in the preceding year, which was not much different from what students reported a decade and a half earlier. Furthermore, fewer (59 percent) reported having sex weekly than in the late '80s (65 percent).

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.