Laura Sessions Stepp is the author of Unhooked, How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, the best-selling book that gets an inside perspective on the "hookup," which has become the "primary currency of social interaction" between the sexes in high schools and colleges. Creating a national phenomenon, Unhooked has been featured in more than 50 newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Glamour, Marie Claire and several national publications in Canada and Great Britain.

A journalist specializing in the coverage of young people and sexuality for The Washington Post, Stepp has written about children and families for more than 15 years, authored two books on adolescence, and is a frequent public speaker around the country. She has appeared on the Today Show, Weekend Today, Nightline, PBS and Fox News as well as local television, and has been heard on NPR, ABC and other national, as well as local, radio programs.

Stepp has written for Cosmo, Parent, Child, Working Mother, Reader’s Digest and Nieman Reports of Harvard University. She served as a member of the US Surgeon General’s Healthy People Panel on Adolescence and spent four years as a visiting scholar at the Board on Children, Youth and Families, a program of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. She currently sits on the board of advisors of the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families at the University of Maryland.

Topics

Unhooked, How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both

To people in their teens or 20s, "hooking up" often means a casual sexual encounter — anything from kissing onwards — with no strings attached.

In this keynote speech, Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked, and a writer for The Washington Post, addresses this not-so-new subject from a different perspective: hookups can be damaging to young women, denying their emotional needs, putting them at risk of depression and even sexually transmitted disease, and making them ill-equipped for real relationships later on.

She points out that both males and females should work hard to gain another's affection and trust. Stepp conflates what the girls refuse to conflate: love and sexuality. Sometimes they coexist, sometimes not. Loving, faithful marriages in which the sex life has cooled are as much a testament to that fact as a lustful tryst that leads nowhere.

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