Abstract
Jennifer Beste’s College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics enters a growing interdisciplinary discussion about the social context on college campuses. It makes a significant contribution to a growing area of Christian ethical reflection following nine years of teaching courses in ethics and interviewing students at two Catholic universities in the United States. A driving concern for Beste’s research is the awareness of shifts in the reality of college social and party life in recent decades. Romantic and sexual scripts of the past have been replaced by what is known as ‘hookup culture.’ It is the dominant campus social and sexual culture in which students attend parties where they not only regularly drink alcohol to excess and extreme intoxication but also pursue sexual encounters, ranging from kissing to intercourse, without commitment.
While many scholars have conducted ethnographic research, a key contribution is Beste’s willingness and ability to take her students seriously. She notes that when teaching the topic, students reacted negatively to the best research on their context and social life: it did not actually reflect the complexity of their lives, and they felt that an accurate representation and analysis of hookup culture would have to take their own perspectives into consideration. These complaints changed the way that Beste taught her class. As she describes, she no longer attempted to be the expert in the room on the hookup scene, but instead recognized that her expertise was in Christian theology and ethics and the ability to ask questions and guide the critical reflection of her students. In contrast, her students had what she calls ‘insider knowledge’ (p. 2) of the campus party scene and hookup culture. Beste’s class became one in which students served as ethnographers tasked with observing and analysing college parties with specific questions about the social and power dynamics of parties according to race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and the happiness of party-goers.
This course ultimately prompted Beste ‘to write a new kind of Christian ethics text—one that regarded college students’ reflections on their experiences and social realities as a legitimate source of knowledge’ (p. 4). In fact, she asked for feedback from her students on her qualitative analysis in order to ensure that she accurately represented their accounts of campus social culture. As such, she challenges her readers to take the students seriously and ‘suspend or let go of previously held moral assumptions and judgments about men and women who drink to get wasted and/or hookup’ (p. 13). The book that is offered not only presents qualitative, rather than quantitative, research on the realities facing college students in campus social life, but also explores the theological roots of these phenomena and recommendations by putting the analysis and later reflections of her students into conversation with the work of Johann Baptist Metz.
Informed by her students’ ethnographies and the consensus of relevant social science research, Beste observes the way in which hookup culture is driven by social power and the need to appear in control of one’s life. White, heterosexual men have the most power in a social context that normalizes a gender hierarchy of predatory masculinity and objectified femininity. While this situation might lead some to conclude that men on campus must enjoy hookup culture, Beste notes, ‘ethnographers across the spectrum of ordinary divides (race, gender, and sexual orientation) would privately express such strong discontent with party and hookup norms’ (p. 121). The social pressure to conform and appear as successful as possible, academically and when partying, pushes college women and men to continue to participate.
Beste engages not only Metz’s Poverty of Spirit, but also her students’ reactions to it. With this material, she suggests both (1) the troubling roots of student participation in this culture and( 2) a theological response to prompt new ways of being. This culture is fostered by the reality behind finding that students lack a sense of self-worth beyond their professional or material successes. Consequently, they pursue ways of relating that are competitive, shaped by desires for control and domination, and devoid of vulnerability. Consequently, it is Metz’s poverty of spirit’s love of self that entails full acceptance of oneself and neighbour-love that challenges students to live in new ways of resistance to hookup and party culture.
It is this concern for students to embrace poverty of spirit that drives Beste’s response to hookup and party culture. While she turns to questions of gendered injustice, power, and the realities of sexual assault, a key feature of the transformative response she proposes is the transformation of the social culture that is made possible by students’ denial of their intrinsic worth, vulnerability, and relationality. Poverty of spirit that offers a way toward what she calls an ‘alternative future reality’ (p. 304). However, this approach raises questions when it comes to the reality of sexual assault. Beste suggests that perpetrators are embracing the opposite of poverty of spirit when she says that ‘The decision to have sex with a person who is incapacitated … is another way to escape the vulnerability that might otherwise occur with a partner who is fully aware of and actively engaged in the sexual encounter’ (p. 287). While she does not downplay the violence of sexual assault and resulting trauma, this approach seems to fall short. Is it enough to suggest that all students, women and men, need to embrace poverty of spirit and stop pursuing a dominating power over others in light of the thorough analysis of gendered inequality and injustice in hookup culture that Beste offers?
College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics is of particular relevance to those who are researching issues of sexuality and young adulthood, sexual ethics, hookup culture, or issues of sexual violence. It would fit in an upper level course dealing with issues of sexuality and relationships. It also offers a pedagogical service in that Beste contributes to the field not only via her argument but also in that she shares much of how she approaches these issues in the classroom.