College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics: The Lives and Longings of Emerging Adults by Jennifer Beste, and: Faith with Benefits: Hookup Culture on Catholic Campuses by Jason King (review)

These two critical examinations of the sexual practices of contemporary university students are indispensable contributions to the quickly developing field of university ethics.

Beste’s book is a perfect introduction to anyone wanting to appreciate, understand, and address the problematic campus hookup culture. It cries for course adoption simply because any college course on sexuality would do well to have this pioneering examination of students’ lives in their own voices as the primary textbook. King’s work digs much deeper than Beste’s introduction and provides, for anyone taking the issue of student life seriously, an indispensable guide to the different typologies that emerge across the American landscape of higher education. If students should buy Beste’s book, administrators and faculty at any school with a serious commitment to its mission must purchase King’s well-documented investigation into the strategies of today’s undergraduates.

Beste’s book is in three parts. She begins with the presentation, engagement, and analysis of the 126 ethnographic reports that she gathered from her students at a Midwestern Catholic university, who were assigned to attend, observe and analyze eight to ten hours of college partying. In four chapters we read the students’ findings, consider why college students act as they do, assess the power dynamics at college parties and conclude with questions about student satisfaction with these practices.

The accounts are disturbing and some convey actual sexual assaults in a world where bystander intervention is not yet evidently a reality. Helpfully, Beste explores the power dynamics, particularly between genders, though with a nod to race, and concludes that “there has actually been a significant decline in gender equality . . . on college campuses” (101). Inevitably students’ dissatisfaction with their culture surfaces.

In the second part of the book she takes us to conversations with students at another Catholic university where she provides the countercultural narrative of Johann Metz’s 1968 classic Poverty of Spirit, which allows her the space to proffer our interdependence on God and the virtues of self-love, neighbor-love and justice as constitutive pathways to becoming fully human. In the third part, through Margaret Farley’s Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (2006), she moves from the more interpersonal issues toward a social, structural approach, grappling with the complexities of sexual assault, trauma and victimization.

Throughout she is a worthy guide, and provides, especially for those many faculty in need of understanding this unfortunate culture, a modest but foundational pathway from hookup culture to something more promising and more just.

King provides us with the results of over 1,000 responses to his quantitative research conducted with students from 26 different Catholic campuses. This survey begins with students choosing to describe the religious culture of their university as “not very Catholic,” “somewhat Catholic,” “mostly Catholic,” and “very Catholic.” Inasmuch as only 1% opted for the first category, King argues rightly, I think, for three distinctive Catholic campus cultures and organizes his findings and recommendation according to each in the typology.

King begins his report with two overarching claims: “Stereotypical hookup culture dominates campus life. It dominates even when most reject it, when most don’t desire it, and when most are marginalized because of it. It is the unquestioned norm for college behavior that pushes all alternatives to the side” (4). But, he adds, at all college campuses, students drew on their religious faith to generate alternatives.

“Very Catholic” campuses have identifiable institutional structures that support their mission, particularly in serving their largely Catholic majority. Dorm visiting policies at these campuses are strict, worship is frequent and all three of the required religion classes pertain to Catholicism. Underlying the campus is what King calls an...