Hookups Won't Ruin Her Life

New books are urging girls in the "hookup generation" to stay chaste, but Tracy Clark-Flory trumpets the virtues of casual sex in Salon. While abstinence authors rate women as whores or angels, the 24-year-old argues that hookups help women vet partners physically and emotionally. Today's females take a feminist approach to sex, "claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double-standard."

Clark-Flory admits she's had more "several-nights stands" than relationships, but says the "Girl/Grrrl Power" movement taught her self-respect. "I don't exactly advocate picking up guys at frat parties and screwing atop the keg as the path to marital bliss," she says. "It’s just that hookup culture is not the radical extreme it is so frequently mischaracterized as in the media." (More premarital sex stories.)