Susan Walsh is a Business Strategy Consultant, mother, and author of the “Hooking Up Smart” blog that helps “people figure out how to navigate the hostile terrain of the contemporary SMP (sexual marketplace)”.

She does some number crunching and comes up with intriguing conclusions about the realities of the campus hookup culture:

Here’s the upshot of the study that generated all the media attention:

As you can see, students are having sex more casually, and they’re having it less frequently – naturally, the two go hand in hand. People in committed relationships, including marriage, have more sex than singles.  There’s a lot of confusion out there – both in the mainstream media and among readers here. Some have questioned how hookup culture can be said to exist with numbers as low as they are. After all, here are the key facts:

The answer is that the prevailing culture of casual hookups is not driving behavior, though it is greatly affecting perceptions of social norms.

…What’s quite surprising, in my view, is that despite consider cultural pressure, students eschew casual sex, for the most part. In doing so, they experience feelings of insecurity and FOMO (fear of missing out). Yet for all the noise of the Sexual Revolution, there is little evidence that young people have more casual sex today than they did 40 years ago.