This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This episode explores explicit themes.

If you're listening with small kids,

you may want to save this for later.

Parties were huge, hookups were huge.

Everyone just seemed to be doing everything with each other.

And yet I always kind of felt like I wasn't doing it right.

There are certain ideas that send the media into a panic.

One of them is hookup culture.

College students are quote unquote hooking up.

Hookup, hookup. Hookup culture.

Yeah, I wonder where people can just be sitting in a cafe

and find someone to hook up with.

Are you buying this?

Kids are more sexual than ever.

Stories about casual sex on college campuses

have long been a staple of cable news.

But the truth is more nuanced.

College students are actually not having more sex

than their parents did a generation ago.

But something has changed.

Not just in what students do or what they don't do,

...