Quick heads up, this episode explores explicit themes.

If you're listening with small kids, you may want to save this for later.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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.

Hook up.

Hookup.

Hookup culture.

Yeah.

Where people can just be sitting in a cafe and find someone hook up with.

Are you buying this?

Kids are more sexual than ever.

It might seem like hookups are rampant in college,

but students are actually not having more sex

than their parents did a generation ago.

Something has changed, though,

not in what students do or what they don't do,

but in how they think. Hookups are decidedly not about finding any sort of romantic connection and suggesting that

...