(PCM) Think no one cares what you do with your free time? Well, when it comes to late night casual hook ups, college students may want to keep it in their pants! Students who hook up too often lose the respect of their peers, including men, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago found discovered that nearly half of students have negative attitudes towards those engaging in a lot of risky behavior.
Study co-author Rachel Allison said in a news release:
“Men and women are increasingly judging each other on the same level playing field. But gender equality and sexual liberation are not synonymous. While we’ve come a long way in terms of gender equality, it seems that a large portion of both college men and women lose respect for individuals who they believe participate in too frequent casual sexual activity.”
Researchers surveyed more than 19,000 students from 22 colleges, asking participants if they lost respect for women who “hook up”, or have sex with a lot of people. The participants were divided into four groups based on their response: egalitarian conservative, egalitarian libertarian, traditional double standard and reverse double standard.
About 48 percent of the college students in the survey said they judged all other students in the same way (regardless of gender) and would lose respect for both men and women that engaged in frequent casual sexual activity. These participants were labeled as egalitarian conservatives. Women were far more likely to fall into this category, with 54 percent of women labeled as egalitarian conservative, compared to only 34 percent of men.
About 27 percent of the students were considered egalitarian libertarians: they would not lose respect for men or women regardless of their sexual activity.
Then there were those who held the double standard view. About 12 percent of students would lose respect for women who hooked up often, but not for men. The researchers noted that only 6 percent of women held this view, compared to nearly 25 percent of men, particularly those in fraternities and athletics (38 percent of male athletes and 37 percent of men in fraternities held a traditional double standard).
“Because Greek brothers and athletes tend to be at the top of the social stratification ladder — the big guys on campus — we see this adversarial double standard infused in people’s perceptions of college and hook-up culture,” study co-author Barbara Risman said in the news release. “These men, who are in fact the minority, end up holding a great deal of social power on campus.”
The remaining 13 percent of participants said they lose respect for men and not women: the reverse double standard. Who is most likely to hold this view? You guessed it: Sorority girls. Women who lived in Greek housing were 42 percent more likely to hold a reverse double standard than an egalitarian libertarian view of hooking up.
The study also found that Buddhist, Jewish, and non-affiliated students were less likely to lose respect for others, with evangelical and fundamentalist Christians the most likely to lose respect for their casual peers. Heterosexual students were more likely than non-heterosexual peers to judge others, as were those attending schools in the Midwest.
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