Jennifer Beste: College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics

In College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics, Jennifer Beste engages the experiences and perspectives of college students, in conversation with Christian ethicists and social science researchers, to reflect on the morality of contemporary sexual norms and behavior on campus. To do so, she enlists members of her classes as “student ethnographers”; much of the book consists of these students’ descriptive accounts as well as their ethical reflection on their experiences and observations. Overall, she finds a profound misalignment between these students’ experience of “hookup culture” and Christian imaginings of relationality and human flourishing; her findings on the prevalence of sexual assault and lack of support victims or accountability for perpetrators are particularly disturbing. She ends with a series of constructive recommendations aimed at addressing these problems and creating sexually just campus cultures.

Beste’s methodology and approach to Christian ethics aligns with several ideas about ordinary or everyday ethics that we’ve encountered in our readings this semester. Thinking in terms of Banner’s Ethics of Everyday Life, for example, she focuses not on “hard cases” or extreme situations but on common, frequently observed behaviors (in fact, she notes that she removed descriptions of behaviors that her classes deemed “extreme and not representative of typical college parties,” 7). Following Banner, her goal is less to determine the licitness of particular behaviors than to bring Christian imaginings of ethical life into dialogue with social realities; she wants to avoid “characterizing certain sexual acts like hookups as ‘bad’ and ‘impure’” and instead encourages religious traditions to “share their rich and distinctive theological and spiritual resources to encourage critical deconstruction of dehumanizing, reductive narratives of sex, relationships, success, and happiness” (303). In her attention to particular behaviors, interactions, and contexts, rather than abstract principles, Beste is working in the direction advocated by many of the theorists we’ve read, including Das, Lambek, Nanko-Fernandez, and others. In my opinion, her methodology not only follows this tradition but embodies it in a way that few of the other authors have, as I will explain below.

The most interesting and generative aspect of Beste’s methodology is her engagement of students not merely as research subjects but as collaborators. This methodology privileges lived experience in a radical way, centering the students’ experiences as moral subjects. She isn’t just employing students as “informants” who can help her understand the norms and behaviors of spaces that she, as a college professor, can’t access; instead, she positions them as ethnographic researchers and ethicists, reflecting on their lives and communities. Through the students’ accounts, we see them struggle to navigate the ethical challenges of everyday life, critically analyze the social structures and norms that influence their behavior, and try to make better choices—in Das’s words, we see their “moral striving in the everyday” (“Ordinary Ethics,” 134).

Of course, Beste is not merely recording and synthesizing the students’ accounts; she is also engaging with them critically from her own normative stance. She alerts the reader, for example, to the fact that the students’ observations and analysis of racial dynamics at parties “were influenced by white privilege and deeply entrenched racist stereotypes about African Americans’ bodies and sexuality” (26). She also emphasizes that the majority of students fail to accurately label instances of sexual assault, and she reframes their narratives in these terms. She doesn’t only reframe these issues for the reader; she does so in dialogue with the students, in the context of their professor-student relationship. She describes conversations she had with a student whose roommate was sexually assaulted and a student who confessed that he was a perpetrator of sexual assault. In both conversations, she uses questions to push the students toward a reframing of the experiences they’ve described (eg. “I asked whether Colleen and Christina had talked about whether the sexual activity that occurred that night met the university’s definition of rape,” 59) and suggests actions they might take to address the harm.

These conversations made me think of Margaret Walker’s “alternative epistemology” for feminist ethics, which “does not imagine our moral understandings congealed into a compact theoretical instrument…but as deployed in shared processes of discovery, expression, interpretation, and adjustment between persons” (“Moral Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics,” 16). Throughout the book, we see “shared processes” of understanding as Beste and her students learn from each other and challenge each others’ ideas. Beste is in no way an “objective” or neutral observer, and she is not describing an inert reality in which she plays no part; rather, she too is a moral subject implicated in the situations she describes. I was also struck by the deep relationship-building and trust required to engage in such vulnerable, risky conversations. In this way, the book models its own ethical vision of vulnerable, authentic relationships.

Questions I’m left with after reading:

1. What is the relationship between the descriptive and normative elements of Beste’s analysis? How does she see the normative elements of Christian ethics interacting with the realities of her students’ lives—some of whom are Christian and some of whom are not?
2. At several points, Beste contrasts contemporary sexual norms and behaviors to those of earlier generations, often with the suggestion that today’s norms are more harmful than those of the past (eg. “I am convinced through my own and others’ research studies and years of class discussion that there has actually been a significant decline in gender equality when it comes to sex,” 101). Is this historical/comparative analysis warranted by the data she presents? What are its implications?
3. The central focus of the book is “hookup culture,” with its norms of excessive drinking and low-commitment sex; Beste seems to frame sexual assault largely as a consequence of this culture (while acknowledging sociocultural influences like sexism, heteropatriarchy and racism). What are the implications of treating sexual assault as a side effect of hookup culture, rather than a problem with its own, independent causes? Given that the most disturbing and ethically challenging elements of the students’ experiences relate to sexual assault, does the book adequately address their root causes and possible remedies?