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"What is hooking up?\n\n\"Making out,\" says fourteen-year-old Ella. \"It can mean anything from kissing at the movies to oral sex to going all the way,\" says Priya, a nineteen-year-old college sophomore. \"Having sex,\" says Nikki,* eighteen. \"Kissing and maybe further\u2014but not sex\u2014with someone, and no more than a few times,\" says Lisa, seventeen. \"People do it every weekend.\"\n\nAll teens, it seems, have a different definition. Although for most, what hooking up doesn't mean is dating. Friends with benefits, perhaps\u2014but romance and a serious relationship? Many young women are saying thanks but no thanks. \"It's a generational thing,\" Lisa says. \"Everyone wants to be single\u2014people go to prom with their friends\u2014and hooking up is part of the lifestyle.\"\n\nTelevision shows like Gossip Girl depict that lifestyle at an extreme. While some viewers yearn to copy Blair's designer frocks or Serena's perfectly mussed hair, others admire the characters' sexual confidence. While experts point out that movies and TV don't exactly instruct teenagers to go out and hook up, they do set norms. \"You watch one of these shows and it appears that this is what the cool people are doing,\" says Michael Rich, M.D., director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston.\n\nIf it's just a television show, what's the big deal? Plenty. A recent study by nonprofit research group the Rand Corporation found that teens who watch a lot of sexual content on TV are twice as likely to become pregnant within three years than kids who rarely watch such shows. The study's findings point to one problem with pop-culture representations of sexuality: For all the skin being bared, the practical aspects of sex are usually kept under wraps. \"They don't show anyone in the drugstore buying protection,\" Priya says.\n\nAnd the shows' sexually brazen characters may make girls feel insecure about their lack of experience. As a result, some teens feel like they have something to prove. \"One girl I know was really into flashing guys on video chat,\" Ella recalls. \"She wanted boys to say, 'She's cool.'\" Sending such pictures by text-message\u2014or \"sexting,\" as it's called\u2014is a newer ritual. About 20 percent of teenagers have tried it, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. \"One girl at my school sent a topless picture of herself to a guy she liked, and it got all over the Internet. She became infamous,\" Nikki says. \"She wasn't even embarrassed. She felt important: Everyone knew who she was and was talking about her.\"\n\nWhat may seem like a moment of daring can have lasting consequences. \"The Internet and cell phones have an illusion of anonymity and privacy,\" Rich says. \"But how will a naked picture on the Web look when you apply to college?\" Across the country, teenage \"sexters\" are making headlines after their photos circulated beyond their intended recipients, prompting police investigations. Legally speaking, if you send or receive a nude image of a minor, you can be charged with distributing child pornography. \"There's a perceived safety online, but you have no idea whose hands the photo might end up in: his friends', your parents', the police's,\" says Carol Weston, author of Girltalk: All the Stuff Your Sister Never Told You (HarperCollins). \"You could break up, and that image will still be out there.\"\n\nThe reality is, says Weston, not everyone is doing it: Fewer than half of all high school students have had sex, according to the 2007 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey. A previous study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that just 30 percent of fifteen- to seventeen-year-old girls had ever had sex. Ultimately, notes Nikki, technology has changed the way teens approach relationships. \"We can communicate with one another more quickly, and it's more impersonal which contributes to the idea of relationships starting quickly and easily,\" she says. \"But that doesn't mean they can't become romantic over time.\" She pauses, considering. \"The moment you become a couple isn't when you first hook up\u2014it's when you change your relationship status on Facebook.\" \u2014SUZANNE D'AMATO\n\n*Name has been changed."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-talk-about-sex-and-hooking-up>