The official added that 75 percent of the funding would go to "programs that have [been] demonstrated by rigorous research to prevent teen pregnancy." It's doubtful that abstinence-only programs, which received over $1 billion in government funding during the Bush administration, will qualify to receive federal assistance based on this criterion. A 2007 Congressional study found that the programs did not stop teenagers from having sex.

However, the official told Brody that the other 25 percent of the federal funds could go towards "promising, but not yet proven, programs for which we have some indication that they achieve the goal of teen pregnancy prevention." The official added that abstinence-only education could qualify for that money, but any programs -- abstinence-based or not -- receiving that funding would "have to agree to participate in a rigorous evaluation.".

The White House seems to be trying to eat its proverbial cake on this issue. Obama is leaving the door open to abstinence-only education in principle, but putting the pressure on program advocates to prove that it works -- something that the White House has already acknowledged isn't the case at present.

Last week, the administration said it had proposed cutting the abstinence-only programs because there was no evidence that they were effective. Melody Barnes, the President’s Domestic Policy Adviser and the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, said, "In any area where Americans want to confront a problem, they want solutions they know will work, as opposed to programming they know hasn't proven to be successful. Given where we've been in recent years, I think this is a very important moment."

In January, the National Center for Health Statistics released a study showing teen birth rates were up significantly in 26 states during 2006 - the most recent year for which reliable data was available.

"He's not a mistake, he's a blessing," she told Matt Lauer of her son, stressing how grueling teen motherhood has been for her. "I'm up all night with him, I'm constantly changing diapers, making bottles ... You don't have time for friends."

The mantra being repeated was "learn from my example," but with Bristol looking so lovely and rosy-cheeked in yet another high-profile interview, her snug bug conked out in her arms, it made you wonder just what message teens were getting about her life. "Is there a difficult line to walk? " Lauer asked. "You adore this little baby. If you're out there loving this baby and showing the joys of motherhood, that could be seen as the wrong example to send to other teenagers," said Lauer.

"Yeah, and I'm just trying to tell teens ... this is a 24-hour job. It's not an accessory on your hip."

Bristol famously told Greta Van Susteren that "abstinence wasn't realistic," which has made her role as one of the country's most visible abstinence spokespeople a bit of a head-scratcher. When Lauer asked her about that comment, she cast a glance downward, before falling back on the party line: "Regardless of what I did, or anything like that, abstinence is the only 100 percent foolproof way of preventing teen pregnancy."

And no one budged from that party line, not Todd when asked about safe sex, not Bristol when asked about Levi. "I'm not here to talk about my personal life," she said, "but I'd love for Levi to be a part of his life." Eh, nice try, Lauer, but not every interview can be a Tom Cruise.

 

And then the host, who today is focusing on personal economies during the recession, turns to me: "Isn't this all a blessing in disguise, Judith? Haven't we lost our way, and aren't we now discovering new, and better, values?" I'm getting such questions regularly these days; my 2006 book, "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping," has unexpectedly made me an oracle.

Well, yes, sort of, I stammer. But, uh, actually, no. On one hand, who can argue that the grow-grow-growth consumer economy is outgrowing the limits not just of our bank accounts but also our finite Earth? Part of me is ecstatic to wave goodbye to the $20 martini and the 20,000-square-foot house.

And then there is the other hand. The downturn is giving us fresh excuses for moral flagellation, of ourselves and others. If yesterday's White House proselytized shopping, today's is shaming bankers for their greed.

The message: We sinned with profligacy, and now we repent in parsimony.

Thrift is the new abstinence.

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Type "recession is good" into Google and you get more than 35 million hits. Some of these are from unreconstructed bulls, explaining how the downturn can help entrepreneurs, supermarkets, something called "cloud computing" -- and, of course, thrift stores. Marketers are linking bad times with good selling. Trend hound Faith Popcorn -- who could find consumers among the residents of a Darfurian refugee camp -- identifies the next surefire ploy: empathy. She attributes Burger King's recent gains to its "we-feel-your-pain" ads rather than to the desperation of laid-off workers driven to subsisting on French fries.

NPR's Martin Caste notices another theme, "dignified deprivation." He plays an Allstate insurance ad: "People are getting back to the basics -- and the basics are good."

The basics -- unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure -- are allegedly good for community (increased donations to soup kitchens, at least from those who aren't eating at them); for family (playing Scrabble together aids both parent-child communication and spelling); for love (bonking is free; just forgo the platinum dildo); and good for health, thanks to more home cooking and less junk food consumption (except for McDonald’s).

A typical post from a personal-finance blogger at NorthernCheapskate.com sums it up: "There is potential for personal growth, innovation, and kindness that doesn’t always appear when times are good." Caste calls it "the virtuous recession."

The religious Web sites are salivating over the soul-saving opportunities opening up. "Our nation has become defined by a total lack of discipline or temperance. That is a spiritual problem, not a financial one," preaches a Sheworships.com blogger. She happily predicts the return of modest fashion, premarital chastity, parental patience and preferences for G-rated movies. The hellfire and damnation faction is also finding great material, as it always does, in signs of moral, economic and environmental decline. "So what caused this recession?" thunders Kent Brandenburg at a Web site called What Is Truth. "Greed. What caused the Great Depression? Greed.”

"Of course, it's very deep rooted," he avers. "Man is depraved and greed is part of it." There’s just one solution: Jesus Christ.

The cultural critic Ellen Willis called anti-consumerism "the Puritanism of the left." If she were alive, she'd see that it is now the Puritanism of the right and the middle as well. The operative word, though, is "Puritanism." Yes, Buddhists and Jews are seeking their own spiritual silver linings in the economy's black clouds. But thrift is a Christian virtue: Temperance, prudence and self-denial are good for the soul.

Primitive societies didn't have much use for saving. They hustled to get in food and fuel for the winter, then kicked back. If extra stuff was amassed, it was often for the express purpose of being squandered. Sacrifices, feasts, potlatches, bacchanalia -- these rites might inspire the gods to send status, rain or military victory. But there was religious value simply in going over the top. If frugality was practical, excess was sacred.

The religious orgies of their mystics notwithstanding, early Christians got pretty exercised about excess. In 1571 Martin Luther put it in writing: his 95 Theses condemning the Catholic Church for feeding Mammon with the indulgence fees of the faithful. "Money," he declared, "is the word of the Devil."

A century later, English and American Puritans were flogging the anti-wealth doctrine. Debt was wicked, as was conspicuous consumption: "'Tis a Sin ... for a man to Spend more than he Gets," said Cotton Mather. Profit was equally sinful: A Puritan could be jailed for charging the market price for his products. Still, the Puritans exalted labor, God's punishment of Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge (and sexual pleasure). "Let your Business Engross most of your time," wrote Mather in a treatise on Diligence. Mather prescribed diligence as a cure for masturbation, but also for something called "economic depression."

If it was hard to distinguish pious industry from sinful profit-seeking, one thing was clear: Early-Christian thrift fought the need of capitalism to accumulate wealth. By the 17th century, a new Protestant ethic would solve the problem. Now a person could be both godly and rich; indeed the latter was proof of the former. Thrift resumed its Old English meaning: a thriving condition, a means to prosperity. In the mid-18th century, Ben Franklin was recommending thrift as "the way to wealth."

Franklin was a secularist, prone to poking fun at religiosity, and his Poor Richard was an avatar of practical, if upright, self-interest. That hasn’t stopped anyone from mining the Almanacs for paeans to godly parsimony, however. Now pragmatic, now Dionysian, Americans always retain the Puritan gene.

That gene emerges even in today’s most pragmatic-seeming responses to Americans’ meager personal savings and high debt. A 2005 article in Education Policy Analysis Archives, proposing an "allowance and savings program" for poor students, begins with a moral assumption -- the poor stay poor because they "make impulsive choices ... driven by a tendency to overweight rewards and costs that are in close temporal or spatial proximity." This infantile instant gratification seeking, the authors suggest, also explains teen pregnancy among the poor.

The program would teach what wealthier families pass on to their offspring: the value of "delayed gratification through the accumulation, savings, and investment of regular allowances." And if the students learn thrift? They'll "move from poverty to middle class status as adults." With echoes of Victorian "child-saving" crusades, the article is titled "Child Savings Plans: Learning the Value of Self Control."

"For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture" -- a recent report from the politically diverse Commission on Thrift -- blames debt not on personal failings but on the influence of "anti-thrift institutions," such as payday lenders, predatory credit card issuers and state-funded lotteries. The report makes moral judgments only of institutional venality and dishonesty, and recommends policy, not personal, change.

Yet where it focuses on personal motivation, "New Thrift" becomes a Sunday school pamphlet. It proposes, for example, to "repurpose the lottery" to offer not just gambling tickets but also "savings tickets." The lottery’s public-relations "wizards” could concoct "jazzy new promotions" and slogans like "Every ticket wins!"

Say the authors: "It ought to be an easy sell."

Right. About as easy as abstinence-only education, and for the same reasons -- or rather, the same faulty reasoning. Teens don't have sex and babies just to gain status, love or welfare, as conservatives contend. They have sex because it feels good. Similarly, people buy lottery tickets not because they need money, even if they do. They enjoy the libidinal thrill of gambling. There is something sadly sober about a "savings ticket," no matter how jazzy the promo. Couldn’t those wizards come up with a gamble that's also a way to save? I've got it: the stock market!

From the 17th through the early 20th century, capitalism needed greed, and Christianity found ways to underwrite it. Late-20th-century consumer capitalism needed unending desire to keep the profits coming. Enter consumer credit and an ethos of gratification. Although that came mostly from secular sources, market-savvy evangelicals have proved enthusiastic boosters of consumerism, with their "gospels of wealth." After Sept. 11, shopping became an act of patriotism, another religion. And now we are asked to keep the faith, spending to save the free market from free fall, and us with it.

The injunction to gratify our desires when we're scared we can't meet our needs is like telling a woman with advanced breast cancer to enjoy sex because it's good for her marriage. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes coined an economic term for this recessionary quandary, in which the macro-economy needs consumers to spend confidently, even while self-interest might be better served by putting the pennies in the cookie jar. Keynes called it "the paradox of thrift."

Add to this a moral paradox: We are damned morally if we don’t save and damned economically if we do.

So is thrift a countercultural message from a chorus of Christians, environmentalists and socialists -- and bad for capitalism? Or is thrift, like the Protestant ethic, useful to the economy?

What’s bad for capitalism is surely good for contemporary Jeremiahs seeking evidence of man's downfall -- and thus for the wisdom of thrift. Here is Kent Brandenburg, naming the latest names in a catalog of history's economic evildoers: "Greedy home ownership painted like Grant Wood's American Gothic. Greedy mortgage lenders looking for a quick buck. Greedy illegal immigrants who think they're entitled. And then the greedy politicians who overspent in the time of plenty, instead of creating budget surpluses for the time of leanness."

But in inveighing against greedy immigrants and wasteful politicians, Brandenburg isn't dissing the free market. No, he’s singing the hymn of Reaganist Christianity, which figures each man -- or each family -- an island, and the state, with its handouts of welfare or food stamps, an intruder in the moral justice that rewards the good with prosperity and the wicked with poverty. This is American self-reliance with a punitive face, wielding thrift as its one economic ameliorator: "Young man, work hard while you are Young; you'l Reap the effects of it when you are Old," proclaimed Cotton Mather. And if you don’t work hard? Then you will reap the effects of that, too.

Thrift is not just a moral antidote to personal profligacy. It is a confederate to collective stinginess. Thrift is good for America’s free-market Puritan state.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I'm thrifty by upbringing and environmentalist principle and, and as a writer, by necessity. For decades I've dutifully put money into my IRA. This year, like everyone else, I lost half of it. Did thrift reward me? I cannot say it gave me much spiritually, unless you count a sense of security. And that turns out to have been false.

So I have reflected on what else I might have done with that money. I could have spent six months in Paris drinking wine and perfecting my French, financed a small movie, or bought oceanfront property in Nova Scotia. What effects would I have reaped from my profligacy? Knowledge, adventure, pleasure: riches perhaps exceeding those of a fully funded retirement account.

You can’t take it with you. That's what St. Paul told Timothy before warning him that the love of money was the root of all evil: "For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." What lesson does the recession teach? Live now. Be merry. For tomorrow we -- or the stock market bull -- may die.

The Van Susteren interview provided a new chapter in this jumbled saga of gender, reproductive and class politics, kicked off when a craven and desperate John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate in August 2008. Palin's acceptance of the nomination meant the prompt exposure of her then-17-year-old unmarried daughter's reproductive life to the world, a circumstance that made Bristol and her self-proclaimed redneck boyfriend, Levi Johnston, accidental cautionary tales (or poster children, depending on your perspective) for what happens when the faith-infused reproductive health policies favored by her mother's supporters meet real life.

Bristol, sitting down with the Palin-friendly Van Susteren, did not come across as any more eloquent or incisive on matters of sex, pregnancy and new motherhood than anyone would expect of an utterly average teenager, but she did offer up an inarticulate, bumbling and nakedly honest interview about how her life has changed since the birth of her son, Tripp, two months ago. Wittingly or not, she touched on issues close to the heart of reproductive rights activists and feminists who fiercely opposed her mother's candidacy: how her life is no longer her own, how she wishes she had waited 10 years, how the choice to have the child was hers and not her mother's and how abstinence was not a realistic answer. All this was discussed before the governor entered and robbed Bristol of her voice and her arguments, making a mash of everything her daughter had said so far.

According to Van Susteren's slightly implausible setup, Bristol had agreed to do this interview on her own, without the consent of her mother, who had learned of it only the day before. The young woman was talking to Van Susteren, Bristol said, in her plaintive adolescent patois, because, "I hope people learn from my story and just, like, prevent teen pregnancy, I guess."

Van Susteren seemed utterly uninterested in interrogating Bristol in any serious way about what can be learned from her story, or how she would go about preventing teen pregnancy. In fact, the interviewer failed to ask several elephant-in-the-room questions, like whether Bristol supports sex education in schools, the distribution of birth control or the rights of other women to choose abortion.

Fox instead couched much of the story as a cutesy-poo introduction to Tripp (who seems temporarily to have replaced Trig, Sarah Palin's night-owl infant, as the family football), whom Bristol described as both "awesome" and "very, very, very cute."

Bristol told Van Susteren that telling her parents she was pregnant "was, like, harder than labor," and described sitting on the couch with Johnston and a best friend there for support, so petrified about making her announcement that she was "just sick to my stomach," so much so that finally, her best friend had to blurt it out for her. Bristol continued, "I don't even remember it, because it was just like something I don't want to remember."

This young woman, too scared to even enunciate the fact of her pregnancy to her parents, is now a parent herself. Which made it slightly more ludicrous for Van Susteren to ask her whether  her pregnancy was planned. "No, not at all," Bristol replied, laughing nervously. Duh. But Van Susteren was determined, in this mother-and-child-worshiping world, not to lose sight of how blessed and happy Tripp's very existence is. "I realize what joy a child brings to a family," Van Susteren continued delicately, "but was there any sort of sense that maybe this would happen a year or two from now?"

Bristol did a lot less beating around the bush. "Of course," she replied matter-of-factly.  "I wish it would happen in like 10 years, so I could have a job and an education and be, like, prepared, and have my own house and stuff. But he brings so much joy. I don't regret it at all. I just wish it would have happened in 10 years rather than right now."

Bristol also bristled obediently when asked by Van Susteren about how the media "dogged" her a bit. "They thought that my mom was going to make me have the baby, and it was my choice to have the baby, and that kind of stuff just bothered me."

Yes, Bristol insisted, it was her choice to have Tripp. "In terms of the ... whole issue of the right to life and choice and things like that ... this is your decision?" Van Susteren asked. "Yeah," repeated Bristol. "It doesn't matter what my mom's views are on it. It was my decision. And I wish people would realize that, too."

Of course some of them -- not the least of them "The Daily Show's" Samantha Bee -- have realized that Bristol's ability to make her own decision, without regard to her mom's views on the issue, is precisely the freedom for which reproductive rights activists fight, trying to ensure that no daughters surrender control of their bodies to their mothers or fathers or husbands or clergymen or governments.

Bristol went on to make more (perhaps unwitting) feminist points about what, exactly, the responsibilities and consequences are for young women who choose (or are forced down) the path she took.

"I don't know if it's what I expected," Bristol said of young motherhood. "But it's just a lot different. It's not just the baby that's hard. It's like I'm not living for myself anymore. It's for another person." Later in the interview, she again repeated this line -- a heartbreaking point if ever there was one, and one we don't talk about much because we feel obligated to acknowledge that of course motherhood is a sacrifice, of course there are consequences, of course for many women and men, choosing to have children and become less self-obsessed is a pleasure. But so much of what pro-life advocacy is about -- whether it denies people sex education or contraception or access to abortion -- is in valuing the cells that make up a fetus (or baby) more than the woman in whose body those cells have grown.

Bristol's articulation of this quagmire may sound selfish and naive. But what she's describing is how she hadn't fully comprehended that, in having a baby at 18, her value as a young woman with interests and desires and ambitions and goals would now come second to the needs of a child.

"I think everyone should just wait 10 years," Bristol said. "Just because it's so much easier if you're married and you have a house and career. It's so much easier." Bristol described to Van Susteren how caring for Tripp is not glamorous at all. "I'm not the first person it's happened to, and I'm not going to be the last," she said. "But I'd love to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy. Because it's not like a situation you want to strive for, I guess."

I guess not. Van Susteren then did ask her, in a roundabout way, about whether she had a religious or philosophical objection to contraception. Bristol said, "No, I don't want to get into detail about that." And then came the line that would come to stand in for the whole interview: "Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it's not realistic at all."

Watch the video:

Bristol's interview was nearly painful to listen to, so vulnerable and untrained was her description of her love for her son, and her wish that she hadn't had him so young. These sounded like the pure and comparatively unscripted answers of a young woman who was not politicizing her situation, just living in it and trying to describe it to the rest of the world.

But the whole awkward purity of Bristol's interview got wrecked once Mama Palin purportedly "surprised" the pair by entering the room holding Tripp, offering him to her daughter and asking, "You want this joy?"

Gov. Palin opened by claiming to be "proud of [Bristol] wanting to take on an advocacy role and just let other girls know that it's not the most ideal situation but certainly you make the most of it." It was like the elder Palin had put her daughter's words through a meat grinder: What Bristol had said was that she wanted to let other girls know that they should wait 10 years, that their lives would shift beneath their feet.

"Bristol is a strong and bold young woman," Palin said, as Bristol sat quietly -- after her mother entered, she barely spoke further -- "and she is an amazing mom, and this little baby is very lucky to have her as a momma. He's gonna be just fine. We're very proud of Bristol." Palin was missing the point, or part of it, or perhaps making it even louder: Bristol's self-professed desire to prevent teen pregnancy is not just about whether this little baby is going to be just fine, it is about whether his momma is.

But that just wasn't of much concern to Sarah Palin. Noting that, because of her large and helpful family, Bristol "has it perhaps easier, if you will, than other young mothers," Palin pointed out that "many, many, many young parents have been successful in raising their children, and have raised healthy, happy, contributing members of our society. And Bristol and Levi will be parents like that."

Van Susteren needed to ask the elder Palin about how she would interpret her daughter's larger message, and in doing so, she mentioned the word "abstinence." "It sounds naive!" said the Alaska governor, a proponent of abstinence (though not abstinence-only) legislation. "So you get beyond that ideal of abstinence. You get beyond that and then you deal with it. Life happens and you deal with it."

To Sarah Palin and Van Susteren's minds, the real story here was not about cautioning other teens, or preventing teen pregnancies, it was about how to deal with them once they'd -- inevitably, it seems -- happened. In Van Susteren's words, about "how important it is for families to pitch in." The Alaska governor, pausing for a moment of generous reflection, said, "I don't know how other families do it. If they kind of assume that the young parent is going to make it on their own, or assume that government would take care of the young parent and child. That's not government's role. This is a role for families to pitch in and help."

So the bigger message here, as spun by Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin, is that abstinence is a naive peg on which to hang our contraceptive hopes, but that when our daughters reproduce before they finish high school, we need to move beyond it -- not to discussions of birth control and abortion, but to the fact that the Palins are an unusually big, helpful, supportive group, and that other less fortunate young mothers should go out and get multigenerational families to help them out because it's not the government's responsibility.

How perfectly, sadly nonsensical. And how poignant that the untrained and unrehearsed and inelegant message of the young woman who actually had the baby, the one who said, "I think everyone should just wait 10 years," made far more sense than the politicized jabbering of her elders.

Broadway's G-rated memoir is just one of a slew of books about chastity released in time to make everyone's list of hot summer reads ... for those planning a vacation in the Arctic Circle. The onslaught started in the spring with "Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America's College Campuses," which reports that all but marriage-minded evangelical students are sleeping around -- and attending Pimps 'n' Hos parties -- in hopes of meeting that special someone. Next came "The Purity Code," a book for Christian teens detailing "God's plan for sex and your body." The catalog climaxes this week with the Aug. 1 release of "Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children." (Hint: Cataclysmically.)

These books are just the latest result of the mounting abstinence movement, which, despite its religious roots, has recast its attack on "hookup" culture as secular, even feminist. The term "hooking up" -- meaning anything from kissing to casual sex -- can be traced back to the early '80s, but only within the past few years did the hand-wringing really begin. Former Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp spent years detailing so-called collegiate mating rituals -- often lamenting a tendency among young women toward boozed-up hookups instead of cross-legged gatekeeping -- which culminated in last year's retro revitalization, "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both."

The abstinence movement has been successful in securing federal funding for abstinence-only programs -- to the tune of $800 million over the past eight years -- but the spectacle of father-daughter purity balls, chastity rings and virginity pledges has failed to make abstinence appear even marginally cool to the mainstream. More recently, activists have begun borrowing from the feminist arsenal -- using words like "empowerment" and "respect" -- in their assault on uncommitted sex. These books add to a loudening cautionary chorus: Young women are hooking up and tuning out emotionally. And, increasingly, young women are being told they are either respecting or exploiting themselves; they're either with the "Girls Gone Wild," sex blogger set or with the iron-belted and chaste. A few months back, a New York Times Magazine piece about chastity on Ivy League campuses relied on this false binary: It pitted a prim Harvard abstinence advocate against a campus sex blogger (who recently posted a photo of her face covered in splooge).

Choose a side? No thanks. I'm a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation -- I've had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships -- and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I've found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships. I don't exactly advocate picking up guys at frat parties and screwing atop the keg as the path to marital bliss. It's just that hookup culture is not the radical extreme it is so frequently mischaracterized as in the media. There is sloppy stranger sex among people my age, sure, but sometimes hooking up is regular sex with a casual acquaintance; sometimes it's innocent making out or casually dating or cuddling, and, oftentimes, it involves just one person at a time. In a sense it's all very old-fashioned -- there's just a lot more unattached sex involved.

Like most 20-somethings, I've had online pornography and unregulated chat rooms at my fingertips since I hit puberty. But I also grew up during the Girl/Grrrl Power explosion, which taught me to demand respect, and play handball (and, later, hardball) with the boys. And it taught me that I didn't need to cake myself in makeup or teeter along in foot-disfiguring heels -- unless, of course, I wanted to.

From the very start, my love life has embodied that seeming paradox. I lost my virginity at 16 with my first love and best friend; it was all champagne and roses. It was also as-porn-ational sex: I enthusiastically guided us into nearly every position I'd long marveled at online. At one point, midcoital, I actually pinched my chin and asked aloud, "What positions are left?" Afterward, he observed: "That wasn't what I'd imagined, exactly." He had imagined: 1) the missionary position and 2) ceremonial crying.

I didn't do much hooking up in college; I went to a single-sex school. But after I closed the gates to that cosseted women's school -- and all of its unsexy talk about misogyny and the patriarchy -- I opened those other, um, metaphorical gates of mine. OK, screw the modesty: My legs, I opened my legs. That's not to say I had a host of one-night stands -- I've never had a one-night stand, only several-nights stands. But I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they fit. (This one makes my control-freak quotient look big but has a slimming effect on my ego.) Like Anna Broadway, I can easily and embarrassingly categorize these men: Lonely Lawyer, Sociopathic Spaniard, Testosterone-Poisoned Pilot and Bellicose Bartender, for starters. Together, they're like the Village People for straight women. During this time, I told my friend Sarah and her boyfriend about the latest person I was seeing. "Which one?" he asked, smirking. I laughed, but I wondered: Shit, am I that girl?

For a while, I was. First, there was the cartoonist. The first night we hooked up, he took me back to his house and played guitar, sang every song he'd ever written, and juggled his collection of vitamin pill bottles.

Then there was the lawyer. We would have passionate, hours-long debates, as though we were opposing counsels in court; the first of such debates ended with him throwing up his hands and announcing, "Congratulations, you've worn out a professional litigator." He owned his own three-story house with a panorama of the Bay Area, drove an SUV -- with a shiny hood ornament that made me cringe -- and wanted to sweep me off my feet, rescue me from my one-room apartment, as well as the dishes piled up in (and under) my sink and my bipolar upstairs neighbor whose monologues are the constant soundtrack to my home life. I told him "no thanks" and moved along.

Then there was the pilot, whom I would see whenever his flight schedule brought him in town. I'd stay the night at his utilitarian airport hotel, order room service, watch planes take off right outside our window, and talk about sexy things like black boxes, plane crashes and thunderstorms. He was cartoonishly masculine and he made me feel stereotypically feminine, which I am not; it made me constantly want to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. It was amorous antagonism.

As far as I can tell, these choices don't form a pattern, other than a refusal to really choose. I was like a college freshman filling out the Career Center's job placement questionnaire, making an enthusiastic check mark next to every box; except, in my case, I was checking off men. Most of them were great; others led me on and made me cry. In a few cases, I felt used, but other times I felt like a user. There were some I wanted to date but who wanted to keep things casual, and vice versa.

There's nothing unusual about my experience. The New York Times recently ran a Modern Love essay by Marguerite Fields, a college junior, about her search for a boy willing to commit. Like me, and like Broadway, she has worked her way through a number of men and says, "I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence." Near the end of her essay, she ends a third date by asking the guy when she'll see him next. "That's a loaded question," he says, offering a meandering explanation: "He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was single and didn't really know how this whole dating thing works, but he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me."

I've heard that speech before; I've given that speech before. It shouldn't be mistaken as a symptom of a generation unable to commit; it's simply what you tell someone when you realize that you don't like him or her all that much. For all the anxiety about "hookup culture" the truth is that for many people older than 20, "hookup culture" will sound remarkably like, well, "college." Indeed, students shifted from dating to what was essentially hooking up during a wild time -- perhaps you've heard of it -- called the '70s.

But, as the median age of marriage continues to climb, young women are spending a lot more time romantically vetting -- and being vetted. It isn't just that hooking up is becoming a common preamble to dating, either -- living in sin is increasingly a prelude to marriage. Hopefully, by taking several test-drives before buying, we'll be happier with our final investment.

Of course, there are also very real hazards to hookup culture: namely, rising rates of unplanned pregnancies among young women and sky-high STD rates. It's safe to say many don't take the latter very seriously: Moe Tkacik, a blogger for Gawker Media's feminist blog, Jezebel, recently stirred the pot by writing that condomless sex "feels awesome" because she has "only really engaged in bareback sex with the types of dudes ... whose diseases I don't particularly fear, because the worst thing I can think of about most of them is the ensuing lifetime of awkward conversations." (And, occasionally, sexual empowerment is overplayed to the point of farce, in the case of a recent incident in which Moe and fellow blogger Tracie Egan shrugged off the seriousness of rape.)

But much of the finger-wagging over hooking up neglects those very reasonable concerns. For example, abstinence advocates are fond of the saying: "There is no condom for the heart." But heartbreak isn't always sexually transmitted. In the New York Times Magazine piece on chastity, prominent Harvard activist Janie Fredell lamented the hurt she'd seen women go through in their pursuit of relationships via hooking up -- as though abstaining from sex would have saved them a broken heart. If only.

I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spending time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a committed relationship became clearer -- and it wasn't amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn't trigger self-protectiveness.

I also discovered that a lot of young men are scared shitless -- of women, themselves and their future; that, contrary to our cultural imaginings, they are just as desperate to figure things out as young women. I found that a lot of the pains in the relationships of us 20-somethings can be blamed on cultural prescriptions for masculinity. Yes, there is the stud-slut double standard -- but there's also an expectation that men, unlike women, will not seek safe harbor in a relationship. No, they are supposed to bravely sail their ships beyond the singing sirens and silted waters of their quarter life until they miraculously hit land in the Real Adult World.

As Kathy Dobie wrote in reviewing Stepp's "Unhooked": "We learn less about intimacy in our youthful sex lives than we do about humanity ... Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex." Indeed, and perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard. Also, the idea that a woman has to test a man by withholding sex -- as many abstinence advocates actually argue -- relies on a paradigm of inequality in which women are forced to rely on such desperate power plays. It isn't that feminism has taught women to have sex like men, as the argument commonly goes, but that withholding sex isn't women's sole superpower; coitus isn't women's kryptonite.

With that in mind, I put my academic and career achievements ahead of romantic relationships, and allowed myself plenty of uncommitted entertainment along the way.

Like Broadway, I happily stayed single until I found someone who seemed truly worth the commitment; unlike Broadway, I wasn't abstinent. These can be different paths ultimately converging on the same plateau of partnership. By the same token, though, you can chastely date more men than you can count -- or sleep with every man who offers you a drink -- and not learn a damn thing about how to find a healthy relationship. We feminists do, indeed, love words like "empowerment" and "respect," but there's one we like even more: choice. The problem is that, too often, the abstinence movement prescribes a particular path, rather than encouraging young women to blaze their own trail.

A year ago, I decided to take a brief hookup hiatus and then, unexpectedly, met a man who is emotionally available and comfortably, not defensively, masculine -- I've never felt the need to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. We're in a relationship now and he has become my best friend. He openly calls himself a feminist and, smilingly, describes our relationship as "respect run amok."

Oh, and we had sex the first night we met.