while the roommate "hooks up" with a "friend with benefits."

Wolfe sure knows the right language to illustrate the shallowness of casual sex. (I think I may have actually heard the expression "friend with benefits" before.)

If you haven’t heard the term "friend with benefits" you are something out of the mainstream.

The journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Daedalus, has an excellent issue out right now (the Fall 2004 issue) on human nature. Contributors include Richard Rorty, Steven Pinker, Vernon Smith, Donald Brown, and Matt Ridley, among others.

for an old fogey who went to a men's college (Washington & Lee), Wolfe stays current with the slang... moreso than some of us still in our 20s, I suspect.

The neuroscience angle is something I hadn't seen explored in a couple other 'reviews' of the book. Perhaps those folks didn't actually read it.

Haven't read Charlotte Simmons yet, but the collection of essays "Hooking Up" goes into young adults' mating rituals in some detail.

Having read some other reviews, it saddens me that so many are negative because they feel Wolfe is out of touch with the real American youths, but in my opinion it is most often these critics who are out of touch. Some will criticize him for over-emphasizing the depravity of it all, while others say it's so common that he expresses too much shock about it. I think the truth lies somewhere in between, exactly where Wolfe puts it. Wolfe's portrayal is certainly satire, but it's an accurate one.

Also, it's interesting that those who criticize it almost always miss the neuroscience subplot which is essential to taking in the book completely.

I am more interested than ever now to read it. But I clearly went to a very different institution as an undergrad. At least in my circle of friends, casually hooking up for sex simply never happened. Even the gay ones mostly looked down on it.

I think I'm missing something here...has someone changed the connotation of the phrase "hooking up" or something? I've seen it several times in this thread. It was always a generic term for "hey, let's get together."

I think probably what many of the critics should have said was that Wolfe takes all the negative characteristics of the modern college experience and focuses solely on those in his book, which leads to pretty much an entirely negative portayal. Sure, this is "inaccurate" in that it takes it to the extreme and doesn't really give an accurate portrayal of any one American college or university, but it's a literary device that Wolfe is using to make his point. The fact is, you can find just about everything in the book at some institution of higher learning in America, just not concentrated into one narrative as Wolfe does.

I haven't read the book, and I probably won't, but I have to ask: what is dehumanizing about understanding the origins and functioning of our minds? Shouldn't such knowledge give us more insight into life and love and relationships and language and art and, therefore, bring us even closer to our own humanity? The human brain is the most complex structure in the universe, as far as we know; thus, to say that we are nothing but "conscious little rocks" because everything we are is contained in that 3-pound ball of goo is terribly unimaginative. Evolution and neuroscience and cognitive psychology add up to a portrait of human nature that is no less humane, and no less awe-inspiring, than the myths which arose from religion and philosophy. As Darwin said, "There is grandeur in this view of life..."

I've been debating adding this to my list (already enough to take me into senescence, not that I ever observe seniority in choosing the Bibliographic Concubine of the Night) but the reviews have been so mixed. Most are along the lines of "Tom Wolfe is a 70something male writing from the perspective of an 18 year old female" and thus obviously can't get it right, but otoh Shakespeare wrote from the perspective of English royalty, Venetian Jews and Catholic Veronese teenage girls and seemed to do a decent job, not to mention authors of fantasy, sci-fi and historical fiction who completely immersed themselves in completely alien societies, so if that's the main criticism it's fairly vain (i.e. "I can't imagine what it must be like to be a modern teenaged girl so neither can Wolfe"). His MAN IN FULL is one of my favorite books and though Wolfe is a millionaire and a senior citizen I thought the role of early-20 something wage-slave and Stoic convert Conrad was quite well done.

'Hooking up' has mean relationship-free sex since at least 1995. I'm not sure how far back it goes, but someone who was a college freshman at that time used it quite regularly in my presence when I was a senior and had not heard the term used that way. It was probably in the early-mid 90s when it became popular.

I haven't read the book, and I probably won't, but I have to ask: what is dehumanizing about understanding the origins and functioning of our minds? Shouldn't such knowledge give us more insight into life and love and relationships and language and art and, therefore, bring us even closer to our own humanity?

Read Nietzsche, then try asking that question. Then read H.P. Lovecraft, and maybe that will cement if for you. And you insist on quoting darwin, try realizing that he had smuggled in religious concepts to make that statement.

But as to neuroscience, for all the academic re-shuffling of the deck they are doing, that still fail to answer the basic questions about human nature and conciousness. All they end up doing is hiding them behind several more layers of theory and abstration.