We already knew that hookup trend pieces were boring and overwrought and full of fear-mongering, but there's another, even more concrete reason they should be ignored: like many trend pieces, they're only about White people.

Researcher Lisa Wade has previously written some great take-downs of the idea that hookup culture is everywhere/a new thing/notable, etc. She's particularly targeted Laura Sessions Stepp's annoying book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, noting that in Wade's own research, "About 80 percent of students hook up, on average, less than once per semester over the course of college" – a far cry from the rampant sex orgies being depicted in books like Stepp's. That being said, Wade also takes issue with the idea that the casual relationships that do develop are inherently dangerous. In a 2010 paper, Wade wrote that: Media panic over hooking up may be at least in part a result of adult confusion about youth sexual culture—that is, not understanding that oral sex and sexual experimentation with friends are actually some young people’s ways of balancing fun and risk.

Now, in a piece for Slate, Wade writes that this is also a panic assigned by the media specifically to wealthy White kids, though perhaps for good reason: those are the kids that are participating in more casual sexual activities in the first place. Wade notes that many young Black kids have a desire to disprove the historical assumption that Black people are "hypersexual" and therefore are more careful about their sexual activities. She also writes that at college, the differences between historically White and historically Black fraternities have created environments for White students that foster a community that's more accepting of hooking up.