Two students from Duke University have talked exclusively to Big Head DC about the “odd” and “bad” experience of having Laura Sessions Stepp, Washington Post sex writer, probably most infamous for her wingman coverage, partying hard with them while researching her new book, titled Unhooked. 

“She made friends with a girl named Alicia who used to lived in Washington,” one of our sources explained. “And then Alicia took Laura to parties and clubs around town… It was kind of weird seeing an old lady in Ann Taylor outfits hanging around our groups asking about hand jobs and sex positions.” 

The middle-aged Sessions Stepp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, spent the past few years writing the book, subtitled “How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.” In conducting her research, she contacted many students whom she had interviewed for past stories she’s written for the Post. One of them, Alicia, ended up at Duke University, which is how our sources came to know Sessions Stepp.

“One night Laura asked me if I ever gave a guy a blow job,” remembers another Duke student. “My eyes popped out of my head, and I politely walked away. I did not want to have anything to do with her.”

The student says that she stopped being friends with Alicia after the experience because she didn’t want to see her sex life portrayed in a book or newspaper article. 

Alicia, for her part, doesn’t seem to mind the cost of being the journalist’s hookup pal. In fact, she wrote the foreward of the new book, which BHDC has obtained. “Looking at me over the rims of her glasses, smile lines crinkling just around her eyes, she asked me to define ‘hooking up,’” the young woman writes. “That first interview started our two-year collaboration, a friendship marked off in salads, coffee and sinful desserts, and measured in conversations, recorded in Laura’s spidery mom-cursive…”  

Sessions Stepp, a mother of three grown children, including one college-aged son, did not respond to requests from BHDC to talk about her writing tactics. In pre-interviews marking the book’s release she has said that she chose to “go deep” in gathering her research. She added, too, that the “hook up culture” of today’s youth is dramatically different than “free love” from the 1960s and 70s.

Unhooked goes on sale this Thursday.