Now even sociologists are discovering the art of hooking up.

Earlier: Laura Sessions Stepp Is a “Chastity All-Star” at Ethically-Challenged Author’s Seminar

And: Laura Sessions Stepp’s Hookup Tactics

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This dirty old broad is strangely engaging:

Earlier: Laura Sessions Stepp Is a “Chastity All-Star” at Ethically-Challenged Author’s Seminar

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We’ve heard of strange bedfellows, but what was the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Laura Sessions Stepp doing speaking (and presumably hawking her book Unhooked) at a recent seminar on female chastity called “Modest Proposals?” Stepp was part of a group of female authors dubbed “Chastity All-Stars” by the organizer, the ethically-challenged Dawn Eden.

Eden is a disgraced former New York Post copy editor-turned-religious “chastity advocate” who was fired by the New York Post after she admittedly inserted her own partisan views on abortion into a story penned by Susan Edelman. Before that, she touted herself as a “rock historian,” but her credibility in the music world was always in question since she readily admitted to sleeping with her subjects.

Eden, whose real last name is Goldstein, became an author of a chastity book after she saw the dollar signs and fame…er, sorry, saw “the light” and converted from Reform Judiasm to Catholicism. Her book is a preachy-yet-lurid Candace Bushnell-styled tell-all that purportedly tells young women not to have a lot of sex, all the while advertising her sex techniques and the fact that she received a book deal as a result of her “sinful” ways.

This hardly sounds like the type of “writer” anyone from the esteemed Washington Post would want to be be associated with. Even the bed-hopping Bushnell’s ethic were never called into question. Read more…

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The long-time critic, first time caller, has finally bowed to her greatness: 

So I went to the Laura Sessions Stepp meet-and-greet at Politics and Prose yesterday. Perhaps there was a bit too much hype. I’ve been getting e-mails from people asking me what I had in store for her. Well, I had no interest in being banned from Politics and Prose and it’s hard to nail someone (in the Colbert sense, not the Unhooked sense) who has the podium. So when Wonkette said that “this Q&A is not to be missed,” I cringed a little. LSS was asked two dozen questions and only two of them could be considered negative.Naturally, I was one of those two.

I refuse to pay for a recording of LSS talking, so, here’s the gist of my question:

“You’ve referred to women as the traditional “sexual gatekeepers” who traditionally have the role of regulating teenage sexuality. Since you also claim that human beings need to learn how to properly love, are you arguing that a woman’s role in a relationship is to be nothing more than to be loving? How is this role different from previous roles that women have had and shed such as the submissive homemaker?”

That’s not a terrible question, is it? Of course I got no answer other than that she is only focused on women and how they’re hurt by hooking up. She would never dream of speaking for men. Her husband would never forgive her! (The audience totally LOL’ed.)

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Innovative tutorial sessions give teen girls hands-on experience

By Laura Stepp Sessions
Washington Post Staff Writer

The scene looks like any other tutoring session for a bright, focused suburban high school girl. The mentor doles out advice while the young charge carefully takes notes.

But this particular session isn’t about algebra or history; it’s all about sex. And in the bedroom of her parents house in a leafy Montgomery County suburb, 17-year-old Emily Neiman is getting real-time, hands-on schooling on the finer points of what conservatives used to call “carnal knowledge.”

Neiman’s parents have hired The School for Sex, a tutoring service designed to educate upwardly-mobile, fast-track teenage girls in sexual techniques and etiquette.

The service, which has been approved by The Academy of Sexual Sciences, has become the rage amongst upper middle class families.

According to University of Virginia psychiatrist Anita H. Clayton, an expert on women’s sexuality and mental health, many women have mediocre sex lives and are in need of some sort help.

“Women can change their level of satisfaction,” she has said. “We need to change the belief systems that are holding us back.”

Changing the belief system

The School for Sex represents a bold, innovative way for young women to change that belief system.

Watching a School lesson in action, it’s easy to see why it has become such a success story.

Up in her bedroom, the raven-haired Neiman watches raptly as a pair of tutors engages in “a standard heterosexual sex act” on her bed, which still boasts a Disney bedspread she had as a kid. Soon, Neiman is being coached in the ways of oral sex and being coaxed into participating.

“It’s always difficult the first time,” offers sexual health educator Stephanie Towers, the female half of the couple. “Just try it and if it doesn’t work for you we’ll stop.”

Sex coaches for girls are now more important than ever. According to Clayton, 43 percent of women are unhappy with their sex lives, “which doesn’t seem bad unless you believe, as I do, that the other 57 percent were lying.” Read more…

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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.

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Laura Session Stepp’s new book is coming soon. We bet it’ll be a perfect stocking stuffer!

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Wow. Just wow. Your response has been deafening regarding the recently announced male winners of the annual Big Head Rob Hottest Media Types Contest.

And now the wait is over. Here come the ladies.

In a surprise move, you chose a real doozy for your hottest female on-air. You picked the delight that is former CNN lead anchor Judy Woodruff, who’s now a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. You like her hair, you like her body, you like her charm. We hear you. When she sat down for an interview with us in 2004, we couldn’t see a wrinkle. And we’re happy to tell you that we haven’t heard a peep about any recent visits to any Bethesda plastic surgeons. She’s definitely a gracious dame, and we’re proud of all of you for thinking outside the box on this one.

As for hottest female off-air, the results weren’t even close. Liz Gorman, freelance photog extraordinaire, more than doubled your votes for the runner-up, Laura Sessions Stepp, the famous WaPo wingman promoter.

Where does Liz buy her clothes? Who does her hair? Does she have a stylist?

We don’t know. But we can provide you with this recent exclusive BHR interview Liz did with us earlier this summer.

Great picks, folks.

Now, be sure to get your nominations in early for next year when we do this silly little stunt all over again.

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We’ve got a tiny beef with WaPo’s Laura Sessions Stepp, exceptional sex writer that she is. We at Big Head Rob have been asking her for weeks to answer a few of our questions about how she gets teenage college boys to open up about their problems with impotency (which must lead to some awkward stares in the locker room) or how she finds researchers who know that girls tend to give up their virginity in the summertime with more frequency (surprise, surprise, said researchers are from Mississippi).

No response. No vacation messages on voicemail or from e-mail. No love.

And now Gawker is trying to edge in on our action, honoring Ms. SS with one of their first “Great Moments in Journalism” awards.

Let’s just say that if you grant those NYC Gawkerphiles an interview before us, we just might have to call for a boycott. We’re even willing to give you the first-ever Big Head Rob Bad Ass Journalist Award, if you would just take a moment to look our way. (We’re batting our eyelashes this very moment.)

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We remember not so long ago when Laura Session Stepp’s son was in his early teens, and she wrote a nifty little book called “Guiding Our Children Through Early Adolescence.” Some say she might have penned the helpful how-to because she was personally concerned about the topic. By our calculations, Son Stepp should be in his early twenties right about now. Wonder if she asked him for any inspiration for her piece today about college guys and erectile dysfunction? (See, DCB, this is a big deal)

Even if Son Stepp had no firm input on the piece, Laura certainly got some boys to shoot their business. A priceless passage:

When the tools work, there’s nothing like it, says Devin Jones, a sophomore at Maryland, who read several how-to books about sex before going all the way with his first girlfriend. “When she got an orgasm, I felt like the man,” he says in an interview, pounding his fists on his chest. Will Skelton, who graduated from George Washington University last year, says good sex “is all about self-worth. If you know you’re a helluva lover, you’re more confident with women and men.” 

James Daley, a senior at GW, used to enjoy that confidence. He has all the creds of a player: tall and good-looking with dark hair and gray-green eyes, member of a fraternity so bad and so much fun that university officials refuse to sanction it. Unlike other guys buying beer on Daddy’s money, he works at a bank and has a job lined up after school — a fact that the ambitious women at GW love. He has charmed probably two dozen girls away from bars and into his bed over four years at school, all consenting partners, he says. His success astonishes him, as he remembers being very shy in high school and most of freshman year in college.

His late-blooming self-assuredness was little in evidence on one recent afternoon in the GW food court. He shifted in his chair, took off and replaced his Yale baseball cap repeatedly. How to admit that his stock was falling fast?

Three times recently he tried to get it on with a girl he likes, he finally says. The first time, he got really angry, he recalls, “and she was getting frustrated. She said, ‘This really sucks.’ ” Not surprisingly, system shutdown ensued.

Three nights after his first attempt, he tried again with the same girl. After a few minutes, he told her he was having “a little problem.” She tried to be sympathetic. Nothing happened.

The third night, things worked, sort of. But it took an hour. “I told her, I don’t know what is going on.”

Thinking maybe it was the particular partner, he hooked up with another girl he had known since freshman year. But he soon realized the situation hadn’t changed. “That’s when I knew I had a problem.”

He is taking a class in human sexuality, has read that men’s sexual performance is at its best in their twenties. “I’m starting to think I’m on the down slope, that I’ve peaked already and if I find a wife, it’s going to be a problem.”

He places his left hand on his chest. “I feel a lack of desire here and in my stomach,” he says, and he is not smiling. “I have all this love to share and it’s not what it used to be.”

To avoid such trauma, a young man may try to fake an orgasm if at all possible, says Earl Fitzhugh, a senior at Howard University. “You want to be able to say, ‘Oh, man, I’m the pimp.’ ” And, he says, you don’t want rumors spreading about your capabilities.

The truth is, we think Laura’s the real pimp. And we’re all her hos.

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