"We've had so much sex ed," Lavinthal said. "With strangers, we are really cautious of the disease thing."
And merely willing that age-old standards no longer apply does not make it so. "Girls are becoming more like guys, but there is still a double standard," Homlish argued. "You are told you can do everything, but you can't. If a girl is dating three guys at the same time, she's looked down upon."
Dig deeper, and it turns out that most of the hookup aficionados assembled that night do not see hooking up as a seemly way to approach their 30s.
While most women agreed that serious dating is being delayed at least a bit these days, they also said they don't plan on living a Sex and the City life when they are anywhere near as old as the women on that series.
Whiffen said she has seen many examples of women who insist they are going to keep hooking up with no thought of having a serious boyfriend until they are at least 25. "But the second `he' comes along," she said knowingly, "it's done." And while The Hookup Handbook explicitly forbids its readers to mistake a hookup for a potential boyfriend, not everyone thought that was realistic. "People who are hooking up are trying to get into a serious relationship," insisted Caitlin Gaffey, 24, a beauty assistant at the magazine Shop Etc. "On the girls' side, that's almost always true."
"You can't just hook up with anyone," added Gaffey, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "You have to learn a lot about him before you hook up. Guys are not picky. We're the ones who are picky. It's kind of like shopping."
Even Lavinthal said she is "more of a boyfriend girl than a hookup girl, to be perfectly honest." As she sees it, hooking up is more what you do between boyfriends, and it is often the only option for busy young women trying to juggle career, friends and romance. "It's almost like attention-deficit disorder," she said. "There are just too many things going on."
For Helen Gurley Brown, for 31 years the editor of Cosmopolitan and the author of perhaps the original dating manual, Sex and the Single Girl, which was published in 1962, the lives and concerns of Lavinthal and her friends show that not much has changed in 30 years, except perhaps the verbs.
"I think it was sort of established in 1962 that you didn't have to be married to have a good life," she said. "I think these young women are probably a living example of what was said at that time."
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