Laura Sessions Step explored in surprising intimate details that reports on teen sex and “hook-up” culture on university campus killed adolescent girls and young women in Springfield, Virginia on February 24th. She was 73 years old.
Her husband, Carl Sessions Step, said her death was caused by complications from Alzheimer's disease at a storage facility.
In a series of articles in the Washington Post, and later for her bestselling book, “Hooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, 2007)” (2007), the session was immersed in the life of subjects in the Washington area and in several university.
She gained trust with her soothing voice accented with Arkansas roots. But more than anything, she listened.
“She wasn't judged,” Henry Allen, editor of the style section of the post, said in an interview. “These girls will tell her these amazing things.”
In July 1999, readers of the post were woken up to an astounding homepage headline. Sessions Stepp interviewed several teenagers in Arlington, Virginia, and discovered that oral sex has become a popular way to avoid pregnancy and look cool.
Some of the girls she spoke to casually: “What's the big deal? President Clinton did it,” one said.
Others were more cautious. “I really didn't know what it was,” one eighth grade girl confessed about the time the boy was proposing it. “I quickly realized that I wouldn't make him the same thing as me.”
Subsequent articles from Sessions Stepp explored “Freak Dancing.” “Buddysex” for high school students. And the sexual scorecards held by university women, among them University of Pennsylvania students who rate her peers and include dates and footnotes.
“These women analyze the numbers as if they were comparing the right size and color shopping for shoes,” Sessions Stepp wrote in a 2004 post. And few adults say anything different to them. ”
She is dull, but separated by newspaper articles, telling a wall-facing story about a provocative topic that normally doesn't surface on the front pages of family newspapers. But that separation disappeared when she extended the report that she had “gotten.”
Now she was worried.
“I want to encourage girls to think hard about whether their sexual and romantic experiences contribute or destroy a sense of self-worth and strength,” she writes in the book's introduction. “Their unstudied efforts convince me how strongly they want to be attached.”
She finished the book with “Letters to Mother and Daughter.”
“If you're a woman who's grown older during the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s, I think you believe that, like I would, you have a responsibility to help other women improve their lives,” she writes. “This means especially the next generation. All of our daughters move through adolescence and into younger adulthood.”
These advice didn't work with critics who accused her of being a cautious vigilant.
“It is an old duty for adolescent alarm adults (particularly parents, especially),” Meghan O'Rourke wrote in Slate.
O'Rourke said he attended university “in the early days of the 'hook-up' culture,” and said, “her memory was that throughout the years they were fun.
Journalist Kathy Dobby, who reviewed the book in the post, wrote that Sessions Stepp “fuses things that girls refuse to fuse.”
“The 'Not' can be totally painful to read,” Dobby wrote. “The author revives the ugly old concept of sex as something women give in exchange for good behavior from men, and imagines a woman's body as something that can be hurt by too much use.”
Session Step defended the book in an interview.
“I didn't want to be an old crime, I grew up with old bullets,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “And I'm not saying, 'I don't have much sex.' I say, “I have more romance.” Love is a word I haven't heard along with passion, joy, anticipation, and just being in love with a terrible state. ”
Her voice rose and she added: The far right wants to wait until you have sex until you get married. The far left tells you to have as much sex as you want. The only requirement is protection. These young women are on the way to find a way to do this. ”
Laura Elizabeth Sessions was born on July 27, 1951 in Fort Smith, Ark. Her father, Robert Sessions, was a Methodist pastor who preached to help separate schools. Her mother, Martha Ray (Rutledge) Session was a psychologist.
In high school, she went on a lot of dates. The boys picked her up at her doorstep, recalled in an interview with The New York Times after “I Got It Got It” was released. Some gave her friendship ring that she claimed would return.
She studied German and English at Earlham University in Richmond, Indiana, where she graduated in 1973. The following year she received her Masters in Journalism from Columbia University.
Her first job was TV news as a weather reporter. After working for newspapers in Florida and Pennsylvania, she joined the Charlotte Observer in 1979 as an editor who oversees the newsroom project. She led a team of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters in Public Service in 1981 for a series of articles on brown lung disease in textile workers.
1982, Ms. SessionsStepp joined the post as editor and turned his attention to writing four years later. She was acquired by the newspaper in 2008.
In addition to “editing out,” she wrote “Our final best shot: Leading our children through adolescence” (2000).
His marriage to Robert King ended with a divorce.
She married Karl Step, a journalist and longtime journalism professor at the University of Maryland in 1981, and shared each other's surnames. In addition to Mr. Step, she was survived by her son, Jeff Step. two stepdaughters, Ashri Step Calvert and Amber Step; Three grandchildren. Her stepmother, Julia Session. and her sisters, Teresa Kramer, Kathy Sessions and Sarah Lundal;
Unlike many reporters in Washington, Sessions Stepp didn't want to cover politicians or other well-known people.
“It's sexy beats to document the lives of rich and famous people,” she wrote in Nieman Reports Magazine in 2000. But in my opinion, it's not as rewarding as writing about ordinary people. ”
