Does "hooking up" always imply sexual activity?

I have checked the Urban Dictionary, but I’d like some input from y’all on this.

A friend of mine accidentally overheard her 11-year-old daughter talking about “hooking up” with a boy she met at a swim party. My friend asked me whether this is likely to mean that the girl is having sex, and I honestly didn’t know, since I am out of touch with young people’s slang.

Does “hooking up” usually indicate having sex, or can it have a more innocent meaning? Please, no opinions regarding the ethics of eavesdropping on your kids. I’d just like some opinions about the current meaning of this slang phrase.

Probably not, no. In someone older it could, but an 11-year old isn’t likely physically or mentally equipped to want sex, much less actively pursue it.

I guess I should have mentioned that this girl is very mature in appearance. I suspect that most people would assume that she’s 15 or 16 years old. That’s one reason why her mom worries so much about the sex issue.

Definitely not in my experience. Kids often say “We’re hooking up with so and so at the mall” meaning only that they’re meeting them there. Or “Let’s hook up after the game” meaning let’s do something together usually go some place.

Of course local usage might vary.

In my limited experience, “hooking up” can mean anything from “meeting up with” to “starting a relationship with” to “making out with” to “having sex with,” with the latter probably being the most rare usage. It all depends on the context.

The term is used to obscure what happened. Sorta like yada yada yada.

Thanks, folks. I’ll tell my friend that she can relax a bit.

It must be very difficult to be the parent of an 11-year-old girl these days.

When I was around that age, hooking up meant “dating” like “going with” or “going steady”. It also meant “meeting with”, as said, like at the mall.

Often kissing or hand holding was involved in the dating scene.

It was usually used in a ‘after the fact’ gossip kind of way. As in “I saw Jenny and Bobby at the party together. Did they hook up?”

It can also mean connecting a trailer to a trailer hitch, but I doubt that’s what she meant. :smiley:

Are you implying it was easier sometime in the past? I swear, every generation of parents claims that their kids are being raised in a new, different environment and that it’s a lot harder. :rolleyes:

Ahhh… I remember not so long ago when ‘hooking up’ meant, “Receiving Stolen or Ill-Gotten Gains.”

Even made a movie about it.

When I was 11 years old (in the late 1950s), I doubt that my parents worried that I might be having sex. Kids today certainly seem more mature physically, if not in other ways.

This might be a cultural issue. My mother who was born in 1944 always said that her friends started actively getting illicit abortions around the time they were 12-13. She always said that the only difference now is that parents talk about things like that and it gets publicized. However, she did live in Russia (Soviet Union) at the time, which is was as conservative as you can be when it comes to kids and sex.

I’ll second what everyone’s said about how hooking up can refer to just about any kind of interaction, and add that younger kids may not even be aware that it could mean something sexual. I don’t think I’d heard it used that way until I was in high school.

Not to sound like the paranoid father of a 10 1/2 year old, but sorry, I am.

Though I can’t answer your factual question definitively, IMHO, your friend should directly ask her daughter - not her friends (you) -or- strangers on a message board via proxy (us). If her mature-looking 11-year old has plans to (or already has) hooked-up with a boy, even if it was (or is) to play Marco Polo, I hope for both their sakes that puberty, hormones, sex and the whole ball of wax are discussed in great detail - with answers to all the daughters quiestions answered in full.

How old is the boy?

She does plan to discuss this with her daughter. But she’s aware that kids don’t always tell the truth about such things.

The mother/daughter talk about sex happened quite some time ago, and mom said that the daughter seemed unimpressed and said that she had “already learned most of that stuff” from watching television! HBO, what hast thou wrought?

In my experience…

I never connoted “hooking up” with sexual activity until late in high school. However, I think this is because that was the time when the slang developed, not because kids weren’t doing it younger.

“Hooking up” as I’ve known it most often means less than sex. If you had sex, you say sex. If you engaged in non intercourse contact, but do not wish to give the details (probably to avoid the TMI factor) you say hooking up. It can be as innocent as necking.

That’s the “old geezer” version – the one I’m familiar with. Well, let me tell you! I said this amongst some young 'uns and they looked at me like I was a streetwalker! In the modern vernacular, it means fucking. Casual fucking.

Yeah I got caught up and while replying to the thread actually forgot to reply to the OP. In my circles it means one thing and one thing only - casual sexual relations without the necessary implications of being in a relationship. We’re 20-somethings from SF Bay Area if that helps pin it down.

Good Lord! I spent last evening hooking up my stereo system!