By today’s standards, the suburban high school girl was a slow starter when it came to sex, having reached ninth grade before she kissed a guy. She just couldn’t see how to fit a boy into heavy loads of honors homework, soccer matches and baby-sitting.

By 11th grade, she’d found the answer: “buddysex”, or sexual encounters with friends, in this case a half-dozen private-school boys, no strings attached. In closets and bathrooms, parents’ bedrooms and friends’ parents’ bedrooms.

“September through December is a blur,” she recalls. “Let’s see, I hooked up with … hmmm, I’ll call him Rob. Then Rob introduced me to Paul. Then there was Colin, and B.T., and Brad, and Steve. I was having so much fun I didn’t even think of having a serious relationship. There was no romance. None.”

These arrangements didn’t include intercourse, she says, but did include mutual oral sex in some cases, “by the second or third time.”

“We’re still all friends, though not in that way,” she insists. Really? Yes, really: “I talked to B.T. just last night. And I’m going to Paul’s basketball game on Friday.”

This girl and others like her might once have been shunned, but no longer. For one thing, adolescents no longer see oral sex as sex. For another, sexual liberation of the late 1960s shattered the rules and rituals of romance for women in their twenties. It was just a matter of time before their younger sisters embraced the same freedoms.

“I know so many girls like this one,” says Julia Kay, who attends Brown University.

The girl hookup culture is known in some circles as Ally McBeal feminism. Dozens of young women described it for this story, some as participants, others as observers. The gist of what they said is this: Many girls don’t have the time or energy required for an intense relationship right now, or they can’t find a guy who wants one. But they possess enormous sexual energy and believe they have every right to enjoy it in whatever form they choose, just as the Fox network’s lusty lawyer did.

They don’t hook up with just anyone; usually, it’s with someone they know at least casually, or, if intercourse is included, with a less printable version of “sexbuddy”. They say they stand less chance of waking up pregnant or infected that way.

A team of social scientists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio has interviewed 1,300 Toledo-area students in grades 7-11 about dating and relationships. Its federally funded survey, highly unusual for the intimate nature of its questions, showed that among the teens who had engaged in intercourse–from 8 percent of 7th graders to 55 percent of 11th graders–one-third said they had had sex with someone whose attachment went no further than friendship. The proportion would have been higher if behaviors other than intercourse had been included.

“The kids make a distinction between casual sex and relationship sex,” says Monica Longmore, a social psychologist on the team. “But casual sex is not a one-night stand. It’s ‘He was my boyfriend last month, I’m not dating him anymore but I was feeling kind of blue so I did it,’ or ‘I used to date him, and we broke up. But the sex is so good, we still do that.'”

Girls haven’t become more promiscuous, in the old-fashioned meaning of that word. As the incidence of oral sex has increased, the proportion of high school girls engaging in intercourse has declined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also, even as they seek the same sexual rush that guys historically have enjoyed, young women confess to dreaming about the romance of the old-fashioned pursuit: being wooed by leisurely strolls and candlelight dinners. Could this explain the large amounts of alcohol some girls say they consume to make hooking up more palatable? So much has changed, so fast, as gender rules have collapsed.

Today, the distance between genders has virtually dissolved. Young women have taken PE with guys since elementary school and gone to movies with them since middle school. They think nothing of phoning or instant-messaging guys. They move into coed dorms at college and go out frequently in coed groups.

If a couple wants to do something together, “it’s not going to the door and to a movie anymore,” says Peggy Giordano, a sociologist on the Bowling Green team. “The activities are the same things you’d be doing with your friends anyway.”

Being in control is what many girls want. The Bowling Green researchers were surprised by how secure girls were about their relationships. Girls expressed significantly more confidence than guys that they could refuse a date, for example, or break up with someone they no longer wanted to go out with, or control what a couple did together.

Girls’ sexual confidence shows up in surveys. In the Toledo research, girls were more likely than guys to say they decided how far a couple would go. In a nationwide study soon to be released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young women ages 15 to 24 were less likely than young men to report feeling pressured to engage in intercourse.

Hooking up has its advantages. It’s cheaper than dating, and it’s intentionally vague. “It requires no commitment of time or emotion–at least that’s what is assumed.

As one college freshman notes wryly, “We’re not looking to get married when we’re 21 and graduated.”

Since hooking up need not involve intercourse, pregnancy isn’t a worry. Oral sex is an acceptable alternative, and young women absolutely don’t consider it sex.

“If we did, we’d be having sex all the time. We still have a shred of self-respect,” one freshman says.

No one uses a condom during oral sex, girls say. “That would be considered absurd,” says one. Although this generation has had more sex education than any previous one, a sizable number aren’t aware that disease can be transmitted by mouth and that condoms reduce that risk.

This concerns health professionals like those at Kaiser, who publicize disturbing statistics: One out of four active teens acquires a sexually transmitted disease every year; rates of herpes and gonorrhea are increasing.

If you can “hook up” with someone occasionally at a party but not be “hanging out” with them, or be “seeing” someone but not “dating,” how does a girl know when she’s headed toward something serious or is already there? Or, for that matter, when a relationship has ended?

If a guy wants to hook up but not date, he probably doesn’t want to take it any further and a girl shouldn’t either. Hooking up also makes a later committed relationship difficult. “If a girl wants a relationship with a guy, we sometimes advise her not to hook up,” Kay says.

But plenty of girls hook up hoping for a relationship, says researcher Giordano, and that’s when they get hurt. Women have always shouldered the emotional burden of sexual behavior. After all, they’re the ones who must carry the baby, or decide to abort.

“There’s so much energy spent analyzing this,” Kay says. “If you’re friends and then you hook up, are you still friends or more than friends? Everything is in play.”

In formal and informal surveys, girls place a higher value on relationships than guys. Psychology professor Longmore suspects her female students in the future may not worry, as their mothers did, that their identity and independence will be compromised in the marriage bed or the corporate suite.