Broadway’s G-rated memoir is just one of a slew of books about chastity released in time to make everyone’s list of hot summer reads … for those planning a vacation in the Arctic Circle. The onslaught started in the spring with “Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses,” which reports that all but marriage-minded evangelical students are sleeping around — and attending Pimps ‘n’ Hos parties — in hopes of meeting that special someone. Next came “The Purity Code,” a book for Christian teens detailing “God’s plan for sex and your body.” The catalog climaxes this week with the Aug. 1 release of “Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children.” (Hint: Cataclysmically.)

These books are just the latest result of the mounting abstinence movement, which, despite its religious roots, has recast its attack on “hookup” culture as secular, even feminist. The term “hooking up” — meaning anything from kissing to casual sex — can be traced back to the early ’80s, but only within the past few years did the hand-wringing really begin. Former Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp spent years detailing so-called collegiate mating rituals — often lamenting a tendency among young women toward boozed-up hookups instead of cross-legged gatekeeping — which culminated in last year’s retro revitalization, “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.”

The abstinence movement has been successful in securing federal funding for abstinence-only programs — to the tune of $800 million over the past eight years — but the spectacle of father-daughter purity balls, chastity rings and virginity pledges has failed to make abstinence appear even marginally cool to the mainstream. More recently, activists have begun borrowing from the feminist arsenal — using words like “empowerment” and “respect” — in their assault on uncommitted sex. These books add to a loudening cautionary chorus: Young women are hooking up and tuning out emotionally. And, increasingly, young women are being told they are either respecting or exploiting themselves; they’re either with the “Girls Gone Wild,” sex blogger set or with the iron-belted and chaste. A few months back, a New York Times Magazine piece about chastity on Ivy League campuses relied on this false binary: It pitted a prim Harvard abstinence advocate against a campus sex blogger (who recently posted a photo of her face covered in splooge).

Choose a side? No thanks. I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships. I don’t exactly advocate picking up guys at frat parties and screwing atop the keg as the path to marital bliss. It’s just that hookup culture is not the radical extreme it is so frequently mischaracterized as in the media. There is sloppy stranger sex among people my age, sure, but sometimes hooking up is regular sex with a casual acquaintance; sometimes it’s innocent making out or casually dating or cuddling, and, oftentimes, it involves just one person at a time. In a sense it’s all very old-fashioned — there’s just a lot more unattached sex involved.

Like most 20-somethings, I’ve had online pornography and unregulated chat rooms at my fingertips since I hit puberty. But I also grew up during the Girl/Grrrl Power explosion, which taught me to demand respect, and play handball (and, later, hardball) with the boys. And it taught me that I didn’t need to cake myself in makeup or teeter along in foot-disfiguring heels — unless, of course, I wanted to.

From the very start, my love life has embodied that seeming paradox. I lost my virginity at 16 with my first love and best friend; it was all champagne and roses. It was also as-porn-ational sex: I enthusiastically guided us into nearly every position I’d long marveled at online. At one point, midcoital, I actually pinched my chin and asked aloud, “What positions are left?” Afterward, he observed: “That wasn’t what I’d imagined, exactly.” He had imagined: 1) the missionary position and 2) ceremonial crying.

I didn’t do much hooking up in college; I went to a single-sex school. But after I closed the gates to that cosseted women’s school — and all of its unsexy talk about misogyny and the patriarchy — I opened those other, um, metaphorical gates of mine. OK, screw the modesty: My legs, I opened my legs. That’s not to say I had a host of one-night stands — I’ve never had a one-night stand, only several-nights stands. But I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they fit. (This one makes my control-freak quotient look big but has a slimming effect on my ego.) Like Anna Broadway, I can easily and embarrassingly categorize these men: Lonely Lawyer, Sociopathic Spaniard, Testosterone-Poisoned Pilot and Bellicose Bartender, for starters. Together, they’re like the Village People for straight women. During this time, I told my friend Sarah and her boyfriend about the latest person I was seeing. “Which one?” he asked, smirking. I laughed, but I wondered: Shit, am I that girl?

For a while, I was. First, there was the cartoonist. The first night we hooked up, he took me back to his house and played guitar, sang every song he’d ever written, and juggled his collection of vitamin pill bottles.

Then there was the lawyer. We would have passionate, hours-long debates, as though we were opposing counsels in court; the first of such debates ended with him throwing up his hands and announcing, “Congratulations, you’ve worn out a professional litigator.” He owned his own three-story house with a panorama of the Bay Area, drove an SUV — with a shiny hood ornament that made me cringe — and wanted to sweep me off my feet, rescue me from my one-room apartment, as well as the dishes piled up in (and under) my sink and my bipolar upstairs neighbor whose monologues are the constant soundtrack to my home life. I told him “no thanks” and moved along.

Then there was the pilot, whom I would see whenever his flight schedule brought him in town. I’d stay the night at his utilitarian airport hotel, order room service, watch planes take off right outside our window, and talk about sexy things like black boxes, plane crashes and thunderstorms. He was cartoonishly masculine and he made me feel stereotypically feminine, which I am not; it made me constantly want to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. It was amorous antagonism.