The Talk

So today we’re going to talk about Sex. Specifically, we’re going to discourse on one of my favorite topics, Sex in college. Ironically enough, my parents never gave me “the talk” – you know the one I’m talking about. The dreaded sex talk. Instead, when it came time for me to go to college, my father sat me down and began, “Son… It’s time to talk… About respecting women.”

Welcome to the south, ladies and gentlemen. In a way, respecting women is what I’d like to talk about in this post. I’d like to start that discussion with something light, so we’ll start this one off with something fun:

For those of you whose curiosity was peaked by the above video, or who wish to avoid any awkward explanations of what, exactly, article 20 consists of, the creators of the video actually provided a slimmed-down version of the form which you can access here.

The next segment of my background filler is this article by Heather Mueller from the Minnesota Daily, who is joined by (as ever) reasoned commentary from none other than the famous Dr. Drew “Dr. Drew” Pinsky.

Both of these links came about via promptings from this article in The Naked Roommate Newsletter.

The video does a good job of portraying the whole thing in an ironic light by juxtaposing the “responsibility” of signing a binding contract (which, oddly, is NOT a response to the more recent “athletic” scandals – I believe that video pre-dates them) with some of the cheesier lines used by both guys and girls in college. Reading these articles, however, it’s easy to get the impression that college students are mindless automatons who largely drink, have sex, drink more, and then have more sex. Frankly, I think that’s a little inaccurate.

The article presumes several things about college students:
1) We’re more routinely-exposed to drinking in an unsafe, and uncontrolled manner
2) We’re highly susceptible to peer pressure and “cultural pressure” to hook up, whatever that might mean
3) Hooking up is always unsafe, rampant, and in the long-run unsatisfying

I recently had a debate with some elder members of my family about the “loosening” attitudes among my generation and the general cultural trend towards the casual. Outside of the context of that conversation (as those of you who know me well will know that in a classic display of German besprechung I tend to cling to positions I take in arguments even if it’s apparent I don’t have the necessary evidence to back them up) I have to admit that their arguments had at least a little merit. I tended to assume that the “earlier days” just LOOKED more innocent because more of the subculture which is so prevalent in my generation was simply hidden, but it does seem fairly evident in hindsight that the very fact that the aforementioned subculture is now readily evident in our lives is a sign that it’s not nearly as controversial as it perhaps once was.

That being said, I don’t think our attitudes are necessarily loosening. I look around me every day and see fellow students rushing to interviews or internships wearing suits; students still attend etiquette classes and write thank-you notes to potential employers; hell, formal balls and galas have become all the rage at my school with upwards of 6 taking place each academic year – and these are no cheap imitation. The last Diplomat Ball employed the National Building Museum as its a-list classy location. It’s only fair to reveal that my school is by anyone’s standards fairly conservative socially, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t influenced by the trends. If I had to speculate, I’d choose to view the trend more as a wave. It’s true that waves move further from shore at low tide, but they also return at high tide and then repeat the cycle. I suspect that what was “uncool” enough to the generation before us to push them into shifting towards the “casual” may eventually be what becomes “uncool” enough to our children’s children to push them back towards some new version of the “formal”.

These attitudes also apply to sex. Claims that students “nowadays” have more casual sex than our fore bearers are probably anecdotal at best. Does anyone out there remember the 60s? Any time characterized by “free love” sounds to me a little more relaxed than the time I live in. My parents would be quick to point out that the “free-lovers” of the 60s were a radical minority, so I feel it’s only fair to retaliate that anyone who believes the statistics put forth in the afore-linked article about the percentage of college students in my generation who’ve “hooked up” has never attended college in the 2000s. It’s true that many choose to, but it’s also true that many don’t, won’t, or can’t. I suspect those statistics fall prey to the terminology trap. Dr. Drew himself admits that “hooking up” means different things to different people – why then would those results not be skewed towards the liberal by bravado, anonymity, and self-favoring bias? Hell – I’ve done that myself. You could argue that only men would want a survey to think they’d hooked up more than they had, but I think any careful look at a college campus would turn up just as many women who actively seek a hook-up on any given Friday night.

That doesn’t address the article’s three claims, though.

1) We’re more routinely-exposed to drinking in an unsafe, and uncontrolled manner

Yes, we drink a lot. Our parents’ generation drank a lot. Actually – I have friends whose parents drink more than they do, and given how few alcohol-related deaths of college students there are in the states each year, I hardly think our alcohol consumption is “unsafe” or “uncontrolled”. If anything, there has been a heightened awareness of late due to diligent efforts by student and administrator activists. Students at Georgetown University actually threw quite the hissy-fit when alcohol regulations were tightened on campus without any clear reasoning. It is true that students sometimes use alcohol to justify abnormal behavior, but that goes hand in hand with the realization that students CHOOSE to drink in order to give themselves a reason to behave that way. That leaves two questions: 1) What are the root causes of this choice? 2) Are the behaviors they exhibit all that bad?

Despite what recent Fox News Articles would have you believe, most college students do drink responsibly and behave more-or-less responsibly while under the influence. The US government certainly believes there is a problem. Their numbers, however, fall into the typical traps of failing to ask questions like, “what do the students count as a drink?”, “over how long a period were these 5 drinks consumed?”, etc… I don’t find these studies conclusive. There are always exceptions to every rule, and I’ll admit I lead a fairly sheltered college existence, but a drinking culture causes an alcohol-related death to be national news is not an indication that there’s a problem – just that some students (as some percentage of every group inevitably will) make bad choices.

2) We’re highly susceptible to peer pressure and “cultural pressure” to hook up, whatever that might mean

This, again, most likely depends on the school. Perhaps I’m exposed to a skewed sample of college students, but my experience has been that this “trend” towards “individuality” means that students are encouraged more to more to think for themselves and to develop their own beliefs and values. At least at Georgetown, that means that any pressure that exists is met by an opposing pressure to make responsible decisions. Students know that they will have to justify these decisions, and “I was drunk” doesn’t always cut it. Of course, that doesn’t always work, and to a certain extent there is an ever-present pressure placed on us by media and outside influences to be sexually active and to become comfortable with our sexuality. This pressure is exerted not necessarily by the easy targets like contemporary advertisements, but also by all the Dr. Drews in the world who make it their mission to educate us about sex. Websites like his lead students to believe that their peers are predominantly sexually-active and place further pressure on those who aren’t to join the norm. That’s sad, because websites like his are also a vital resource as more and more young people become open and sexually active. Influences like these, however, do not exclusively affect college students – they affect everyone.

3) Hooking up is always unsafe, rampant, and in the long-run unsatisfying

While my experience, once again, is limited to the college I attended, I haven’t found this to be true at all. This consequence assumes that college students are making bad choices by failing to think through their actions. While it’s true that many people regret hooking up the next morning because of the associated stigma (and other reasons – my favorite example of which being the (probably) room-mate yelling “WALK OF SHAAAAAAAAME” after one Georgetown Woman as she left a townhouse I walked past on my way to work), it’s not true that they don’t go into it with the full use of their facilities. Girls are probably less susceptible to this, but many men do go out looking for a hook-up on Friday night.

Their success rate is another story. Most college students that I’ve talked with aren’t as sexually active as government statistics and conservative activist groups and authors would have us believe. Pardon me if I’m too lazy to find links for all of those. There’s much evidence, in fact, that those self-same sexually-active students are being more responsible than ever. Students have, in my opinion, risen to the challenge of rising personal freedom. Most students only have a handful of sexual partners in their entire college career – how is that rampant?; use condoms and take other precautions to ensure safe sex – how is that dangerous?; and are entirely responsible and mature about their sex lives – you can’t tell me that’s unsatisfying… I think this is one case where the rather vocal minority or the mistakes that everyone makes once or twice in their lives are acting in the place of mass reality in the public mind.

I think it’s true that these issues need to be watched carefully – that if proper steps aren’t taken to ensure America’s youth are well-educated about the risks and effects of sex and drugs, to curtail media and cultural promotion of sexual recklessness and substance abuse they could BECOME a large problem – but they are by no means rampant or uncontrolled now. As always, I think America would find its youth far more trustworthy than it seems to currently believe them to be if it gave them the chance to prove it. As far as a drift towards the “casual” goes… Well, I don’t think it’s worth worrying about. It might be a little unsettling for the older generation at the moment, but in the long run it sounds to me like America could use a little less stress anyways.