Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Sluts at Penn

A very interesting New York Times article sheds light on the new age of sluttiness on college campuses. The author spent an entire school year interviewing 60 female students about their sex lives.
Obviously you can't categorize 60 women into one specific type, but the overall gist is that these driven young women are too focused on schoolwork, extra-curriculars and post-graduation careers to form meaningful romantic relationships. But they don't want to be left out of the fun so they get drunk and have cheap meaningless sex but they try not to regret it in the morning.

“You go in, and they take you down to a dark basement,” Haley, a blond, pink-cheeked senior, recalled of her first frat parties in freshman year. “There’s girls dancing in the middle, and there’s guys lurking on the sides and then coming and basically pressing their genitals up against you and trying to dance.” Dancing like that felt good but dirty, and like a number of girls, Haley said she had to be drunk in order to enjoy it. Women said universally that hookups could not exist without alcohol, because they were for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk. One girl, explaining why her encounters freshman and sophomore year often ended with fellatio, said that usually by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.

I don't remember girls like these when Reissberg and the Conch were matriculating there.

1 comment:

Damino said...

It's a very interesting read. The thing is, I'm not sure the percentage of students having casual sex/hookup buddies is any higher at elite schools like Penn than it is nationally. The reasons may be different for kids at less rigorous colleges (i.e. I don't want to be tied down/I just want to have fun as opposed to I study/do extracurricular activities every hour that I'm sober). But it's the same behavior.

I definitely knew people at Cornell who were very much of the hookup mindset, but I also knew many more people in relationships, some of whom ended up getting married by the way.

And I don't think this is a new thing and it definitely happened at Princeton in the 70's and elsewhere all over the country in the 70's, 80's and certainly the 90's when we were in college. Perhaps it's slightly easier now with cell phones/texting to get a booty call whenever you want one, but this is hardly a behavior invented by millenials.