Photo by Flickr user rkohn12. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Recently graduated journalists Christopher Beam and Nick Summers of The Washington Post have updated numbers that I really could have used when I was coining the term “cool men.”
This post is intended to advance the idea of “cool men” and so I’m going to focus on that. But the information is more than generalizable and you’re welcome to do so.
In a 2000 Zogby poll, 40 percent of students nationwide reported that they were not “sexually active” — a term left vague enough to include everything from kissing to soliciting strangers in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. At the country’s top schools, the dry spells approach levels not seen since 1930s Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Harvard’s health department reported last year that 47 percent of students there said they had not yet had vaginal intercourse. (Numbers not adjusted for homosexuality, apparently.) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a 2001 survey found that only 51 percent of undergrads had lost their virginity; at Princeton the same year, the student body was 44 percent pure.
Parents and other interested parties often confuse having had sex with having sex regularly. One landmark 2000 study found that kids have an average of 10.8 hookups in college. That seems like a lot. But the math works out to only 1.35 hookups per semester — and remember, some of these incidents are merely make-out sessions. This is what we’re getting so worked up about?
The rest of the post is an excellent read. Check out their analysis of the numbers here.
Vendors of porn and/or romance novels and/or old TV shows on DVD, might be happy to know that in fact the numbers of people having sex may be down quite a bit from the 1970s. And so ought to be moralists and sour authors of
More devastating to the idea that everyone is constantly hooking up is the evidence that students hugely overestimate the notches on their classmates’ mortarboards. In 2005, a survey of four universities found that while 80 percent of students had had one sex partner or fewer in the previous year, only 22 percent thought that the average number of partners was that low. In a similar survey in 2002, most guessed that three or more was the norm.
In other words, not only are the stereotypes wrong, our beliefs about the stereotypes may make our behavior wrong! It may make young men “uncool” in the sense that they’re desperation to be “like all the other guys” may may be desperately misplaced! Similarly lurid and unseemly-lingering fulminations by the likes of Bill O’Reilly may reveal more about him than about actual goings on on campus. And sour authors like Laura Sessions Stepp may have more say about on-campus wishful thinking than about the social theory of coed dorms — important for what it says about what people believe, yes, but that’s not nearly as interesting as it would be if it was about what’s really happening.
(Point? A near-50% rate of inexperience for both women and men would really, really explain some of the doesn’t-look-that-much-fun behavior that keeps showing up in “spring break” style videos. Just sayin’)
Sooooo….
While obviously not ever man who’s not having sex is a “cool man,” (nor, equally obviously, does having sex exclude one from the designation) another point one might mention about them is that they’re likely more honest and less frantic than their keep-up-with-the-stereotype counterparts. Which, in the long run, will probably serve them and their partners in good stead.
And just on a personal note: after I left home I remember winding up on day three of a weekend-long party in a neighboring college-neighborhood party. A lot of people had been drinking a lot of alcohol there for a very long time so when I was invited in I figured I had to not just keep up but catch up. Problem was that though I had heard a lot of talk from my old high-school buddies about how much they drank every weekend, and though I talked a pretty good game about how much I could drink, I really wasn’t that experienced. (I’d been drunk a lot, sure, but never as drunk as I “thought I could get” if I could just get access to enough booze. And here was my chance.) But drawing on the certain knowledge that one can easily drain a bottle of tequila I proceeded to down, oh, say, about 21 shots of pretty much everything they had open from tequila to Kahalua. In les than 10 minutes. And the weird thing is that after about my fifth or sixth shot of whatever, a fair number of other people decided they needed to keep up and they started pounding stuff at about the same rate I did.
Now…
Ok, I don’t even have to tell you how things turned out for me, right? After about 10 minutes I decided maybe I needed to go back to my apartment “for a minute,” and I have the most distinct memory of throwing up while my bed raised up and swatted me firmly on my face. Now the bad news is I threw up all over my bed. The good news is therefore I didn’t die of alcohol poisoning!
But I gotta tell ya’ I think an awful lot of drinking, and an awful lot of sex, starts out with pretty similar combinations of inexperience, hearsay, and bravado. And, I also have to say, it usually turns out no worse than it did for me with all that alcohol — a dangerously close call but nobody died. But… but… but… call me a dreamer but I think it would be very nice cool if we had a little less bravado and a lot more transparency when it comes to our abilities and/or capacities. And, again, in the long run I have a feeling we’d all end up having a lot more, and a lot better sex than we might otherwise…
... even if not as much as we imagine everyone but us is already always having every time we turn our backs. :-)
[Via Michaela Holland of r e d l i g h t Also, there’s a WaPo Q&A with the authors that answers what happens to the free condoms that disappear by the bucketload in dormitories, and whether “party school” numbers are really that much different from the ivy-league schools mentioned in the article. —fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-12-17 19:06.
i never quite understood what the fascination was with authorities (parents, gov.) wanting to know about the sex lives of young people.
that being said, it's quite obvious that people in college are less likely to be having sex because being truly promiscuous (the kind of promiscuity that leads to teen pregnancy and the like) is a time-consuming activity - the sort of time consuming activity that the typical college student doesn't really have time for (keyword there being typical, i.e. not party schools)
the concern lies (and probably always has lied) with the lower income individuals that - thanks to abstinence policies and similar so-called "sex education" - have no idea about safe sex practices, contraception, etc., and for whom the only source of information is probably internet message boards and rumors.
[I agree that less well-educated people may be at greater risk for certain consequences, but to be honest I'm going to bet the numbers really aren't *that* different outside any but the most benighted communities. Thanks, kermit. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-12-17 20:11.
Strikes me that a lot of this has to do with "selective sampling", which was explained to me thus by my science teacher way back when i was but a wee nipper:
"If you look where you're throwing your quadrangle, and you see there's a rare orchid in the area you're sampling, you're going to try to catch the orchid inside your quadrangle. Instead, you should turn your back and throw the quadrangle over your shoulder, without looking. Then what falls in the quadrangle will be an accurate sample. Instead of everyone coming up with 'an orchid', and making the orchid seem far less rare, we will have a proper sample of the area."
Sex (and in particular, young people having sex) works like that - the media especially, looks where it's throwing it's sampling device, and aims for the unusual parts! Also, nobody ever really tells about the night where they drank sensibly, didn't get laid, but came home, studied for a bit and then went to bed. So again, the sample of "reported events" is selected in favour of the more unusual, and more extreme, exploits of sex, drugs (including alcohol) and violence.
Thus, it creates the impression that it is more common than it actually is, because you just don't hear about the other sort of event so much.
[Exactly. Thanks, SDE. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-12-17 21:00.
I know this isn't quite your point but it kind of irks me when low sexual-activity figures (and for people in college even, these aren't minors!) are presented as reassuring good news.
As far as I'm concerned, if people use protection and get their schoolwork done they can have 800 partners. Of course, not that they shouldn't be pressured if they'd rather have few or none... damn, I'm constructing sexual utopias in my head again. Gotta stop that.
It always does bug me though when the news goes "Horrible panic! Kids having sex!" as if it were some intrinsic evil. Even non-abstinence sex educators tend to say something along the lines of "I'm going to teach you how to be safe, but abstinence is really the best choice so if you're a good person you should never need to use this."
In my sexual utopia, people base how much sex they have on how much they want to have and not a damn thing else.
[And my only shift would be "where 'have as much as you want' means as much as you want, not so you can say 'well that was horrible but at least I'm no longer a vigin.'" Which is sort of what I'm talking about here: finding out what *each individual* wants instead of being all "should" this or "shouldn't" that. So I'm not pitching "cool men" because I think all men, or women, should wait. I'm pitching them because a) they're *there* and acknowledging them could take pressure off a lot of the people who think they gotta go now, ready or not, or somehow be left "behind." Thanks, Holly. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-12-17 21:14.
Actually, 10.8 "hookups" in an entire lifetime seems like a lot, if you're thinking of "hookup" as "horrendously lonely experience in which couple who barely know each other have full sexual intercourse while trying to be way more emotionally detached than is natural to them."
Obviously mileage varies depending on just what the college students were actually averaging 10.8 of.
[Actually the authors were quite clear that the definition of "hooking up" given in the surveys was broad enough to include far milder activities such as kissing. This came up in the Q&A section (there's a link at the bottom of this post.) Q: "I don't think the piece really got to the heart of the problem. Its not just vaginal sex, if they asked about oral sex those numbers would skyrocket..." A: "Those numbers do include oral sex. "Hook-up" is an intentionally vague term, and it can mean anything from aggressive hand-holding to a make out session to Larry Craig's average Minneapolis layover." So rather than saying sex an average of once a quarter they're saying something closer to one *date* on average per quarter. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-12-17 22:29.
Yes - it's not just that this is an orchid (read: group of people who normatively *ought* to be having sex, since they're all young and as such ostensibly attractive). Above all, they're cheap and easy to survey. When I was an undergrad taking the Intro to Psych class, a course requirement was to take part in three psych experiments. And college administrators partly earn their keep by surveying their charges.
Further distortion comes from the definition (or lack thereof) of hook-up. Studies - again of more or less captive college students - show that young women and men define "hook-up" differently. Men generally call no-strings intercourse a hook-up, while women might consider even kissing as such. My own students seem to subscribe to these gendered definitions, too. So Lynn, I'm not convinced that these are necessarily hollow experiences of intercourse, or even intercourse of any flavor. Depends on how the surveys defined a hook-up (if they did at all). And regardless of definition, a short-term encounter doesn't need to be meaningless or hollow; it really depends on the person and circumstances, I think.
And then there's the party-school vs. elite-school factor. Despite a bunch of personal experience with both (as a teacher and as a student), I'm still not sure how this sorts out. There may be more pressure at "party schools" to accumulate various sorts of notches, be they tequila shots or sexual partners. (One thing I *am* sure of is that tequila is the devil's own drink!) On the other hand, kids at "elite schools" have more incentive to delay marriage in favor of career (which may lead to more non-binding sex) and tend to be less religious.
What I'd *really* like to know is 1) how many of the inactive (or active!) young people are unhappy with their current status, and 2) how many of them think that their behavior doesn't fit with their own value system. Q2 would get at how much people's behavior is likely to settle into a different pattern as they move further along in life. Q1 might pick up on how many men - and women - are unwillingly virgins or sexually inactive.
[Yes, I'd be very interested in answers to #1 and #2, but we're not going to get much of it till people stop tittering and huffing that anything is happening at all. Thank you, Sungold! --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 00:17.
So Lynn, I'm not convinced that these are necessarily hollow experiences of intercourse, or even intercourse of any flavor.
I'm not saying that they are intercourse of any flavor; what I'm saying is that if "hollow experience of intercourse" is what you think of first when you hear the word "hook-up" (and it seems pretty clear to me that such is the meaning of "hook-up" that's implied in worried articles about college students having too many of them), then hearing that people average only ten or so of them in their college career isn't going to be especially reassuring.
Since it's not clear to me how the survey defined a hook-up, or whether the term was defined at all, or whether the term was even used in the survey (as opposed to being how some article about the survey interpreted the response), I'm cautious about drawing any conclusion from the reported number.
What I'd *really* like to know is 1) how many of the inactive (or active!) young people are unhappy with their current status
There are degrees of happiness and unhappiness, there. I think lots of sexually inactive college students could be sexually active, but aren't willing to choose any of the options that are actually available to them, while being frustrated that they can't have whom they want. In that sense, they may be unhappy with their current status, but still choosing it.
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 00:23.
Oops! I see I posted my second comment while figleaf was replying to my first. Anyway, if the definition is left as loose as that, it's really hard for me to draw any conclusions about how big a number 10 would be, but I do think that the fuzziness of what "hook-up" means is a more significant point than 10 being a low number (10 either is or isn't a low number, depending on what a respondent is counting as a hook-up).
[I agree with that assessment: on the one hand it gives worriers extra ammunition to worry about, on the other hand it provides nothing to go on for people who would perhaps consider different policies depending on actual answers. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 00:28.
And, just to be more clear, I'm not saying that 10 is a high number of times to have had sexual intercourse, but that 10 is a high number of times to have had sexual intercourse under circumstances that you find emotionally alienating, or to think that someone else is having sexual intercourse under such circumstances. (Sorry for so many comments in one thread, but I just want to make sure it's clear what I mean here.)
[No problem, Lynn. Everyone gets (pretty much) as much time as she or he needs to say what they want. And this is one of those areas where a little extra clarification never hurt. So thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 01:27.
Harvard and MIT? I wouldn't draw any conclusions on THAT data! NOT a random sample! And I say this as a graduate of MIT. Wonderful fabulous place. Loved it. But we ARE freaks!
[Yeah, a friend who went to MIT said everyone's favorite acronym there was IHTFP. But the authors say they're not talking only about the ivys. (In the Q&A section they did say that virginity rates among engineering undergrads was, um, very high.) Thanks, Plymouth. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 08:52.
Great points, Lynn. The fuzzy definitions and potential for alienation are actually interlinked. Women tend to view hookups as potentially leading to deeper involvement, whereas men more often regard them as just for fun. And yeah, I know this echoes the old stereotypes, but there's solid research behind it, and my students say it's generally true.
So, with mismatched definitions and expectations, women run a risk of disappointment, alienation, minor heartbreak, and (worst case) date rape. The last can ensue when she thinks they’re just making out, but he believes she in for a penny, in for a pound - again, different assumptions stemming from gendered ideas about hookups - and then he refuses to respect her "no," which is obviously a whole 'nother issue.
None of the above is meant to condemn short-term liaisons. But for them to be ethical (at least in my universe), they require communication that too often doesn't happen.
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 10:13.
I'm asking this for two reasons, first to see what happens if I reply directly to a comment rather than posting a comment, and second to ask about "the party-school vs. elite-school factor" which is not a concept I know. There are universities where you don't need to do much work? Ours are roughly divided into elite, red-brick, and the rest, though the elite may well be the ones that party hard too.
Sorry figleaf, a bit off topic. Curiosity killed the cat.
["Party schools" are typically big public land-grant state universities where people who can't or wouldn't go to an elite school allegedly end up. The story is that a lot of kids wind up taking just enough classes to justify to their parents all the after-class drinking and partying they do. As for comments, I just noticed the same thing this morning. It actually *does* make a difference in the sense that the system tells me that X replied to Y's comment. The trick now, though, is to get it to let *you* know. Because otherwise what's the point? Anyway, that's my homework for this morning. Thanks, A. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 10:18.
So in fact it doesn't seem to make a blind bit of difference if you reply to a comment or just comment. Please feel free to delete my ramblings :)
[We'll see. I'm working on adding the code that shows who's replying to whom right now. Let's see if it works. Ummm.... no. More digging to be done then. (Between rounds of baking holiday cookies.) --fl]
[Update: Ok, I've chased down some, but not quite all, the documentation and so now I've got things going a little bit. Not perfect, but at least there's basic functionality. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 14:26.
I find myself bristling at this because my alma mater (the University of Illinois) is a large land grant school, and the Princeton whatever lists it as a party school (#16). It seems to be true that some students come to the U of I and can't handle the freedom of being away from their parents and they party too much and they flunk out in the first year. On the other hand, people also come from all over the world to study here, mostly engineering. I studied LAS and I worked hard for my degree. I'm guess I'm just saying I really don't like the label. I'm baking cookies, too-walnut shortbread. Merry Christmas!
[Ok, so for the record I went to a "hippie" school, right? Hippie in the sense that every flipping time the news channels did a story from there they'd head over to this one set of trees next to the library where all the guys with hacky-sacks, the women with dreadlocks, and the dogs with bandana collars congregated so they could do their news spots with the recognizable background. And why did they always have to move to that one area? Because a much higher percentage of the students were actually state workers and other professionals in continuing education classes, and if they filmed from anywhere else on the quad the majority non-hippy students would have gotten in the way. Oh yeah, and had they chosen instead to tape closer to the dormatories they'd have had way, way more archival footage of the grunge movement, which originated there but was largely overlooked... because, you see, there were all those guys with dreadlock socks under the trees. So anyway, yeah, maybe the big party schools have huge parties, but only 5-15% out of 80,000 students have to participate for it to look like *everybody's* doing it. So sorry about the designation, mag, but tv reporters can't count past five because the rulebook says you can't put down the microphone while tape's rolling. :-) Thanks. --fl]
Submitted by 1819 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-12-19 10:57.
Well, when 25% of the women in your dorm are lesbians (or claim to be), 50% are ethnic activists who won't date outside their fold, and 25% are belles-of-the-ball interested in being traditionally-feminine and attracting traditionally-masculine men, most people are going to self-report a minimal number of contacts, given that the lesbians aren't going to out themselves to a statistician, the ethnic activists won't cooperate with "The Man", and the belles-of-the-ball don't want to be seen as easy. So that pretty much concealed any of the sex anyone might have been having at my large state school. Add to that the silencing effect on male sexuality of early 90s feminism ("'Just say no' means NO", asking twice was stalking, etc.) and it's not surprising that things have remained static on campus.
I would definitely agree about my Ivy, which went by the old saw, "There's no place like home for a Tiger." It seemed like a LOT of the women were scared of all the risks that can come with sex and were perfectly content not to have any, given that they were ALL always in demand. If tons of men are always asking you out, why not wait until you have the safer context of your own place, income, top-of-the-line reproductive healthcare paid for from your own salary, etc. 4 years from now, when tons of men are STILL always asking you out? Also, a LOT of these people are unsure of their own desirability and there is probably a lot of miscommunication going on between people who ARE interested in each other, just because they're still learning to listen and pay attention.
[I agree, by the way, that college is a particularly harsh time for both young men and young women. And for quite a few of the reasons you outline. Although in my experience at schools where men complain that half the women are lesbians (or at least LUGs) the straight women are complaining that half the men are gay. My further experience is that it only *seems* that way, but even so, when it's actually surprisingly difficult to connect, let alone "hook up," and when statistics show that up to half of everybody in college is actually still a virgin even though they and everyone else believes virgins are but a tiny fraction of the student body then... yeah, that's gonna leave almost everybody believing a) they're the only ones not "getting any" and b) when they *do* get a chance they're going to feel obliged to fake it experience-wise to avoid blowing it. Which has a tendency to leave everybody thinking "is that it?" Much cynicism and resentment (and potential exaggeration of how bad it is) is bound to follow. The weird thing is the interested people are *there,* it's just very difficult to connect. Thanks, ES. --fl]