Wanted So Bad: On Sex and Our Generation
Published March 4, 2008
By Max C. Bookman
Her heart starts pumping faster. She feels the blood accelerating through her arteries, causing her face to turn red and hot. Her brown eyes dart around the lobby of the Davis Center as she folds the newspaper in half and lets it fall to her lap. She’s a sophomore nursing major, and she is 100% sure that someone just spotted her in the “I Want You So Bad” section of the Water Tower.
“Well, the description fits me perfectly,” she explains to her friend, who is seated on one of the comfy green couches directly across from her. She picks the newspaper back up from her lap and summarizes the entry out loud, “Short brown hair with red highlights, pierced eyebrow, outside Rowell on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2:00!”
“It’s gotta be you,” her friend concurs. The nursing major is more than mildly amused by her possible secret admirer. It has been quite a while since she’s, “you know… done anything… with anyone.” Not that she would get involved like that with someone on a whim from a hip college newspaper. But she has fun entertaining the idea.
After all, her life has been so crazy lately that between class, endless anatomy homework, the gym, tennis on Wednesdays, Lost on Thursdays, and “friends time” whenever she can, this nursing major seems to always be putting that one other ultimately stereotypical detail of college on the back burner. “I’m not like, thinking about it all the time,” she admits, “but it would be nice once in a while.”
She’s not alone.
Various studies conducted in recent years indicate that college students across the country are having less sex. The American College Health Association recently reported that while male students had an average of 2.1 sexual partners in 2000, the number has dropped to 1.6 in 2006. Women have followed the same trends.
Could it really be possible that college students, the culturally glorified personifications of sexual promiscuity, are doing it less? Hard to believe. It seems especially odd with our generation. We, the ones who invented hooking up, who would unabashedly pose half-naked for Facebook pictures in high school, have grown up in a more sexualized society than any generation before us.
Even if we’re having sex less often than past generations of college kids, we still do get it on more than any other age group. The National Center for Health Statistics reported in its 2005 Sexual Behavior Study that 30% of men and women between 20-24 have had more than one sexual partner in the past year. But that number plummets to 18% for the 25-29 age group, and continues falling to 10% for the 40-44 age group.
As a testament to our generation’s unique take on college sex, Newsweek recently ran an article documenting the wild popularity that writing and blogging about our sex lives has gained among our age group. Strangely enough, Ivy League students are leading the trend with popular blogs like Sex and the Ivy, the “bleeding heart nympho’s guide to Harvard life,” which has a variety of stories with titles ranging from the innocent, “Would I Date Me?” to the graphic, “Spreading My Legs Does not Make Me a Sexpert.”
So, okay. Sex is not a taboo subject for our generation. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The tough question is, if the statistics are correct, then what could be the cause of our general drop in sexual activity, given the society we live in?
One explanation could be the stellar job our educational system has done at pounding into our heads the negative consequences of promiscuity, particularly sexually transmitted diseases. It makes sense. After all, the prospect of crabs has never really been a turn on for anyone.
Lifestyle could provide a better explanation. Today’s college students are the product of a lifetime of activity. From getting shuttled around from soccer practice to dance class in our youth, to joining a million different extracurricular activities in high school to build up that college application, our generation has always been terribly busy, and that has not changed in college. A short posting on Sex and the Ivy encapsulates the effect:
Me: So, would you like to have sex?
Boy Who Has A Thesis Due: Now is … not a good time.
Me: When’s a good time?
Boy: Can I get back to you on this later?
Me: Sure. When?
Boy: March 20th.
It’s impossible to accurately gauge the average sex lives of us Catamounts. There are no UVM blogs like Sex and the Ivy, nor do we have any student publication devoted to the topic, like Boston College’s Boink or Harvard’s H Bomb. But the Water Tower’s “I Want You So Bad” section has been faithfully publishing samples of our fellow students’ romantic and lustful anonymous thoughts. Of course, the submissions are not all sexual. But we sure hope that there have been a few success stories.
It is also important to remember that statistics about sex only provide a general picture at best. No survey or poll actually follows participants around to see exactly when and how often they’re having sex, so the information has to be attained verbally. But answers to personal questions about sexual activity in an interview setting are not always reliable. Women tend to deflate their answers. Men do the opposite.
Back in the Davis Center, the nursing major folds up her Water Tower and places it into her bag. It’s time to walk to class at Rowell. Before getting up, she feels her hair to make sure it’s not messed up. Her friend laughs, “aw look at you, you want to look nice for your secret admirer.” The nursing major giggles but doesn’t deny the claim. “Who knows?” she wonders.
Editor’s Note: We don’t make up anything that appears in the I Want You So Bad section. All the submissions come from UVM students like you. Do it anonymously at http://thewatertowernews.com/iwantyousobad.
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