An informal survey of today’s extracurricular collegiate activities comes up with some surprising results.
“Let’s go for it!” is the rallying cry this Monday night at U.C.L.A. Jimmy, a handsome junior business major in just-tight-enough Levi 501 s and a polo shirt, is ready for a big night out with B. J., Jimmy’s 30-year-old alumnus brother along for the ride. They enter Stratton’s and B. J. knows he’s in for some unexpected surprises. No scrungy sawdust floor and peeling walls here. No, this is all sleek wood paneling and tasteful wall hangings. Trim young bodies abound, all identically dressed in the obligatory 501s and silk blouses or designer T-shirts. Where once collegians sauntered sartorially out of Rolling Stone, today they seem to have stepped directly from a GQ spread. The college scene has cleaned up its act.
“It looks like you’ve got two possibilities, my man,” B. J. laughs, first indicating a brunette who seems more than happy to rendezvous later with Jimmy. And then there’s a sweet-looking redhead who’s certainly taken with him. “But I just met her and I like her,” Jimmy says, almost protesting. B. J.’s perplexed. “Well, you could certainly get laid with the brunette. You got all the options.” Jimmy responds with a half-smile but doesn’t make a move. Things have changed since B. J. was in college, and he can’t figure any of this out.
With good reason. To the outsider, it may seem collegians have become a group of bland Yuppies-in-training, or preps and prepettes more interested in silicon chips and the status quo than in sex. Not so. Sex in the halls of academe is alive and well and as prevalent as ever. It’s still a favorite indoor sport. but as with any good game, some of the rules have changed with the times. Attitudes are a Cuisinart blend of sixties liberalism and the inevitable backlash of eighties conservatism. Students know more, and what they know, they know earlier — all of which is resulting in a new wariness as well as a new sophistication about sex.
Today’s wholesome student body may look 99.44 percent pure. but those shining faces are coming to college with knowledge that previous generations never had. A psychological counselor at a northeastern school commented, “It’s not as if everyone is rocked by meeting open sexual expression for the first time in college. What surprises me are the ones who’ve been sexually active since they were 13.” And even if you haven’t taken the plunge by freshman year, you certainly are surrounded by more blatant sexual messages than ever before. The classic boys’ heroes, baseball and football stars, now pose provocatively in underwear ads. Teen idols aren’t Connie Francis singing “Lipstick on My Collar,” but lingerie-clad Madonna, who mockingly croons “Like a Virgin.” It seems there are indeed some pretty fast times going on at America’s Ridgemont Highs. “If you want to see kids going nuts with sex, check out the high schools. That’s where the juices are really flowing,” one male history major at Duke stated. “And if you’re still a virgin when you get to college, it’s something that’s taken care of quickly and fairly easily.” For starters. the logistical stumbling blocks have been greatly reduced. Coed dorms and even coed floors are prevalent, and many upperclassmen and women live in off-campus housing — which isn’t to say today’s students lack imagination.
One male U.C.L.A. film major sat in a tranquil campus park and recalled the site of his own deflowering: “I got my ashes hauled right here in the Franklin D. Murphy sculpture garden. I was necking with this girl behind a bush. Our hormones were pumping, and we just went for it behind that.” He laughed, pointing to a rather stern-looking statue. “It wasn’t magic, but I couldn’t take being the only one of my friends still a virgin when I was a freshman.”
Echoing his sentiments was an unlikely cohort, a smartly uniformed, squeaky clean Air Force Academy cadet. As a squadron of equally white-bread men and women marched across the Colorado Springs field, he commented, “The pressure freshman year is, ‘Get it by Christmas.’ It finally happened for me Christmas Eve, when I was driving a friend‘s sister to the bus. She just jumped on my bones on a back road. She was a virgin, too, and wanted to get rid of it as much as I did. We were both nice kids and a nice thing, definitely nice” — he smiles — “happened.”
It used to be “nice girls don’t,” but the old order passeth. “I’d say there were still a lot of virgins in my dorm freshman year … at the start,” remembered a bright-eyed Skidmore senior, as she and some friends took a break between classes at their chilly Saratoga Springs, New York, campus. “If you hadn’t done it, like me, then you’d been thinking about it since junior high. I wanted it to be right. So I planned it. Midway freshman year, I had a boyfriend. One night I decided, ‘This is it.’ I got my parents’ country house and lots of great tapes and champagne. I really engineered it, and it was good because we both wanted it.”
Of course, college men “wanting it” has been as much a constant as death and taxes, but this student stressed that “he never pushed me into anything. That was his smartest move, because the pressure to do it was coming from myself.” Another friend elaborated:
“If you’re still a virgin girl by your junior year, you feel totally different — that is, unless you’re going to Oral Roberts U. Late at night all the girls are sitting around over pizza and talking about orgasms and you’ve never ‘done it.’ Talk about pressure.”
The dean of a midwestern school remarked, “After the virginity question, sex becomes neutral for this new generation … it’s all in how you use it.” “Or not use it,” commented one Ohio State sorority girl. “The attitudes have become more liberal, but in a strange way. People are now more accepting of conservative attitudes.” One U.C.L.A. fraternity social chairman reflected, “There seems to be an unspoken message to cool it. It’s like a lot of kids in college feel they’ve already been dragged through a psychological and sexual ringer. In light of pressure about your future these days, sex doesn’t take on the same importance it did when we were younger, but that doesn’t mean we’re not doing it. You need some release from all this tension. Kids turn to all sorts of things … even religion.”
Indeed, on many campuses, there seems to be an increasing number of students coming back to, or even experiencing for the first time, religious yearnings. Where once ragged-looking students lined U.C.L.A.’s famous Bruin Walk shouting antiwar slogans, now zealous young men in suits wave Bibles and yell prophecies to the crowd. Tables that used to offer passersby rally information now are manned by clean-cut representatives of everything from the Jewish Shabbat to Christian Bible-study classes. One handsome jock type admitted that he hadn’t been particularly religious when he came to school but is now a regular Bible-study attendant. “I think more kids are becoming religious as a way to get through the night. There’s so much pressure to be the best, to compete, that I think lots of us would really crack otherwise. We’ve tried sex and drugs in high school, and when you get here, what else is there to help you out but religion?” Though he and other religious students officially came out against premarital sex, many admitted to succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. “As long as you really love the person, it’s okay. Of course, that’s not what I’d say in Bible-study class,” the jock commented. “Lots of people think that casual, good-time, live-for-the-moment sex is the thing to do, but a lot of us really question that.”
“If you’re still a virgin by your junior year, you feel totally different. All the girls are talking about orgasms, and you’ve never ‘done it.’ Talk about pressure!”
At one point, “casual, live-for-the-moment” sex was an accepted part of any college curriculum. Checking out a cavernous, smoke-filled hangout — the Dark Horse, at the University of Colorado in Boulder — it seemed there indeed might be lots of potential roommates for the night. It’s a real good, old-fashioned college dive, complete with sweaty, blue-jeaned bodies on the pit-like dance floor, gyrating to a pop-song anthem to one-night stands, “So Many Men, So Little Time.” Two coeds in well-worn, plaid flannel shirts watched as a pigtailed girlfriend left with a “very hunky guy she’s just met,” reported one girl. The other shook her head wearily. “I’d never sleep with a guy I just met these days.”
Bedroom roulette has become Russian roulette for several reasons. An obvious one would seem to be the increased fear and prevalence of sexually transmitted disease. But most students said that fear wasn’t a real deterrent. They enter college having had vast media immersion in the subject. Most professed to have known beforehand their one-night-stand partners, while preferring to deny that even one’s best friends can have secrets not exchanged over a few beers. But what really seemed too awful to face was “getting hurt,” as a Metropolitan State girl put it. “I can’t afford the emotional drain. I want to get into a good M.B.A. program. Messing up your feelings by putting yourself sexually on the line with someone you don’t know, and then not having it work out at all, can put your grades off for a whole term,” she concluded, pragmatically.
“Today’s students are more skeptical and more mistrustful, but what’s also true is that, sexually, they take things for granted that weren’t 20 years ago,” observed Hal Pruitt, head of psychological counseling for U.C.L.A. “What’s not taken for granted is that there are no consequences. Casual sex is definitely on the outs. There’s too much of a price to pay, even for the so-called wild students.”
“Especially where ‘trains’ are concerned,” one husky blond male U.C.L.A. swim-team member pointed out. Though hardly a regular occurrence on the social calendar, the larger campuses, especially ones with fraternities and sororities, have seen a revival of an old college tradition. The blond elaborated: “In the early eighties, we all drank fairly heavily at parties, and that was the optimum condition for a train to start. I remember one time this sorority girl got really plastered and decided to go for it with a brother in his room. As they finished, his roommate, accidentally on purpose, came in — and she was feeling so crazy, she let the roommate get right on top of her. Pretty soon Bill, the brother in charge of first aid stuff like aspirin, was outside the door throwing rubbers to four or five brothers, who were lining up ready to get on board and dip their wicks. I was third or fourth, and I’m not proud of it. It’s not like she didn’t want to do it, but what I felt bad about was knowing that I’d helped this poor chick do something like that to herself. Some guys are still assholes and think it’s a neat thing, but most guys are too embarrassed these days to admit they’ve ever done it.” Other versions of this Sexual Amtrak were heard on several campuses, but it was agreed that the tradition is fading.
Decisions about sex are seen in terms of the bottom line. What’s the return on the investment? Where casual sex is concerned, it appears the dividends are increasingly considered to be too low and the investment too risky, even where the rowdiest male diehards aro concerned. A group of boisterous Boston University men echoed that feeling over several rounds of Coors in a local bar. College men have traditionally been seen as a rather tough-skinned bunch, but the new sensitivity has brought new attitudes to the surface. “Look, a dick has no conscience,” observed one tall, good-looking business major. “But when you just drop trou, you run a risk. Sophomore year I met this girl. She was jumping on my bones and I was hot for her, so we went back to my place. First I told her I had a girl and this was only for the night, and she agreed. That night we sucked and fucked away and then she was gone. I didn’t call her, but for weeks after she kept calling me and finally came to my fraternity house and yelled, ‘Asshole!’ up the stairs at me for ten minutes. She then proceeded to tell all of our mutual friends what an insensitive jerk I was. It wasn’t worth getting my rocks off.”
Of course, the tale of the wronged woman is an old standby, but these days it shows no sexual discrimination — or maybe it’s just that these days guys are willing to talk more about it. “Casual sex is a crap shoot,” said a hefty phys-ed major. “I remember I picked up a girl and had the greatest sex with her. Now I really wanted to keep seeing her, but she refused. Then it turned out she was fucking and running out on a couple of my friends — for practice! See, she’d never had an orgasm with her out-of-state boyfriend, and she was just going through guys to find one she’d be able to come with and then really practice on him so sex would be better with her other guy! Boy, talk about feeling cheap and used.”
Many women and men verified that casual sex still occurs, but now there appear to be very definite rules that everyone is expected to understand. “You have to set it up right away that there are no expectations on either side for the relationship to continue, and keep to that,” another buddy in the Boston group asserted. “We all know those encounters never lead to anything. Of course, they can, but it’s unlikely. Still, we’re not saints and some of us will say anything to get a girl to bed if we’re horny. But then, we’ll never want to see her again.”
Fellow female Boston University students had to agree that the double standard is still operative. “It kills me that a guy will push to get something and then not respect you for giving it to him, but” — one female junior said — “it happens every time. You’d have to be a fool to sleep with someone you want to see again the first time you meet him. Now, I may have first-night sex with someone, but it’ll only be away from school. People still talk.” A University of North Carolina student agreed: “There are definitely such things as ‘reputations’ about girls. It’s not so much being known as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ It’s just that a girl who is known to sleep around is seen as not being very together or smart about herself, and that’s worse than being ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”
While today’s collegians sound skeptical about some of the fruits gathered in the harvest of the sexual revolution, they’re more permissive about others. High on the list of steady items on the current college sexual menu is oral sex. A group of University of Vermont coeds sat comparing notes on a snowy afternoon. “If I’m going to be that intimate with a guy,” a blonde declared, “and there is something more intimate about oral sex than intercourse — then he should be willing to give me the same kind of pleasure. Of course, some girls don’t like it, but I do.” Some of the girls also admitted that more men get oral sex than women because some women still feel difficulties in asking for what they want. “Even with women’s lib, I was always more comfortable just letting the guy take the lead,” one girl confessed. “My boyfriend and I had been sleeping together for months and routinely he’d just kind of gently push my head downward, and there I’d be, sucking away. Now, he never made any moves to do it to me, but it’s just that I was really too scared to say what I wanted.” More than a few of the girls around the room nodded in recognition. “Finally, I just got up enough confidence to say, ‘How come you never go down on me?!’ I was real pissed off and he was surprised. ‘You never asked!’ was his answer, and it was true, I never had. Once I did ask he was more than happy to oblige, and it was great.”
One male Williams College junior, however, feels it’s better to give than to receive, and reported his first encounter with oral sex as the impetus for his sexual preferences today. “I got laid the beginning of my freshman year. But the first year I found myself doing pretty conservative missionary-position type things. I was anxious to do and feel more. It’s just that I didn’t feel all that comfortable experimenting with the girl I’d been dating. Finally, I started sleeping with a girl I’d been great buddies with. One night we got a little stoned and we were so hot for each other we couldn’t even stand the hour’s drive back to school, so we rented a motel room, and a good, aerobic time was had by all. We did everything we could think of, and finally I decided to go for the only thing I hadn’t tried: giving a girl oral sex. But, hey, I wasn’t just going to let that momentous occasion happen normally. So I got her into a vertical sixty-nine, with her legs wrapped around my shoulders and me standing up. She was understandably disoriented and surprised, but I kinda reassured her … non-verbally, of course. Then I walked around the room with her and, I must say; I was loving the pleasure she was getting. I caught a view of us in the mirror with her upside-down around my neck, and I thought, Hmmm, I look like Abe Lincoln. We both cracked up. After that I really got into oral sex and love seeing the look on a woman’s face when I do it … that gives me more pleasure than she could know.”
Oral sex notwithstanding, today’s college students tend to view walking on the kinkier side, and past generations’ fascination with sex as a sensual circus, as something that went out with love-ins. A group of Columbia University film students, in eclectic outfits ranging from high prep to vintage leather-studded Billy Idol, sat around a local New York coffeehouse and speculated about their fetishes: some ingenious uses of whipped cream and cooking oil. As one spike-haired male sophomore pointed out, “I’ve been having sex since I was 14, and when I was younger I used to lie awake fantasizing about having groups of black and white girls all over me or using weird contraptions, but no one I know has actually gotten into anything kinky. I have sex as much as I want” — his voice took on somber, mock — John Houseman tones — “the ‘old-fashioned way,’ and that’s just fine with me.” Another friend was quick to point out, “We may appear conservative, but we’re not dead. As a matter of fact, I’ve been known to take advantage of an opportunity when the time’s right. It was last summer and this girl and I were sailing her Sunfish on a crowded upstate lake. We were rubbing suntan oil on each other. I was rubbing near her tits and she was rubbing my cock, and suddenly we were just fucking away right there on the boat with all these other people sailing around us. I loved it. It was daring, but not crazy just to be crazy. As for anything wilder, well, it’s just not what people are into these days.”
That attitude seems to have little to do with any new moral stance on bacchanals. It’s more like these collegians have seen one too many reruns of “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” A prepped-out senior commented, “Don’t get me wrong. If my girlfriend initiated a little sexy domination, I wouldn’t complain” — a remark that elicited applause from all but one of the group, a New Wave junior who took a more cautious “sounds good on paper” stance after one adventuresome night with his girlfriend. “We were about to have sex when she came to bed wearing high black boots, a studded leather jacket, and nothing else,” he said, and a collective sigh of envy filled the small coffee shop booth. “Sounds great, right? Well, first of all, her boots were tearing the sheets and we kept getting tangled up in them, and then just when we were about to come” — he took a dramatic pause — “one of her jacket spikes cut my cheek and we spent the next half-hour in the bathroom trying to stop the bleeding. Kinky, sure, forget it. Well … it was kinda nice, for a change.”
“We’ve tried sex and drugs in high school,” one jock said. “And when you get to college, what else is there to help you out but religion?”
“Most students who’ve planned experimentation with mechanical aids or things like S&M or group sex were disappointed by the reality of it,” asserted U.C.L.A.’s psychological counseling head, Hal Pruitt, “especially when they tried it with partners they didn’t know that well. It only seems to have worked at all when the participants were really at ease with each other and, most importantly, nothing had been planned per se. Spontaneity was a key ingredient.”
It seems spontaneity was in full force on the occasion that Jane, a Stanford University prelaw student in a denim skirt and ponytail, recalled, as she lunched with Chris, a towheaded male fellow student. “On this particular day,” Jane remembered, “Chris. his best friend Tim, who’s a buddy of mine, and I were on our way back to school after a great three-day wine-tasting trip to Napa.” The two exchanged good-natured grins and Jane continued, “Chris and I had been sleeping with each other, really just as friends. So there was a nice feeling with the three of us anyway. Well, Chris and I were in the back …”
Chris continued: “Suddenly, there on the Golden Gate Bridge, Jane and I started making it in the backseat. What surprised me really was that after all that wine, I was actually able to get it up. Funny thing was our buddy Tim was part of that moment. After we finished, Jane and he shared a look in the rearview mirror and she nodded. I just jumped in front, took the wheel, and Tim hopped in back. Right there, Jane and he started going for it. Maybe I shouldn’t have told all that,” Chris said, looking to Jane. She squeezed his shoulder in a show of camaraderie, and continued the story. “Now, the real problem wasn’t the drivers and passengers around us who were seeing this rear end bobbing up and down in the back. It’s just that while we were making it, the car was approaching a toll booth! So I was calling out ‘slower, slower’ to Chris, who was driving, and ‘faster, faster’ to Tim, who was with me. Well, the timing was perfect and everything was back in order by the toll booth.” Chris went on, “Jane tells us we both tasted like two great bottles of wine, but she won’t tell us which one was the Chateau Lafitte.” Jane still wasn’t telling. She concluded, “It was all so natural, not like a big deal.”
One ethical “big deal” is a taboo as old as the ivy on college walls: student-faculty sex. With students who are more sexually aware arriving at college, the obstacles seem to have lifted somewhat. For one thing, with more students of both genders available to have sex, it’s not as tempting to search through the faculty lounge for experienced partners. But student-faculty sex is dismissed by students, with their new no-nonsense approach, as being far too full of potential complications, as well. Even if an irate faculty wife isn’t part of the picture, noticeable grade inflation — or worse, potential deflation at the affair’s end — is still a gruesome possibility. And when life after your B.A. is dependent on faculty evaluations, that’s a sobering thought.
Nevertheless, the practice continues. “I must admit I did have a crush on a young engineering professor,” one female University of Arizona business major recalled. “One night we were the only ones working late in the math building. While we were in the computer room, I leaned over him real close. He almost had to kiss me, which he proceeded to do. We wound up making it right there on top of the computer.” The affair only lasted a short time, but there was “always the fear that if we had a bad breakup, I’d have a grade problem. Luckily, the thing died a natural death before finals. I got a good grade, which,” she stressed, “I deserved for my classwork.” She did affirm, as had other students, that she felt grateful for the experience, but didn’t necessarily recommend it to others or feel eager for a second go-round.
Taboos have also been lifted in the sexual climate for gay students. The subject is not totally out of the closet, but the door is open to a much greater degree, and more collegians than ever have actually made their way through it. While on some campuses, posters for Gay Alliance meetings are right up there alongside those for the French Society tea, it’s still a topic given truly free rein only at the larger, more urban institutions, which attract a more sophisticated student body. Students in these settings said they felt no particular prejudice toward gay schoolmates, although one straight male U.S.C. senior candidly pointed out, “It’s not usual for us to mix socially.”
A former Big Ten football player, now a senior and “out of the closet,” confessed that he tends to keep to friends who’ve made similar choices. “It’s hard enough to be different when you’re young,” he reflected. “I just feel more comfortable around people who are struggling with the same problems that I have. People are still threatened when you make a different choice these days.” Yet a straight male fellow classmate confided he was supportive and even positive about the gay influence on campus life. “The gay element is making it easier for all of us to break down stereotypes. That, and women’s lib, make it easier for a once basically macho guy like me to think it’s okay to be sensitive, to get in touch with my more feminine side.” Indicating the bright-turquoise windbreaker he was wearing, he said, “Hey, it’s even seen in the kinds of clothes guys wear nowadays. Years ago I couldn’t have worn this kind of color without getting a lot of static.” It appears that gay students, while still small in number, may be having a greater impact.
Even though it may appear that sex is treated with a more laissez-faire attitude today, a truce has yet to be achieved in the ongoing collegiate war between the sexes. Male and female students still sit around dorm rooms over stale cups of coffee and bitch about the opposite sex, but the complaints have changed. One major gripe heard from collegiate women coast-to-coast was the “lack of aggression in men.” As one Brown University senior moaned, “It takes guys forever to ask you for a dance, let alone a date. Of course, sexually, there are some incredibly horny guys who’ll put the moves on right away, but for the most part, they’re all tentative. Sometimes I think I’d take a good 18-year-old over a college man any day. I think women’s lib and the sexual revolution have done lots of good things, but one negative result has been to scare the shit out of guys.”
That woman’s complaint wasn’t far off target, judging from comments made by college men. “I definitely find myself more afraid to make the first move,” one Yale man stated. Looking like academe’s answer to Robert Redford, you’d never guess he had a problem. The reasons, he explained, are linked to the shifting roles of the sexes in contemporary society. “Women seem so much stronger these days, and I don’t think men have caught up with feeling how strong they themselves can be. Women act like they don’t need you at a party, and seem so standoffish that you’re sure you’ll be rejected, even if it turns out the girl’s been dying to meet you.” A freshman from Dartmouth agreed: “It used to be the women who looked scared at parties. Now the women are the ones casing the guys out. I don’t think guys really know how to deal with that. Sexually, I happen to love it when a woman turns the tables and is more aggressive with me. It doesn’t threaten my masculinity at all, but everyone’s scared to take chances. We’d all like the safe way out.”
“We’re not saints and some of us will say anything to get a girl to bed if we’re horny. But then, we’ll never want to see her again!”
The “safe way out,” for many, used to mean graduating to the strains of “Goin’ to the chapel …” Although marriage in general has been on the increase, many students, even the most conservative, expressed reticence about tying the knot too soon after college. Just as they’re practical about the harsh realities of other aspects of life, they’re level-headed about the pitfalls of marriage — especially an early one. Most of them cited high divorce rates as the source of their hesitancy to go through with the vows, even if they’ve had steady partners throughout their college years. Once considered more interested in pursuing an “M.R.S.” than a B.A., increasing numbers of women are more concerned with guaranteeing steady employment for themselves after their college career than with steady dating throughout it. A University of Florida woman summed up her immediate focus on a career in this way: “You always have time to get married, and then if you fuck it up, at least you’re going to really have something solid to fall back on that will always be with you.”
Then just what do today’s contemporary students yearn for? A University of Michigan senior, home in Los Angeles for the holidays, contemplated the question as he reigned over a beach party at his parents’ Malibu home. His father is a successful film producer and he feels he’s had more than his share of the good life. “I’ve had cash in my pocket, I’m good-looking, and I’ve been getting laid since I was 15, but you wanna know what my ultimate fantasy is?” He paused, throwing a volleyball out to some spirited companions. “With all that’s available, my biggest turn-on would be to finally get to know and love someone and then experience what it would be like to make love with them. What I want is personal contact, deep personal contact with someone. And that’s so hard to get. Of course, some people just hide out for four years with a steady, but they’ll break up after graduation. People say romance is back, and you see more couples pairing up now, but that’s only for security. They’re scared. Most of us would rather hang out in groups. These girls here are really friends of mine. I like them as people and I’d rather have them as girls to pal around with.”
A girl in denim shorts seconded the thought: “The quickest way to screw up a friendship is to sleep together. There are so many things to cope with in college today. You need all the help you can get, and most of us have found out that just getting laid doesn’t provide it.” Most of the group felt more comfortable putting their priorities in something other than sex. “And it isn’t because we don’t want to fall in love, it’s just such a long shot,” one girl commented. A burly football player handed out some margaritas, saying, “During the past years, some great things have happened, but it’s also like we’ve been through some kind of emotional nuclear war. Now, we’re all behaving like the superpowers. Everybody’s got their deterrents up.”
Back at the U.C.L.A. hangout in Westwood, those deterrents are an important factor in Jimmy’s reaction, as his older brother urges him to make some decisions. There are the two girls Jimmy could leave the bar with, the brunette or the redhead. “You wanna get fucked or fall in love?” B. J. teasingly reiterates, indicating Jimmy’s options — at one time, any college man’s dream. Suddenly, Jimmy is nowhere to be seen. His brother finds him out on the street in his convertible. Alone. “Jimmy, don’t tell me you’d rather go home and study?!” Jimmy pauses. “No, but it’s a helluva lot simpler,” he says with a knowing smile. The car speeds off into traffic as another, packed with students, takes its place. “Let’s go for it!” resounds through the air once again as another horde of kids enters Stratton’s to make their choices in today’s collegiate sexual smorgasbord.
It has been a few years — well, 40 of them — since this initial publication, but as near as we can tell, young people still have a lot of sexual activity on campus with its inherent mathematical consequences. Granted, we happen to know more than a few folks who could have Ph.D. degrees in the topic should that have been the option, but our circle of acquaintances may not quite match that of most people. Still, the group can never be too small, nor too big, for a little higher education. And if brave that little calculation we linked, and you happen to know someone who hit over 2.2 billion “indirectly exposed” as an answer, perhaps it might be better to limit your future interactions to lunch, or maybe just coffee.
