If it seems like I’ve been writing about college students and sex a lot lately, it’s because 1) it’s a major issue, and 2) it’s been in the news a lot recently.
The WSJ offers a helpful review of the book Sex and the Soul by Donna Freitas. Freitas writes about the prevalence of Hook-Up culture in today’s universities and the devastating effects on both men and women in their views of sex, each other, and themselves.
No doubt lurid anecdote and popular myth cause us to exaggerate the actual frequency of campus hook-ups: Most college students do not share in these delights. But most students also believe that “everyone does it,” even if the individual student, for some reason, cannot locate a partner. Thus an active minority sets the tone and makes hooking up a “culture.” When there are no sexual boundaries, either official or informal, the standard becomes the extreme, and all students feel the pressure to appear more promiscuous than they are. The traditional double standard of sexual conduct – more restrictive for women than for men – has been replaced by the single standard of the predatory male.
The Sexual Revolution has not resulted in equality, empowerment, and enlightenment among men and women. Rather, it seems to have done the opposite.
According to one feminist professor of health – the head of a recent Harvard committee on student sexual relations – sex on campus should be “mature, respectful and life-affirming.” But, as Ms. Freitas shows, it usually is not. Instead it degrades both women and men. Women lose their sense of having a choice, to say nothing of “autonomy,” the supposed goal of sexual liberation. They feel compelled to offer a hook-up when they really want a date without the expectation of sex. And yet they fear “getting a reputation” for doing just what they are expected to do. “I felt a lot of regret . . . ,” one female student tells Ms. Freitas, speaking about a hook-up experience. “I felt that I kind of just gave myself.”
College men, meanwhile, degrade themselves by becoming callous. They behave like charmless Don Giovannis who cannot sing. They are indignant at girls who “want to spend time with guys during the day.” The nerve!
She also examines how sexual identity and pressures are dealt with among the “religious” and the “spiritual.”
Rather than confine her interviews to secular colleges, she visits religious ones, both Catholic and evangelical. The Catholic colleges, she finds, are little different from their secular counterparts; they seem “more adept at creating lapsed Catholics than anything else.”
But evangelical colleges make an effort to oppose the hook-up culture with a “purity culture,” asking a level of sexual restraint that would seem, for most young people today, all but impossible. One is inclined to admire the students who attempt to meet the purity culture’s strict demands. But it is clear that such students often suffer deep anxiety in their search for a mate. The boys find it troublingly difficult to put off sex, and the girls are fearful that they will have failed in college if they do not get a “ring by spring” (of their senior year). While students in the hook-up culture appear more promiscuous than they are, purity students appear more virtuous than they are…
Ms. Freitas considers sex to be a yearning of the soul, not an expression of power (as feminists would have it). She thus dubs secular colleges “spiritual,” noting that women in particular enter into hook-ups looking for a “relationship.” Both sexes, she argues, foregather “for a reason,” if not necessarily for marriage. Both would like to have a shot at the romance (from olden times) they have read about. But romance requires holding back, and no one at Ms. Freitas’s “spiritual” colleges has a respectable reason for doing so.
What about the role of the University in all this? Does it have one? Should it?
Colleges find it risky, Ms. Freitas notes, to oppose the hook-up culture. They do not boast of it when parents visit, but they are happy to look the other way throughout the year. Their main concern is to be sure that they cannot be accused of treating men and women differently, and they do not care, or do not see, that the result of sexual liberation is a culture that does harm to the young people caught within it. “Sex and the Soul” doesn’t offer an easy way out, because there isn’t one. But it makes us eager for something better than the goings-on at colleges today.
If the colleges won’t do it, how can friends, fellowship groups, and churches help students not fall prey to destructive sexual practices. Students, what have you found helpful in this?
