B’’H

Are you happy?

My first sex talk came in second grade, on the bus home.

“You need to have sex to make babies,” Joey calmly explained.

“Really?” We all listened eagerly, ears poking over seat-backs.

“Yes, it’s true.”

We nodded like we’d always known and sat back down. But this was news—big news. Sex was
something obliquely alluded to on TV, and babies came from… Well, it had never come up.

Lying in bed that night next to my dad, I asked him what sex was. He confirmed the day’s discovery and
explained that sex was a result of love, of caring about someone very deeply. He was not ashamed and I
was comforted; I didn’t think about it for two years.

Then Sexual Education began, in fourth grade science class, with a series of videos depicting example
after example of animals mating. Sex was natural: all animals did it.

Sex ed continued every year thereafter, annually reviewing the mechanics of sex and now informing us
about Sexually Transmitted Diseases. As seventh grade rolled around, most of the class “hit puberty,”
and we learned about many of the physical things that were now happening to our bodies, starting with
higher levels of “hormones” and an attraction to the opposite gender.

Yet our academic curriculum, perhaps in an effort to avoid value-judgments and religion, did not once
suggest what we should do. I was informed as to the awful consequences of teenage pregnancy and the
proper way to put a condom on your fingers by a very large, bear-like and grim gym teacher, but nothing
was said about my newfound desire to be close to my best friend, a girl.

Sex, we learned, we had to navigate alone.

So we devoured the only sources that did offer direction: TV shows, teen magazines and the popular
wisdom based on them. “If you like them then date them,” we were told. The motivation? “Your
pleasure or your reputation.”

And the way we relate to sex today, with much more at stake than our bruised popularity, is still based
almost entirely on the oft-repeated advice of those teenage magazines.

‘Sex Out Loud’

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On campus, there exist a myriad of organizations dealing with sex: Promoting Awareness Victim
Empowerment (PAVE), Sex Out Loud, the Campus Women’s Center, Domestic Abuse Intervention
Services (DAIS), Men Stopping Rape, and many others.

I constantly receive emails exhorting me to “Be a Resource” in the fight against campus violence.

Columns in both major campus newspapers constantly tell me how to get laid.

People in the dorms constantly talk about who they’ve hooked up with or who they’re planning on
hooking up with.

And I’m constantly amazed by how little we talk about the actual issue: how incredibly alone we all feel
and how this culture of hooking up only reinforces that isolation.

This fall, Sex Out Loud was invited to my dorm for “Safer Sex,” a program whose goal, as per the
organization’s website, is “for individuals to assess the safety of their own sexually-active behavior… and
learn how to better protect her-/himself and others against STIs and pregnancy.”

The first activity comprised choosing three “sexual activities” listed on the table—ranging from talking to
mutual masturbation—and creating a story that included those actions.

Graphic stories told, the presenters explained that the goal of the activity was to “think about sex out of
the natural order.”

Wait, I thought, this could be good: possibly a new paradigm, a challenge to hook up culture?

The student presenter continued: “You know, kiss, hand-job, clothes off, sex. Penis, vagina, in-out-
done." The natural order.

The program continued similarly.

I approached one of the students presenting during a break to ask if he thought sex had meaning. "We
believe in the fluidity of terms such as monogamy, virginity and sex,” he answered. “The program can be
helpful to people regardless. They can tell their friends who are sexually active."

This program, virtually the only on campus to even superficially discuss sex and its consequences,
epitomizes the prevailing campus paradigm of sex, a paradigm that assumes sex is inevitable, calls on
you to suppress your sense of shame until it disappears, and fails to acknowledge a single emotional
consequence of sex.

And worst of all, the media and dorm-talk and programs all make us think we’re expected to have sex,
because that’s just what people do in college.

Apparently, though, not quite everyone does.

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UW Sociology Professor John Delamater teaches Psych. 169, Human Sexuality. Having heard hundreds of
students’ views on the subject each semester, he is uniquely knowledgeable about campus
relationships.

“At least a third of my students are in continuing relationships, with one person,” he says.

“About half the males and a third of females had [ever] engaged in casual sex 1,” he pointed out. These
proportions contrast sharply with college students’ perception: 9 out of 10 think hookups occur “very
often” in college.2

What’s more, in Madison the numbers are even lower: Professor Delamater recently conducted several
focus groups and found that on average only 3-4 of a dozen men and 2-3 of a dozen women talked
about hooking up.

When I expressed my disbelief to Professor Delamater that so few hooked up, he explained, “It’s a
phenomenon called ‘pluralistic ignorance’: everyone thinks that everyone else is doing more than they
are, whether it’s having sex, drinking alcohol, [etc]. Part of the phenomenon is that these people stand
out… What doesn’t get publicity is the kids studying in the library, or going to the movies.”

“But the reality is, when we investigate, that they’re not [having sex]—fewer people than you would
think.”

‘Sex and the Soul’

A study by Boston University Professor Donna Freitas, published as the book Sex and the Soul: Juggling
Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses, comes to a similar
conclusion. In it, she argues that many students only participate in hook up culture because they think
they’re supposed to, and end up hurt in the process.

Here are some of the responses of nearly 500 college students on how they felt the morning after a
hookup:

The largest group (41%) responded negatively, “expressing such emotions as feeling awkward, used,
dirty, empty, regretful, ashamed, alone, miserable, disgusted, duped, and, in the words of several,
abused.”

One said, “Dirty is the best word for how I feel about myself.” Another: “I have felt disconnected with
myself, as though I were a person I wouldn’t talk to.”

1
Referring to the study “No Strings Attached: The Nature of Casual Sex Among College Students,” Journal of Sex
Research (2006).
2
91% of respondents to a 2001 study by the International Women’s Health Forum said hookups occur “very often”
in college.
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And what’s more, students consistently have exactly the opposite romantic ideal: 4 out of 5 respondents
believe the best romance is sex-less. 3

Freitas says most girls see hookups as the best way into a meaningful relationship—a strange inversion
of the more traditional talk-then-kiss script. Even those who want a real connection—and Freitas’ study
shows that the overwhelming majority of college students do—don’t know how to begin one. They’re
struggling, alone, to genuinely understand their sexuality, and if Freitas’ research is anywhere near the
truth, they’re failing.

The one thing we’re not alone in, these figures and stories and interviews suggest, is in hiding our pain.

Two half-souls

Sex Out Loud has succeeded in many ways: it enters dorms to start a conversation about the problem,
i.e. students hurting themselves, and it seeks to accept students and make them comfortable with who
they are—a laudable goal.

But what Sex Out Loud misses is that sex is not only about pleasuring yourself while protecting yourself.
It accepts “our” ideas about sex, which we truly want not accepted but challenged because they are
foreign—the product of movies and magazine articles mined for some glimmer of direction. Sex Out
Loud accepts uncritically pop culture’s depiction of sex as a tool of self-pleasure.

The question is: are we ready to accept that? Is there not something better?

I hazard that the answer come from a radically different place:

The Midrash4 tells us: “…when a soul descends to this world, half of it descends in one body [of the man]
and half of it descends in a second body [of the woman]… within each of them there resides no more
than half a soul.”

This is based on an ancient Jewish teaching: G-d first created Adam as a dual-gender human being, both
male and female. The subsequent creation of Eve was not a new creation but rather the rending of
those two aspects. And those aspects are fundamentally incomplete when separate.

Our longing for another human being, our essential incompleteness we begin to sense just as sex ed
pretends to offer a solution, is powerful and beautiful when channeled in the right ways:

When a relationship is based on giving (not getting), on a foundation of mutual respect (not ‘like’), and
on a recognition of the other person’s soul (not body), then love can blossom. Not the empty love that

3
79% of students responded with an ideal romance that consisted of talking/kissing. Over and over again, Freitas
listened to students whose most romantic experience was “just talking,” or “talking for hours.” She writes:
“[S]tudents are looking for communication. Talking without sex. Without so much as a kiss. Romance, to them, is
chaste.”
4
A compilation of ancient Rabbinic interpretation that fills in the gaps in the Written Torah (5 books of Moses).
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so often dogs hookups, but the endless love that comes from committing to spend the rest of your life
with the other half of your soul.

It comes down to one thing: when you look deep within yourself, are you actually happy when you hook
up with someone? If not the last time you did, then the time before, or the time before that—before
you toughened yourself so that you did not feel anymore. You did not feel the pain that comes from
knowing you have not lived up to your true self. The pain that comes from feeling like nothing more
than an unfamiliar and awkward body, from feeling like you have denigrated a potentially beautiful
activity and two beautiful people.

When you walk into the room, it is just you and the other person, stripped of expectation. And when
you’re so exposed, on the verge of profound intimacy with someone whose insecurities and beauty you
may know nothing about, it is tremendously uncomfortable. You can put on a mask, dripping of alcohol,
and avoid the reality of that discomfort. And if you do, if you choose to push on in willful ignorance, you
will most likely cause someone to respond to a survey like Freitas’ saying he/she felt “awkward, used,
dirty, empty, regretful, ashamed, alone, miserable, disgusted, duped, and… abused.” Someone, that is,
besides you.

We need a new discussion on campus. A discussion that recognizes pop culture and sex ed and the
“sexual liberation movement,” hitherto our sole guides in forming our personal sexual boundaries, as
the true causes of our failure in finding meaning in sex.

We’ve been looking to all these movements and ideologies and outside sources for an answer. Stop
looking outward and start looking in: the answer is within you.