October 16, 2009
College students putting sex on display

Posted at 11:55 am, in: Moral Relativism
Tags: American University, Ben Gittleson, College of William and Mary, Oberlin College, Roger Williams University, Sexile, St. John's College, Tufts University, University of Maryland, Washington and Lee University, Wesleyan University

The fact that colleges have to put it in writing that having sex while your roommate is in the room is unexceptable makes a very loud statement about how badly we have screwed up:

In an era of coed dorms and slackening rules about “overnight guests,” a new constituency has emerged on college campuses: the roommate inconvenienced by sex.

Shielding a cohabitant from moments of intimacy is an article of collegiate etiquette as old as the sexual revolution. In the previous generation, a tie or sock hung from a doorknob served as a do-not-disturb sign. Today, the warning is more commonly delivered by text message. At some point, students displaced from their rooms came to be known as “sexiles”.

Schools around Washington have mostly tiptoed around the issue of roommate sex, reminding students in general terms of the need for common civility. No student at St. John’s College in Annapolis may “knowingly interfere with the sleep or study” of another. Students at Washington and Lee University in Lexington are told to mind the “rights and sensibilities of others.” Students at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg sign a roommate agreement that covers overnight guests along with cleanliness and borrowed food.

Tufts University, near Boston, raised eyebrows this fall by going where its peers would not. The school has banned sexual activity in dorm rooms when a roommate is present.

“It happens, not often, but it happens enough,” said Ben Gittleson of Gaithersburg, a 20-year-old Tufts junior. “I think it’s ridiculous that people can’t talk it out with their roommates. But people aren’t always considerate, and roommates aren’t always assertive enough.”

Tufts may be the first college in the nation to make explicit what other schools have only hinted: It is not cool to have sex in front of your roommate.

The action also is notable as a baby-step backward in the decades-long march toward fully coeducational living. Colleges have steadily loosened rules about romantic guests as they have brought the genders closer together, first in coed dorms, then coed floors, and finally coed rooms. Couples can now share a dorm room at a growing number of schools, including Wesleyan University and Oberlin College. (Oberlin also hosts an annual Safer Sex Night.) Students can share an apartment at American University or University of Maryland. School officials note that the trend toward mixed-gender housing is intended to promote gender neutrality, not romantic cohabitation.

I really don’t have much to say for this. It kind of speaks for itself. Well, I guess it doesn’t. I mean, if people are so disgusting that it has become common place for schools to have to spell it out that you shouldn’t be having sex in front of other people, then I guess all rules of common decency need to be spelled out.

This actually happened to me in college. My second year at Roger Williams. It was probably a bad idea for them to buy a hotel for us to live in. We can mark that down as their first mistake. It must have been the second week of school. I hadn’t known my roommate prior to that. I couldn’t tell you her name if my life depended on it. All I recall about her was that her screen saver was just the phrase “Sexy B*tch” bouncing around the screen. She might have been hanging out with Meghan McCain, now that I think about it.

Anyway, I was sleeping and woke up to some interesting sounds. I was not pleased. I got up, grabbed my stuff, and walked out. I went and crashed on a couch in my friends Dennis and Panos’s room. Needless to say, the next day I asked to be removed from that room. Thank goodness, too! I stayed in the same apartment for the next three years and the view of the bay was gorgeous. I knew I was paying all of that money for something, and it certainly wasn’t an education.

Back to the story at hand. America is full of sluts, and I’m not just talking about women. I wrote an article a couple of years back about the newest wave of feminism: Slut Feminism. Basically, as I see it, slut feminism, is “where the new test of gender equality is how openly promiscuous a woman can be without judgment or penalty.” It’s kind of sad, really.

I mean, when our parents were promoting the sexual revolution is this what they envisioned? Did they really think that a life filled with empty, meaningless sex would make their daughters happy? Can it be considered as a step forward for our society when our children, and these college kids are still children, have such little regard for sex and privacy that they have no shame performing sex acts with other people in the room?

It’s funny because these same kids would probably talk down to a stripper, like having sex in a room full of others is somehow acceptable to them. They probably think they’re better just because they are working toward a degree, but I would have to disagree. Look, strippers might take their clothes off for money, but they’re not having sex in public. What does it say about our society when strippers have more decency than our college-educated children? Yuk!

I think where women lost their way is when they decided that instead of trying to get men to be more chaste they decided that women should be more promiscuous. The challenge became for us to out-raunch men so many women just became pigs. I think I summed it up best in that column I wrote all of those years ago:

Sexual freedom has turned into sexual obsession. Perversion and promiscuity are applauded, morality and chastity condemned. Female college students of the slut feminism camp are finally equal to the men. It’s a shame, though, that they view equality as an equal number of notches on their belts.

But, I’m sure I’m just being a judgmental prude so I’ll shut up now.