To outsiders, American pop culture has made college culture all about sex, and lots of it. This trend occurs for an understandable reason: sex sells; attractive sex sells better. So, our media relies on young, attractive individuals getting it on to make sex even sexier. Thus, movies and television series are constantly portraying young adults as highly sexual beings, leading younger demographics to believe that being sexually active is not only cool and fun, but also normal and almost necessary to fitting in.
When I think of college culture as shown in the media, I think of what many consider to be classic American college-aged films, such as Van Wilder and the American Pie series. These movies promote sex in the context of college by including nudity, story lines with characters seeking out sexual activity, and crude sexual language. Many films targeting the same audience—Easy A, Superbad, Project X, 22 Jump Street, to name a few—follow suit, with sex infiltrating the plot regardless of if it is crucial to the main storyline or not. Based off of these media, being of college age looks like it means being caught in a sexual frenzy.
When I actually became a part of the college culture, what I found to be true about sex and sexuality was pretty different from what I was led to believe. Yes, casual sex does occur. People do go home with practical strangers on any given night. But, a lot of sex also doesn’t happen. People fall all across the spectrum: people are doing it frequently, people have only done it a few times, and people are still virgins. And guess what? Any of these categories are totally and completely normal.
Not all college sex is crazy, carefree, and ephemeral. It is not necessarily the “hook-up culture” it is widely portrayed to be. A 2013 study by the American Sociologic Association found that of the sexually active population of college kids, only one-third have had more than one partner in the past year. The study shows that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of college students who are having sex are not doing so frequently or with several different partners.
Further, not everyone is having or has even had sex. The American Sociologic Association’s same study found that 1 in 4 college students is a virgin. Also, a National Center for Health Statistics survey found that this number is only increasing—a conclusion that may surprise many, for even though we are seeing it in reality, it goes against everything our culture has conditioned us to believe.
So then why are movies likeVan Wilder and Easy A telling us otherwise? What's interesting about these movies, however, is that they show the effect that the overtly sexual college culture they're promoting has on kids before they even reach college. In these story lines, high school kids are so burdened by the pressure to lose their virginity that it takes over their lives. Story lines like these are bound to leave an impression on younger minds so that they are lead to believe that going to college means having sex a lot, or at least being expected to have sex a lot. There is a pressure to prepare for such an environment that inevitably pushes some people out of their comfort zones for the sake of fitting in, of avoiding embarrassment. This pressure is something we all need to not only be aware of but also abstain from further perpetuating for the sake of everyone's sanity.
Here's the thing: the hook-up culture is college's biggest illusion. Sure, it exists, but it is not the be-all end-all. It is important to recognize how sensationalized sex is in college and to know that there is no one sex culture that you need to conform to. Wherever you fall on the scale, whatever you do or do not do, know that you have no reason to feel uncomfortable about anything and that you are just where you are supposed to be.
