Much is made these days about the "hookup culture" pervading college campuses, leading young women to eschew monogamous relationships in favor of 2am booty calls and one-night stands. But the truth is, most college students these days have a sex life not very different from what their parents or even grandparents experienced, writes Eliana Dockterman in Time. Since many of these media "trend pieces" focus on Ivy League schools and Dockterman graduated from Yale, she focuses on the Ivy League to bust three myths about college students and sex:
- College students aren't actually choosing casual sex over meaningful relationships. If you actually crunch the survey numbers, not that many students are reporting rampant promiscuity with multiple partners.
- Female Ivy Leaguers actually do have time for serious partners. Many of these articles paint female Ivy Leaguers as simply too ambitious to be interested in a time-consuming relationship, but anecdotal evidence and at least one Yale survey find that's just not the case.
- None of this is all that different from previous generations. Compare studies, and you'll find that premarital sex on college campuses has traditionally been at about the same level it's at now.
The real difference? "The amount that we talk about sex and the way we talk about it," Dockterman writes. "We are making a topic that was conversationally taboo a few decades ago central to our concerns about the moral decline of the nation." Click for
her full column. (More
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