In short, we encountered an almost bewildering variety of sexual experiences. Gender is now not just mutable, even the concept is optional, and identity comprises a set of categories that can be sliced as finely as you want: Be a demi-girl who identifies with the female binary be a graysexual panromantic transman. There’s plenty of that old classic, straight-girl collegiate lesbian experimentation, but there are also trans students and pansexual students and bi students and gay students - not to mention the asexuals and aromantics - all happily trying out identities on one another. There is a new kind of freedom, too: a seemingly infinite array of genders and sexualities. The following pages are, as much as possible, a record through their eyes of what it means to be young and in college and sexually aware in 2015. We polled more than 700 of them and spoke extensively to dozens more about their sexual histories. Their peers in the pictures were then interviewed about their experiences all were open and eager to share about their lives (itself a generational phenomenon). All the photographs you will find below were shot by students.
In an attempt to get past the existing media narratives, and the moralizing that comes with them, New York asked college students what they think about the campus-sex climate. To them, college sex isn’t a headline but something real. Some worry that the notion of “ affirmative consent” - every step toward sex being explicitly agreed to with a “yes” - is overkill and unrealistic others argue that it serves to protect both men and women in an environment where an unpredictable swirl of alcohol, hormones, newfound freedom, and relative inexperience can result in the best experience of a young life - or the very worst.Īnd yet, for all there is to worry about - and we old folks love nothing more than worrying about the sex lives of young people - campuses are still filled with college kids excited about one another and the thrill of a night that’s just beginning. And the proposed solutions to the problem have created their own controversy. A new generation of activists has raised awareness of what appears to be a crisis: Studies show that as many as 25 percent of college women report having been raped, and college administrations have been repeatedly criticized for their anemic responses to alleged assaults. The apparent rise of rape on campus is more recent and more disconcerting.
Or, more likely, you just continue to hook up, creating a long-term relationship - minus feelings, theoretically - out of a series of one-night stands. The script, according to this ritual, is: First you fuck, then (perhaps) you date. It could mean anything from kissing to intercourse, with a crush, with a friend, or, yes, sometimes with a relative stranger. Even among college students, it’s defined differently from person to person and situation to situation. But a hookup is not always the blithe and meaningless sex with strangers that the term conjures. Hand-wringing over what has become known as hookup culture is nothing new, of course - the panicky-sounding term has been around for decades now. College sex as both playland and minefield. And yet, at the same time, news about the high incidence of rape has reached a fever pitch - leaving students, not to mention their parents, worried about their safety. The sexual revolution has been won, and many campuses resemble great drunken bacchanals in which men and women can choose to participate in no-strings-attached, or at least few-strings-attached, experimentations in lust - sex without stigma or shame.
It would seem to be a pretty confusing time to be a college student, at least as far as sex is concerned. COLLEGE SEX 2015: An Introduction By Lauren Kern and Noreen Malone