Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  The girls I talked to often spoke of “going crazy” as an integral part of “the college experience”; they sounded like they were all quoting from the same travel brochure. I’m not sure when that phrase began to refer specifically to drunken partying. Although I recall a certain amount of alcohol and weed when I was at school, if someone had asked me to describe it, I would have said the “college experience” was more about redefining myself away from my family through intense late-night talks with friends, exposure to alternative music and film, finding my passions, falling in love. But according to a blistering exposé by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, as tuitions have skyrocketed, universities apparently need to convince “consumers” (their prospective students) that it’s worth the staggering debt they’ll take on to attend. What better enticement than to position higher education as not only edifying, but off-the-chain fun? “Every moment of the experience is sweetened,” Flanagan wrote, “by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager . . . they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!” That’s a far cry from the original purpose of universities: to train young men for the ministry, a process that involved asceticism, temperance, and chastity.

  When I asked why they didn’t hook up sober, girls would laugh and say that would be awkward—their catchall word (along with uncomfortable and, sometimes, weird) for any unpleasant emotion. In this case, what seemed to unnerve them was not only having nothing on which to “blame” their behavior, but the idea of being fully emotionally, psychologically, and physically present in a sexual encounter. “Being sober makes it seem like you want to be in a relationship,” one freshman told me. “It’s really uncomfortable.”

  That first night Connor tagged along with Holly, they both got tipsy and kissed on the dance floor. The next day, they attended a football game together. Within a week, she had given him oral sex, something she’d never done before. “It was like, ‘Whoa! Where did this come from?’” she said. “He didn’t even ask. I was slightly alcohol-induced, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m just going to go for it.’ And I thought, ‘You know, this isn’t too bad. Why was I making a big deal about it?’” She paused, considering. “That was the moment, I think, when I became a lot less uptight.”

  Looking back on it, Holly believed she was “too generous” with Connor—she wanted to make him “happy,” but he didn’t seem to return the sentiment. “There was one night I asked, ‘Do you want to give me oral?’” she said. “He went down on me for about a half second. Then he said, ‘I just can’t do this. It grosses me out.’”

  “I mean, I had a good time,” she continued, “but it wouldn’t be about me. My orgasm was never a given. It was not as important. It was not part of the deal.”

  Two weeks after their first hookup, Connor asked Holly to be his girlfriend. She was thrilled. He never pressured her to have intercourse, she said; he told her to just tell him when she was ready. A month later, she was. She thought it would be “like the movies: this magical and beautiful moment.” She even decorated her room with Christmas lights for the occasion. Instead, it hurt. A lot. “I made him stop. We kissed for a little while and cuddled and were cute with each other. And then I said we could try again. It lasted a little longer, but it still hurt too much.”

  Intercourse may have been a disappointment for Holly, but it still felt like an accomplishment, a milestone. After Connor left, she strutted into a friend’s room blasting the song “I Just Had Sex” on her iPod (a somewhat ironic choice, given that the lyrics—“I just had sex, / And it felt so good, / A woman let me put my penis inside of her”—describe a guy who is comically oblivious to his partner). “I was like, I feel so cool!” she said. “I feel like such a grown-up! And I had shared this special moment with a guy who I liked and trusted and who I had feelings for and who had feelings for me. Also, I was sober—that was very important to me. I was not going to have sex the first time drunk. I wanted to be able to experience it.”

  Connor broke up with her two days later.

  This was a boy who had compared their relationship to his parents’ (who had also begun dating each other the second month of freshman year). He had talked about how much he’d miss her over winter break, which was still over a month away. He had asked her to be his girlfriend. Holly was devastated. She left school two days early for the Thanksgiving break, needing to get away.

  When her parents picked her up at the train station, her mom looked her up and down. “You lost your virginity,” she said.

  “I asked her how she knew,” Holly told me. “And she said, ‘Look at you. You’re a mess! I hope that’s a good lesson for you about not giving your body away to just anyone.’”

  Girls’ ideas and attitudes about sex are shaped by family, media, friends, and their own experience. Holly had followed the contemporary rules of female sexual respectability, done everything she believed was “right,” and she was betrayed. She responded by giving up on love and commitment. She wanted to be “not feeling-less, exactly, but not in a relationship.” Besides, she was busy: doing her schoolwork, pledging her sorority, going to parties. She still planned to reserve intercourse for a committed partner, whenever that might happen. “I felt like”—she stopped and corrected herself. “I still feel like it means something, that you’re intimately connected and really like this person and you’re showing affection.”

  Since she didn’t have a boyfriend, Holly invited a male buddy from her dorm to her sorority’s winter date party in February. They arrived already loaded—she’d had six shots at pregames. After the party, she went back to his room thinking they would make out, but she was still awfully drunk. So when he said she was beautiful and that he’d like to have sex with her, she thought, “Why not?”

  A few minutes later, she felt as if she’d snapped out of a trance. “I thought, ‘Holy shit! I’m having sex and I’m not supposed to be doing this unless I’m in a relationship.’” Holly panicked, telling the boy she needed to stop. He urged her to stay, but she jumped out of bed and threw on her dress. Still barefoot, holding her shoes, she flung open the door of his room to find a group of young men standing directly outside, listening in. She ran to a friend’s room and cried.

  “I was so upset with myself that I’d had sex outside of a relationship,” Holly said. “Which I eventually got over. Now I don’t care so much about that. I just care that I know the guy. But back then, in my head, I was a skank. I was one of those skanks who just has sex with people. I was a bad person.”

  Everyone’s Slutty Friend

  A picture of a kitten hung on one wall of Megan Massoud’s room. Above her pillow was a poster from Pulp Fiction, the one in which Uma Thurman lies stomach-down on a bed, her stiletto-shod feet crossed at the ankles, a cigarette dangling from the fingers of one hand, a pistol flung casually near the other. Megan’s desk was littered with half-drunk bottles of Coke Zero, open boxes of cookies, and several shot glasses. I picked my way through piles of clothes heaped on the floor, cleared a chair of some laundry, and sat down, resting my feet on a polka-dotted hassock.

  Megan, a sophomore at a midwestern public university majoring in economics, was tiny (barely five feet tall), with enormous dark eyes, a quick smile, and flat-ironed dark hair that she would absentmindedly braid and unbraid as we spoke. Her mom, she said, was a “generic white woman.” Her dad, who was Lebanese, gave her a pink lipstick-shaped canister of pepper spray just before her freshman year; Megan kept it out as a joke. “He thinks I’m a virgin,” she said, laughing.

  Megan pulled on a cropped orange tank top and a thigh-grazing skirt that hugged her butt and fit tight across the stomach. She examined herself in the mirror from the front, from the side, from the back. “Does my stomach look big in this?” she asked a friend, who was standing in the doorway. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “I’m not fucking with you,” the friend said. “You look hot. Like the skinniest fucking bitch.” Megan
looked at herself again, dissatisfied. “I never think about what I eat until I get dressed for a party. Then I think I shouldn’t have had that extra doughnut,” she said.

  As she continued to dress, Megan told me about the Gender Studies class she was taking this semester. “I had never noticed that guy models in ads are always doing something—playing a guitar or driving—and girl models are just . . .” She struck a classic pose: head tilted, chin down, hand on hip, a coy smile.

  I laughed. “You do that really well,” I said.

  “I haven’t taken a picture without the head tilt since I was six,” she replied. “I don’t know where I learned it.”

  She looked again at her stomach, again at her butt. She changed her shirt. She pulled off her skirt, tried on a different one, decided the first made her stomach look better, changed back. “In my gender class I’m all, ‘That damned patriarchy,’” she said. “But at night it all goes to shit. The only thing I care about is: ‘Does this skirt make my ass look good?’” She grabbed her cosmetics pouch and headed to the bathroom. Although she hates makeup, she said, it’s part of attracting guys’ attention, so she swiped on dark lipstick and some smoky, sparkly eye shadow. She smoothed her hair with two hands (a brush in one, a comb in the other), put on a pair of four-inch heels, and doused herself with perfume. “It makes me feel less self-conscious to wear the outfit and the heels,” she said. “I feel kind of like I’m swaggering, like, ‘Yes, I am the baddest bitch in this room.’” The evening was cold, but Megan didn’t take a jacket. Nor did she carry a purse. She held her keys and school ID in one hand (later she would lose both) and tucked her phone and iPod into the waistband of her skirt, which was tight enough to hold them fast. She looked in the mirror one last time, turning to check her butt, and tugged down the hem of her skirt, a gesture she’d repeat every few minutes throughout the evening. She grabbed a bottle of vodka to share at pregames, and headed out the door. It was nearly ten o’clock. Her goal? “To get really drunk and make out with someone,” she said cheerfully. “Because what’s the point of a night if you aren’t getting attention from guys?”

  The stigma of “slut” didn’t disappear with the rise of hookup culture. Its criteria just became ever more elusive. Girls routinely told me they hated the word, that they never used it, didn’t “slut-shame” their classmates (though in truth, they often did). At the same time, they policed themselves. Some, like Holly, would continually revise, rather than discard, the definition of “skank” as their own behavior changed. Others, such as Megan, took “slut” on as a badge of honor, or at least tried to. “I’m the slutty friend,” she told me gleefully when we’d first met. “I find it liberating. I love being the crazy one. If someone is going to judge me for what I do, then fine, judge me. I don’t care. Fuck you if you think you’re better than me just because you don’t have sex that much. I feel bad for you if you don’t have sex that much because sex is awesome. I’m not saying that every time I go out, I hook up with someone. That’s definitely not the case. But it’s more fun to not control myself. Not to worry how it will look. And in college, nobody gives a shit.”

  Like Holly, Megan described her behavior as “liberating,” even as she struggled with its limits. During another conversation, she insisted, “I’m not a slut. Some people probably would consider me one, but I don’t consider myself one because I don’t carry myself like that. . . . When I think of a slut, I picture that girl who has the really thick black mascara and smoky eyes and wears two bras to push up her boobs.” On another occasion, she told me, “I love being single,” and a few minutes later confided, “No boys want to date the slut.” Back and forth she went, between resisting and submitting to age-old ideas about girls’ sexuality. Talking to Megan sometimes felt like watching someone trying to shore up a sand castle whose walls kept collapsing. Megan had less transcended limits than tried to legitimize herself within them, despite them. “I think,” she told me at one point, “that every girl’s goal is to be just slutty enough, where you’re not a prude but you’re not a whore. Yeah, you have your one-night stands. Yeah, you’re experienced. But you’re not sleeping with every guy in the fraternity. You’re not making brothers ‘Eskimo brothers’”—when two or more fraternity members have intercourse with the same girl. “Finding that balance is every college girl’s dream, you know what I mean?”

  Like Holly, Megan had her own agenda for our conversations: she, too, wanted an opportunity to make sense of a sexual history that had progressed quite differently from how she’d once expected. Also like Holly, she described herself as a “good girl” in high school—not even kissing a boy until she was seventeen, by which time she was eager to move forward. “I really wanted to get rid of my ‘firsts’ with a boyfriend,” she said. “And all my friends had already kissed guys, already given blow jobs. I was behind.” During four months of dating her first boyfriend, she “caught up,” performing oral sex that was never reciprocated. “I didn’t even think that was an option,” she said. She lost her virginity the summer before college with another guy she was dating, though, she said, they were never “Facebook official.” She was relieved to get first intercourse over with, and remembers the experience fondly.

  Megan had masturbated since she was a young teen. She had no difficulty reaching orgasm on her own, but had never climaxed with a partner. “A lot of guys don’t do enough foreplay,” she explained. “They just get to sex really quickly. And then, after a while I get tired, and I know they’re doing their best, so I just fake an orgasm to end it, and then I’m like ‘Oh, that was so good.’” Most of the girls I talked to had faked an orgasm now and again; that seemed unfortunate, though not unusual. But according to The Sex Lives of College Students, the number who fake has been rising steadily, from less than half in 1990 to 70 percent today. That may at least in part explain the gulf between the proportion of boys who think their partner has come during an encounter and the percentage of girls who actually did. Girls feigned climax because they were bored, they were tired, they were in pain, they wanted the night to end. They were often, like Megan, protecting their partners’ egos, or felt pressured to be perceived as enjoying sex even if they weren’t—especially since pleasure was presumably the whole point of a hookup. They also faked because they didn’t, or couldn’t, ask for what they wanted in bed. A few were starting to question whether the practice was counterproductive. “I haven’t really cared enough about the people I’ve been with to invest the time in training them in how my body works and what I like and don’t like,” a sophomore at an Ivy League college told me. “But now I’m going to put in the effort. Because I feel like I owe it to other girls to do them the favor of bringing these things to guys’ consciousness. And why am I using my time like this if I’m not even going to enjoy it?”

  Megan, like Holly, had her first college hookup within days of arriving on campus. The sex, she said, was “pretty terrible. He was the thrusting type, you know, jack-hammering me until I faked an orgasm, and then he went to sleep.” Even so, she said, she continued hooking up with him semiregularly over the next two months. I asked her why she went back when the sex was so bad. She shrugged. “Sex is always good on one level,” she said. “And whenever I get drunk, I hate going home alone. It’s like, I need a boy or a burrito, you know?”

  When we’d first met, midway through her sophomore year, Megan pulled out her period tracker app, where she had logged hookups that included intercourse. She’d had twelve partners, she said—though, if anyone asked, she reduced it to a more socially acceptable five. She preferred to remain “blissfully ignorant” of how many hookups had included only oral sex. “Giving a guy a blow job is something I don’t really consider a big deal,” she said. “Like, this one guy, when I go to his frat he’ll say, ‘Hey, Megan, do you want to come see my room?’ And I’ll give him a blow job and we’ll make out. I told him, ‘I like this casual thing we have going.’ He’s like, ‘I know, me too.’ I don’t even have his phone number.”
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br />   It was clear to me what he was getting out of that arrangement, I told Megan, but what was she getting? She shrugged. “I guess I could ask that every time I have sex. ‘What am I getting out of it?’ Guys tell me I’m really good at blow jobs, probably because I have a lot of practice. I really like kissing him. It’s exciting, it’s an adrenaline rush. And it’s like, at least I’ll have company. At least he’ll appreciate me, even if it’s for that fifteen minutes. I’ll have someone to hang out with, and make out with, and make me feel special.”

  When the Fun Stops

  Holly needed a guy. That’s what one of her sorority sisters thought. So she asked her boyfriend to introduce Holly to his frat brother Robert. The four of them would go out to lunch, they’d go on double dates. Holly thought Robert was sweet, but she wasn’t especially interested in him, either romantically or sexually. Still, simply by virtue of being thrown together so much, they got to know each other, and one night, at a party at his frat, they began making out on the dance floor. A little while later, she “found herself” in his room, doing “everything but intercourse.” She had a wonderful time. “Oral sex both ways,” she said, “which was a big deal for me.” Robert walked her back to her dorm afterward. Even though she was hammered, she said he was a “gentleman and didn’t take advantage of that and have sex with me.”