Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  The school year was winding down by then. She and Robert texted each other through finals, went for a couple of walks, made out. She had no interest in anything more; she was just enjoying his company. One night, after midnight, they snuck into an academic building and hooked up in a classroom. She’d had two beers, but said she wasn’t particularly drunk. Neither was he. Again, they did “everything but intercourse,” though this time it was mainly because he didn’t have a condom. “Weirdly enough, I really wanted to have sex with him,” Holly said—perhaps because he was the first guy who seemed authentically invested in her physical pleasure. “It was good that we didn’t, though,” she continued, “because I would have hated myself. I would’ve thought, ‘Look, you’ve only started to get to know this guy. You need to know him better.’”

  Over the summer, Holly tried to talk to her mom about birth control. She wanted to go on the Pill. “I told her it was safer in the social environment that I was in to have it, in case something happened. But she said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t want to be having sex. You’re not in a relationship. You’re nineteen years old.’ And in my head I was thinking the opposite: ‘I’m nineteen years old, I’m not in a relationship, and I want to be having sex!’ She has no idea. If I told her what I’ve told you, she wouldn’t let me come back to college. She’d say I was ‘one of those girls.’”

  Something else happened that summer, too. Holly had never before masturbated—it wasn’t something she thought girls did. A few of her sorority sisters, as a joke, had given her a vibrator for her last birthday. One day, home alone and bored, she decided to give it a try, and she had her first orgasm. She spent the rest of the summer exploring her body. “It was cool!” she said. “I was able to learn all about myself without having to feel the awkwardness of trying to direct someone else.” Girls often told me their first orgasm was transformative, whether they experienced it alone or with a partner. Why wouldn’t it be, given their dearth of education on the subject? “The first time I had an orgasm I cried,” one high school senior told me. “I cried! It was so powerful. I think it really helped me grow as a person.”

  Holly started her sophomore year with a new sexual standard. Still uninterested in a “serious” relationship but eager to experiment, she decided she would have intercourse only with someone she knew in a situation in which she felt safe. “Like, not in some weird room somewhere where you can’t get help if you needed it,” she said. Also, condoms were nonnegotiable. Then, one night, she did three shots at pregames and another three at a party. Then she had a “Jäger bomb,” a shot of Jägermeister dropped into a beer. She followed that up with a Red Bull. Mixing energy drinks with alcohol leaves a person feeling deceptively sober—or “wide-awake drunk”: college-age bar patrons who mix caffeine and alcohol, for example, leave drunker than their peers yet are four times more likely to believe they can drive. Maybe that’s why Holly’s sorority sisters, who are supposed to “look out” for one another, thought she seemed fine. Or maybe they were in no state themselves to notice. Either way, that drink was the last thing Holly remembered that night.

  MEGAN WAS PLAYING BEER pong at a low-key party just after winter break when a sophomore named Tyler began flirting with her. When her friends got ready to leave, around two in the morning, he asked Megan to stay.

  “I’m not going to have sex with you,” she told him.

  “That’s cool,” he replied. “We’ll just kiss and cuddle.”

  Megan’s friend caught her eye one last time, silently double-checking her decision. Megan nodded. She wasn’t too drunk, and she was having fun with Tyler.

  They held hands and chatted as they walked back to his frat, getting to know each other. He seemed sweet. As soon as they got inside, though, his manner changed. He rushed her upstairs to his room and into his bed. They made out, and she started going down on him, but he kept pushing for intercourse. Megan said no. He pushed harder. Megan claimed not to have birth control, thinking that was a good, inoffensive excuse, one that wouldn’t hurt his feelings. Instead, he grabbed a condom, held her down, and entered her. “I just kind of laid there,” she said. “I thought maybe if I’m really shitty at sex, he’ll just stop. At one point he asked if I wanted to take a shower together, and I was like, ‘Well, we already had sex. What’s the point in saying no now?’ I just kept trying to make it better, to psych myself into thinking it wasn’t what it was.”

  In the shower, Tyler kissed her roughly, then pushed her up against the tiles and began having sex with her from behind. She turned up the hot water tap all the way, hoping that would make him stop. It didn’t. He switched to anal sex. “I told him he was hurting me, and he was like ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ but then he’d keep going. His frat brothers actually came into the shower and saw us and laughed.” She asked Tyler to stop twice more; finally he did. Not knowing what else to do, she spent the night. The next morning, when he dropped her off at her dorm, she told him, “Thanks, I had fun.” She still doesn’t know why she said that. A friend stopped by her room to find out how her night had gone.

  “I think I was raped,” Megan said.

  THE CAMPUS PARTY scene can be exhilarating—if it weren’t, no one would participate. But as Armstrong and her colleagues have pointed out, it also facilitates rape. Women, not men, wear body-baring outfits. Women, not men, relinquish turf and transportation. Women, as females and often as younger students, are expected to be “nice” and deferential to their male hosts. A “fun girl” wouldn’t make a scene just because a guy grabbed her ass or held her down and grinded against her; she’d just find a way artfully and politely to disengage. “Fun girls” also drink freely—alcohol gives them license to be sexual, loosening inhibitions while anesthetizing against intimacy, embarrassment, or accountability. It can also undermine their ability to resist, remember, or feel entitled to report sexual assault. The manipulation of the party culture is both systematic and invisible, Armstrong writes, seemingly part of the continuum (if at the extreme edge) of acceptable “crazy” collegiate behavior. Since victims have a hard time convincing anyone, including themselves, that a crime has actually occurred, it is also generally consequence-free.

  Holly woke the next morning with no idea where she was. There was a guy next to her in the bed, a senior she knew only by name and didn’t remember seeing at the party. There was also a used condom on the floor.

  “Do you remember what happened last night?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “We had sex,” he said.

  The boy lived several blocks off-campus, and claimed his car had broken down. So Holly, still dressed in the party clothes and high heels that had made her feel “proud of her body” the night before, made her way back to her sorority house alone. The so-called walk of shame is another aspect of hookup culture that calls out only young women’s behavior, since boys often wear the same clothing at parties that they’d wear during the day. Sometimes girls borrow something from a sexual partner (though they may never have occasion to return it), but as Megan told me, “Everyone knows when you’re in ‘shacker clothes’ and they’ll heckle you when you cross campus, like, ‘Ohhh! How was your night last night?’” Again, such harassment is typically leveled only at girls.

  Holly spent the rest of the day in sweat pants, crying and watching TV while her roommate hugged her. That was just two weeks before we met. “I’m not going to let it ruin my life,” she told me, her voice stalwart. “It’s not something that defines me. It was just something that happened, and I can’t get that drunk again.”

  While getting blackout drunk is never a good idea, and it seemed only natural for Holly to want to regain some sense of control, it troubled me that she placed all the blame on herself, on her drinking, rather than on the boy who took advantage of it. “I’d like to say he didn’t know how drunk I was,” she said. “But I don’t know. My friend who is in an organization that fights rape on campus said that by definition I couldn’t consent, so I was raped. And I almost . .
.” she paused. “Not that I wish rape upon myself, but I hope I wasn’t sitting there saying, ‘Yeah, I want to have sex!’ Because that would go against everything that I’ve said about not having sex with a random person.” She shook her head and sighed. “I guess I’m fortunate that I don’t remember.”

  I had no way of knowing, when I met them, that Megan was a rape victim or that Holly may have been. I didn’t ask about nonconsensual sex in my recruitment e-mails, and it wasn’t, they each said, what had motivated them to talk to me. A report by the Justice Department released at the end of 2014 found that, despite the growing national awareness of campus sexual assault, only an estimated 20 percent of college victims report the crime, a markedly lower rate than nonstudents the same age. They’re inhibited by fear of reprisal, shame, self-blame, or the belief that reporting would only make things worse, especially given the historically low rate of campus assailants who are punished. Also by the deliberate muddying of consent that happens at parties. Mariah, a junior at a private university in the South, urged me not to demonize the Greek system. “I’m an intelligent woman,” she said in an e-mail. “If all a sorority did for me was make me vulnerable to sexual assault and alcohol poisoning, I’d have bailed by now.” She had made the dearest friends of her life among her sorority sisters, girls she described as “involved,” “inspiring,” and “brilliant.” Yes, she said, the Greek system was “heteronormative” and riddled with racial and gender inequalities that needed to be addressed. “But I firmly believe,” she wrote, “that sororities are, and can be, a wonderful experience, a vehicle for change, and a bastion of feminism on modern college campuses.”

  At the same time, though, she felt that she and her sisters were being “crushed” by a campus hookup culture in which drunken frat boys felt free to touch, kiss, or rub up against them without permission. (“You’re supposed to swat them away like flies,” she said.) Girls could quickly slip from feeling emboldened by sexiness to feeling objectified: like things to be used and consumed. Boys, too, could feel confused, uncertain: eager to fit in, yet struggling with assumptions about masculinity, sex, coercion, conquest. They could misinterpret mixed messages, or be too drunk themselves to realize a partner’s state—both may wake up the morning after unsure of who they’re with or what went on. “No one here knows what rape is,” Mariah wrote, neither the boys nor the girls. “Would I know if I was raped? Maybe if it was a stranger in a dark alley, yeah, but otherwise, I’m not so sure.”

  I was surprised, then, to hear that Megan, at the urging of a campus therapist, had pressed charges against Tyler through her school’s office of student ethics. The investigation took the entire second semester. Megan told her story repeatedly. Her friends gave statements about how much she’d changed since that night, growing depressed, unable to concentrate, how she dropped a class and was drinking more than usual. Tyler gave his version of events as well. When asked when, precisely, he believed Megan had given consent for intercourse, she recalled him saying, ‘Well, she gave me a blow job. I pretty much call that consent.’” That had infuriated her. “I was giving him the blow job to end it, not to start something. I told him I did not want to have sex. I told him I did not have birth control. And he just hopped out of bed, put on a condom, and raped me.”

  What she suspects ultimately made her case was not so much what either she or Tyler had said, but that Tyler’s own frat brothers turned on him, admitting that he could be aggressive, even violent; he had already been on probation for fighting. In the end, Tyler was suspended for a year and his credits for the semester nullified. Megan is pretty sure he won’t be back, though she can’t say whether he’s learned anything from the experience. “After the hearing he said he was sorry I felt the way I did, but he never apologized,” she said. “He never believed he’d done anything wrong.” In fact, she confessed, she had to control herself from apologizing to him. “I hated him,” she said, “but it was weird. I also wanted to give him a hug and tell him I was sorry for doing all this, for ruining his life.”

  DESPICABLE ME PLAYED on TV at an off-campus house as Megan and her friends poured pregame shots into candy-colored glasses. There were six girls and two boys, who were in town visiting from another school. They traded war stories about hangovers they’d had, the hazards of Everclear, and the crazy drinks they had tried: Jungle Juice, apple pie moonshine, vodka infused with cannabis or Skittles candy. Over the next hour, Megan and the other girls in the group would knock back four or five shots each. The boys would drink six. “We have a system,” one of the boys told me. “Drink three shots, wait three minutes, drink two more shots, wait five minutes, one more shot and you’re done.” I asked what the wait was for. “So we can have time to see if we’re too affected by it,” he said, apparently in all seriousness.

  In between drinks, the group chatted, texted friends, and posted selfies to Instagram, always looking carefully around to make sure no liquor was visible in the frame (all of them were underage). “It doesn’t happen unless it happens on Instagram!” Megan told me, only half-joking. Each of them had a few stock expressions they could call up on command: a sexy chin drop, a “this is my friend and I love her” smile, an open-mouthed “aren’t I crazy and having fun” face. The boys clowned around, striking the classic “sorority squat” pose. One of them checked his feed. “I only have one ‘like,’” he complained. “By now I should have forty-seven!” They spent at least half their time together engrossed in their individual screens.

  I doubt they realized how often they referenced gender, whether it was when a boy called a female high school classmate “all Christian during the day and slutty at night,” or during a good-natured argument over which sex ultimately pays more for a frat party: the brothers, who buy all the liquor, or the girls, who have the “upkeep” of hair, nails, clothes, shoes, and makeup. The girls reminded the boys that their cost wasn’t only monetary. “Like, we have to remove our hair everywhere,” one said.

  “No razors below the neck for me,” answered a boy, laughing.

  “And okay,” said another girl, “we have to walk in five-inch heels.”

  At that, the boys conceded. The girls had won, if you call that winning.

  They talked, too, about the collateral damage of the party scene: a girl they knew who was bulimic; another who was in rehab; the frats that had been kicked off campus; the drunk boy who tried, with tragic results, to do a backflip off a bar.

  The song “Blurred Lines” came up on the playlist, with its hooky, contentious chorus, “I know you want it, I know you want it.” Megan bobbed her head in time to the beat, seemingly indifferent to the lyrics.

  Surprisingly, Megan said, after the rape, her sex drive became even stronger. Like Holly, she didn’t want a negative experience to define her or her college years. “I had lots of casual sex for a while. And it was good. I liked feeling giddy in the morning again instead of horrible, like when I left Tyler.” But now, in the second semester of her sophomore year, she was growing weary of one-night stands. “I do get hurt feelings a lot,” she said. “I set myself up for it. I know it’s going to end without him texting. It does every time. Guys don’t respect you after they have sex with you. That’s just how it is. And that sucks. You do want that text, though. I mean just someone saying that was fun and we should hang out. If someone doesn’t text me for three days afterward, I’m like, fuck you, but then if they text you suddenly on Saturday night and say, ‘Hey, wanna come over?’ you feel kind of obligated because you do want to see them and that’s the only way.”

  Even though most girls and boys claim they’re generally happy with their last hookup, majorities of both also express having had, at some point, regret over casual sex. When they do, boys tend to feel remorse about “using” someone; girls feel bad about being “used.” I commented to a sophomore at a private New England college that a text seemed a pretty low standard for common decency after a night in bed with someone. “And even that seems like such a concession to guys,�
� she agreed. “Meanwhile, the girl has to sit and wait. And that is torturous. If you texted first, it would freak him out. On our campus, we only have one dining hall, so there’s this whole thing of seeing him and he hasn’t texted and, you know, ‘Look me in the eye. I don’t want to marry you.’ Or maybe the boy next to you in Bio has seen your boobs and now wants nothing to do with you. So it’s better not to hook up with people from your classes. You don’t go for someone who lives on your floor. You keep your social self and your academic self detached.”

  Victims or Victors?

  A week after her blackout, Holly hooked up again with Robert, the boy she’d started seeing at the end of the previous semester, and the two finally had sex. It was amazing. “I woke up the next morning happy that I had sex with someone I wasn’t in a relationship with, who I know and like as a person, who is a sweet guy,” she said. “We were able to enjoy ourselves, experiment—and we both had orgasms. We’ve agreed we want to keep this casual. If there’s anything going on with us, it’s ‘friends with benefits.’ We are definitely friends. Maybe if it continues, perhaps I’ll want it to be something more. But that’s an ‘if,’ because this is all new.” Looking back, Holly couldn’t believe how far she’d come. Only a year ago, she was a virgin. Only a year ago, she would have said she’d need to be in a committed relationship for at least six months before she’d have intercourse. “That’s clearly changed,” she said. “I’ve pushed the line, pushed the line, pushed the line. But it’s interesting where it’s taken me. I don’t know if it’s the culture around me that tells me my behavior is okay, so therefore I’m fine with it, or if it’s because I’m older and more mature and have grown as a person.” She shook her head, incredulous. “It’s been such a strange journey.”