Chill out, guys: Harvard grads have perfectly normal amounts of sex
Don’t believe the headlines.
The number one trending topic on my Facebook newsfeed this morning was: “Harvard University: Survey Indicates 1 in 4 Seniors Did Not Engage in Sexual Activity at University.’’
Of course that was the top story. We’re fascinated by how much sex the cream of America’s crop—the chosen ones—does or doesn’t have at college.
Ever since Bluto pranced around a frat in Animal House wearing a sheet, chanting “Toga! Toga!’’—and, let’s be honest, well before that—college in popular culture has been painted as four years of debaucherous drinking and wild amounts of sex.
But the numbers from a survey conducted by The Crimson, the Harvard student newspaper, paint a different picture, one where 24 percent of the class leaves a virgin. It shocked America’s news media that a quarter of Harvard’s graduating class says they’ve never gotten down and dirty, judging by the number of articles pointing their fingers at students too busy studying to have sex.
So I did a little digging to see just how weird this is. Turns out, it isn’t weird at all.
In 2011, USA Today reported that 24 percent of college seniors were virgins.
And two years later, Time reported the same thing.
Hold up—aren’t those the same numbers The Crimson reported this year? 24 percent? Why, yes, I believe they are. It looks like the media was a bit too quick to try to take down Harvard students.
Probably because we’re afraid they’ll be our bosses someday and we have to get all of our jabs in now.
To further prove publications were trigger happy with those condescending headlines (“That’s a lot of studying! One in four Harvard students say they never had sex there,’’ blared The Washington Post), a study collected from 1,500 Duke University freshmen and seniors at the Durham, N.C., campus in 2007 found that about 53 percent of women and 40 percent of the men said they were virgins.
Perhaps its movies like Animal House, Old School, Van Wilder, American Pie, Orange County, and countless others that make us think all students are doing beer bongs and then going home with the person holding the funnel.
But as anyone who’s ever done the dirty on an extra-long, twin-size bed can tell you, the numbers suggest that the fantasy of college sex is a whole lot hotter than we’d like to believe.
New England Schools on the Forbes Top Colleges List
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