College Students Are Not Having Nearly as Much Sex as Everyone Thinks They Are

A new survey finds that nearly 40 percent are virgins.

21 March, 2018
College Students Are Not Having Nearly as Much Sex as Everyone Thinks They Are

One of the most surprising facts to emerge from New York Magazine's new feature on the sex lives of college students — aside from discovering that you're now one of the "old folks" who is obsessed with "the sex lives of young people​" — is that a large percentage of college students aren't the rabbits perpetually in heat like many of us old folk think they are.

[pullquote align="C"]39 percent said they were virgins[/pullquote]

New York partnered with SurveyMonkey to poll 700 college students, most of whom also assume college is some big sexfest. 74 percent of freshman and sophomores, and 64 percent of junior and seniors, respectively, said they believed they had far less active sex lives than their friends did. ​But it turns out that no one is having as much sex as everyone else thinks they are. From freshman to seniors, ​41 percent of women  and 49 percent of men ​said they were not sexually active. And 39 percent said they were virgins. "Everyone, in other words, thinks they are the exception to a general state of wild abandon. It's as if sexual freedom has become a burden as well as a gift," note journalists Lauren Kern and Noreen Malone.

Of course, to assume that virginity is a prudish rejection of sexual activity or exploration is to have a narrow definition of sex. ​While many men and women might be far more comfortable having sex than stripping on a webcam, for NYU student Rebecca, a virgin, it is camming that is liberating and sex that is intimidating. "​At first it was financially motivated, but I found it was kind of pleasurable for me. It made me feel good, I guess. People message you and ask you to do things or customize something for them. You can say yes or no," she said about stripping in front of a web came. "I feel shitty when my friends are talking about all their experiences and I don't have any to talk about. It's hard because I feel that I am highly experienced — but obviously without the physical part. When it does get down to me actually possibly having this kind of encounter with someone, I get really scared."

[pullquote align="C"]73 percent of students reported having been in love at least once.[/pullquote]

Another surprising insight? "That for all the narrative dominance of 'hookup culture,'" the article notes, "the students who replied to our survey were surprisingly sexually conservative." Most students have been in love. In fact, being in love was the most universal experience among college students, aside from the fact that 91 percent see themselves as getting married one day. ​70 percent of women and 80 percent of men reported being in love; 87 percent of people who've had sex reported they've been in love and nearly 50 percent of virgins admitted to having fallen in love as well. Overall, 73 percent of students reported having been in love at least once.

At the same time, the survey reported a finding that was pretty in-line with what we know about campus sexual assault: It's a reality that affects mostly women. ​Three times as many women than men reported being raped, and nearly 40 percent of women felt that a sexual partner had "crossed a line", compared to 15 percent of men.​ While rejection was the greatest fear among both men (47 percent) and women (37 percent), coercion was the second greatest fear among women, at 30 percent. Meanwhile, only 6 percent of men feared being forced into a sex act against their will, putting it well behind rejection, performance, and "other." 

"What emerges from these stories and photographs and interviews is complicated," report Kern and Malone. "The issue of rape and sexual assault on campus is very real, and is also something that students we polled and interviewed—male and female—seem quite aware of. Yet despite the pall cast by this, college students also share a sense of optimism about the many ways for young people to explore their own identities and sexuality, to figure out who they are and whom they want to love."

The article shows that while sexual revolutions come and go, some things never change.​ Even after these kids graduate college, they'll still think that everyone else is having more sex than them.

Follow Prachi on Twitter.

Credit: Cosmopolitan
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