Vera, a young Black woman from Colorado, recalled the sex education at her arts-oriented magnet school as “kind of like, don’t do it, you can catch STIs [sexually transmitted infections], and make babies accidentally.” When her fellow high-schoolers talked about sex, the focus was on judgment rather than information: “There would be rumors going around, she’s a—I don’t know, insert pejorative word here.” Vera was clear both about her ultimate sexual project—“a nice, long-term relationship”—and about the interim plan: “I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon, so maybe now, kind of friends with benefits.” She sought a partner who was “funny, intelligent, considerate, affectionate, intelligent—and curly hair.” The intelligent part was clearly important to her—she mentioned it twice—but she was agnostic about race, other than to note that white guys “don’t see me as somebody who’s maybe a potential suitor.” For gender, she said “male probably,” but only because “guys are the default.” Her mom’s advice about sexual activity was brief but clear: “Just don’t do it”—modified slightly with a parting message before Vera left for college: “If you need birth control I’m not going to judge you.”
Vera did indeed need birth control. She’d found enough information online to know that she wanted to get on the pill as soon as she got to college; in her words, “I wasn’t very sexually active” in high school, but for college “I figured I might as well be prepared.” To locate prospective “friends with benefits,” she turned to Tinder, an app that people use to match with prospective partners. Her fellow Barnard students were emphatically nonjudgmental about sexual behavior—but early freshman year she and her roommates had “agreed no sex [in the dorm room] . . . just because it would be really hard to coordinate with three other people, and we all have different hours, and it doesn’t seem fair to kick three people out at one time. I feel like it would be unfair to kick somebody out while they’re studying so I can have sex.” She laughed, recalling how her roommates, who she described as “pretty open,” told her that she was “getting the most action of any of them.” And yet their agreement required that that action had to happen elsewhere. As she explained, “I don’t know when I’m going to be alone, and like I said, my roommates are in there studying or listening to music. I don’t say, hey, can you leave, I want to have sex. It’s kind of rude because it’s their space too. . . . So it’s kind of a protective thing.”
The agreement among roommates not to have sex in their shared space certainly helps with interpersonal harmony. And yet it also produces vulnerability—think back to Charisma, who was far from campus, deep in Brooklyn, when the guy whose apartment she was in started pressing her to do more than make out. The geographic context—the actual spaces through which students move, where they meet, and where they have sex—intersect with their goals and values to shape sexual interactions, creating the possibility for fun, exciting sex, but also structuring opportunities for bad things to happen.
The story Boutros reluctantly shared about being sexually assaulted by a woman he barely knew, while he was very drunk and in a strange city, underlines the spatial dimension of vulnerability. But the way Boutros handled this in his own room was markedly different, reflecting both his gender and his robust sense of his own sexual citizenship. Boutros was perfectly comfortable with sober sex, unlike his American peers, who “just find it incredibly difficult to talk to a girl unless they’ve had alcohol.” He saw this discomfort as related to Americans’ sexual illiteracy and the shame produced by those “just don’t do it” messages. He recounted, with incredulity, his freshman-year girlfriend’s near-complete lack of understanding of the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. “How is this girl—how do you not know this? Like, for example, she thought you could just pull out and it would be fine. And I’m like, that’s obviously not true.”
Boutros was forthright with his freshman roommate in claiming space to have sex. At 5:00 p.m. one Monday afternoon, he texted his roommate: “‘Give me forty minutes.’ . . . We’ve got, like, a good code, we’ve got a good relationship.” When asked if he had waited for a response, he laughed. The failure to wait was why he wanted to tell the story. There he was in their double room with his girlfriend:
fooling around . . . just, like, kissing and maybe a bit of fingering. . . . Clothes are off—yeah, well, actually no, we’re both in underwear. And then I take her bra off. Take her clothes off. Take her underwear off, I take my pants off, put on a condom, and then, I don’t know, we’re just having sex in the bed. We start having sex like missionary, I guess, and then switch to cowgirl. And then I fell off the bed, because our beds are so small.
He laughed.
And so we started doing it just, like, standing by the bed. And then I look over and sit on the chair. And she sits on top of me. That was good. And then—my desk is full of stuff, it had like a laptop on it and some books. My roommate’s desk was completely empty. So we ended up having sex on his desk. And then he knocks! He’s like, “Hey, Boutros, I just need to come in really quickly, I need to grab my bag.”
Boutros laughed again, telling the story.
And I grabbed the handle—“There’s no—don’t come in right now.” He’s like, “Why?” and it’s like, “Um, I’m on your desk.” And he’s like, “Fuck.” So that was funny.
Boutros was laughing throughout, as he recounted this story of the close quarters and the challenges of negotiating sex in a way that frequently involves at least one other person.
The space is not just a backdrop—it is almost a third character in the sexual scene. The frantic freshman minuet of finding space to have sex reflects how much more likely first-years are to be in shared bedrooms, as well as the high stakes of offending a roommate. If a hookup goes sour, students can “ghost” a sexual partner, particularly someone on the fringes of or outside their social circle, but they have to make it through the whole year with their roommate. Dorm room furniture all but forces two people—regardless of whether they just want to make out or even chat—to sit on a bed if they’re going to sit together. And although college beds are multipurpose—study space, snack stop, facetime with parents—there’s no denying that a bed has a strong sexual component. The almost tidal flow of students in and out of each other’s bedrooms is a defining element of residential higher education. Dorm life is a fundamental sexual assault opportunity structure. (Social scientists use the term opportunity structure to refer to socially organized and unequal allocation of opportunities. The original use was in relation to criminal behavior, but it has been applied to life transitions such as marriage or finding a job, and more recently to extramarital sexual relations.)1
For this generation of digital natives, the online world is a real and vital dimension of that sexual landscape, with a porous line between digitally mediated social interactions and those that happen in person. We saw students sitting at a lunch table laughing as one scrolled through profiles; they collectively assessed the suitability of prospective hookups. In one interview, a student chuckled in recounting how easily she’d “fact-checked” a guy’s assertion that he went to Cornell when in fact he was a student at the City College of New York (“not that I’d have cared”). “Suitability” is typically assessed in terms of whether or not someone is in your broader social group. A friend of a friend is the ideal social distance: pre-screened for social acceptability, but still far enough from their primary peers so if things go wrong it won’t be socially disruptive.
We heard plenty of stories about students who’d met boyfriends or girlfriends on Tinder or another one of the digital platforms. Apps aren’t just for sex; they help organize and categorize partners. Who is also gay? Who is available? Who is looking for fun, and who is willing to say they’re looking for something more? Not all students use apps, and the uses are quite varied; several had met long-term girlfriends or boyfriends online, while one student proudly recounted having had sex with 73 men he met on Grindr—as a freshman. Students flirt through their phones. Octavia whipped out her phone in the interview, and started scrolling through, showing pictures that the guy she was hooking up with had sent her:
Like, he’ll send me this at bedtime, right? That’s flirty—like, he’s topless, and making a smirking face, and I’ll be like, “Can I join?” You get the point. Um, or this, oh my god, look, look how hot he looks, holy shit. Oh my god. Or like this—that’s flirty—like, they’re all flirty. [She scrolls further.] Oh, like this, “when I’m giving it to you good.” Like, okay, so “Can I come over, so you can give it to me good?”
When the number of suitable prospective partners on campus feels particularly small—for some students of color, or queer students, or students with very specific sexual desires—apps expand the pool.
Early in our research, a colleague at the cross-university council of faculty who do research on gender and sexuality challenged the framing of SHIFT’s broad focus on “‘sexual assault and sexual health,’” suggesting that “healthy sex” might not be the best placeholder for whatever one might label the sex that is not assault. There was lots of sex that wasn’t assault that wasn’t necessarily “healthy.” The next week we asked our Undergraduate Advisory Board, a group of students that we consulted with every Monday morning about our research (we explain their role fully in the Appendix A), to articulate for us all the different ways to categorize a sexual interaction that wasn’t assault. Over the course of an intense two hours, they listed dozens of categories. Whether power inequalities are present. Whether the sex was drunk sex. They mentioned sober sex, which they called “serious sex,” but also noted that for students who don’t drink or do drugs, all sex is sober sex. And then there was relationship sex, which included makeup sex, hot relationship sex, relationship sex that is as exciting as going to the store for a quart of milk, and sex when one person is a survivor of assault, with all of the challenges that that can bring. There’s “phone” sex (usually using video). The list went on and on.
But underlying that diversity of encounters are five sexual projects: becoming a skilled sexual partner, seeking pleasure, connecting with another person emotionally, defining oneself, and impressing others—all while managing a complex set of social opportunities and risks. Examining students’ sexual projects reveals the internal logic of behaviors that may otherwise seem mysterious, a little scary, or downright cruel. Sex is not the opposite of sexual assault, in part because the same contexts and even very similar sequences of interactions define both experiences.
Students have a word for this—they describe some sex as being “rapey.” Initially we found this disturbing. Calling something rapey, with a raised eyebrow, seemed to be joking about something that was not funny; we wanted, and still want, a bright line between “rape” and “sex.” But the words that students use are a window into their world. When students talked about sex as “rapey,” part of what they were indicating was that they were having sex that they were unwilling to name “assault” but that they recognized as having a lot of similarities to assault. And when students talk about other things as rapey—whether it’s a 1980s classic teen movie like Sixteen Candles, with a scene that borders on date rape; a Disney movie scene, such as the song sung by Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, where he claims he’ll make Belle his wife, regardless of her objections; or an old jazz standard such as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” where a man tries to keep a woman from leaving, even as she insists she wants to—what they are flagging is a shift in cultural sensibilities that is part of the emerging contemporary collective acknowledgment of sexual assault as a social problem.
There are plenty of virgins on campus: one in five men who took the SHIFT survey reported not having had sex ever, as did one in five gender-nonconforming students, and one in three women.2 And yet students who start college without having had penetrative intercourse often feel that they’re behind and need to catch up. There’s a complex set of motivations packed into this.3 Many see casual sex as a fundamental part of the college experience—a core way to “be college.” But others feel shame at sexual inexperience, as well as fear that a lack of sexual experience will render them inept as sexual partners when they do eventually have sex. For the most part, these students are disciplined, hard workers. They’ve drilled with SAT flashcards, spent hundreds of hours practicing the violin, gone off-book for the lead in the school play after only a couple of weeks, or perfected their free throws by taking thousands of shots. Many approach sex as a skill rather than as a form of interpersonal interaction. This way of thinking makes it a personal achievement in which partners are interchangeable.
Irene described what sounded like an awful encounter, the sole goal of which was to lose her virginity or, as she put it, “get it over with.”4 It was nearly exam time, freshman fall, and she was walking back from an evening chem lab. Another freshman fell into step with her along College Walk. She dimly recognized him because he lived on the floor across from her, and they chatted. He wanted to go back to her room with her. She thought to herself, “I might as well get it done with.” They made out for a while on her bed, but since her roommate was sleeping in the same bedroom, she didn’t want to have sex there. He said he’d go get a condom, and they met in the bathroom down the hall. She pulled her pants down, he picked her up, and they began to have intercourse, standing in the shower stall. She was not physically excited, not lubricated at all, and it hurt. He apologized in response to her evident discomfort and yet continued thrusting, saying that next time would be better. But there was no next time. After he pulled out and saw blood on the condom, he realized she’d been a virgin. Irene’s roommates heard her come back into the suite. She sat on her bed, quietly weeping. They gathered around her to talk. Looking back on that moment, she described him as “a nasty person.” She never spoke with him again.
We have no reason to think of what happened to Irene as an assault. But it was, unquestionably, an interaction that left her feeling bad. The sex that students have to accumulate experience, or to demonstrate that they can be modern people, highlights one risk built into impersonal sex: not caring if the other person has a bad experience, sexually or otherwise. One young woman, Kathleen, told us about a man with whom she’d been in an ongoing hookup for months. He’d generally text her, or she’d text him, some time before midnight. “You up?” “Sure.” “Can I come by?” She’d respond with a thumbs-up, or a funny GIF. He’d regularly sleep over; even in a twin bed, it was nice to have someone to cuddle with on cold winter nights. Students called the late fall “cuffing season”—that time when, as it started to get cold, it was helpful to lock down a potential partner for the winter: to cuff them. Cuffing is distinct from relationships, which entail both more time and more emotional risk. Several students described relationships to us as “like an extra three-credit class,”—a class that they hesitated to sign up for, fearing the time commitment, or being hurt, or hurting someone else. In Kathleen’s case, the cuffing of this man didn’t last. He crossed the line when he started opening up emotionally by telling her how sad he felt about his grandmother’s recent death. She was definitely “dtf” (down to fuck), and even to snuggle. But sadness? She hadn’t signed up for that. And so she asked him to leave. Kathleen had every “right” to. If she didn’t want him there, he shouldn’t be there. What is troubling about this is not that these two are “hooking up” outside of a relationship context. Rather, Irene exhibited an intentional lack of care for her partner’s humanity; she wasn’t alone in doing so.
Sometimes students are more sensitive to each other’s cues during encounters. Simon described what had happened with Jordan, a sophomore he met at a party during orientation week, as uncomfortable and embarrassing. After the party, they texted a bit, and then met up in person a couple of days later. They sat on the Low Library steps in the late summer night, talking and making out a little bit. That part was fun. Another night, Jordan took him out for ramen. Eventually Simon confessed to Jordan that he was a virgin, and they made plans to meet in Simon’s room. While there, they started making out. Simon told us that Jordan made the first move: without saying anything, he started taking off Simon’s clothes, and his own. Once his shirt was off, Simon began to feel nervous—so nervous, in fact, that he told Jordan he was going to vomit, grabbed his shirt, and ran to the bathroom. Jordan followed to make sure he was okay. They returned to Simon’s room and Jordan started taking off his clothes again, but Simon stopped him, saying, “‘No, I’m not ready for this, right now.’” Jordan asked if he was sure he didn’t want to do anything, and Simon said yes. Jordan left, and they didn’t see each other again.
I felt really embarrassed, because it was, like, “I don’t even know how this works.” I was so uncomfortable in the situation, because I had had no experience. And I don’t know where the fear was coming from, but I just, I just was really uncomfortable. It was really embarrassing, because, you know, he’s older and seems to know exactly what to do, and I’m just this young freshman who is too nervous to even have fun. I just felt completely embarrassed by it, and that’s why I didn’t talk to him again, because I was just, like, “I don’t want that kind of, I don’t want that to happen again.” I was just so self-conscious of my own lack of experience, that I didn’t wanna be bad, and I didn’t wanna show inadequacy. That was a lot of the nervousness.
It wasn’t just nerves. He didn’t know Jordan, he wasn’t that interested in getting to know him better, and the shallowness of the physical interaction made him feel bad. Simon has grown to be more comfortable with a sexual project that combines sex and intimacy. He described that it felt like a kind of revelation—which he then justified in terms of his conservative Christian upbringing—to admit to himself that he did not want to have sex with someone he did not know or care about.5 A lot of students feel this way, but then some look around and see their peers having sex with people they don’t know well, and feel like they need to get with the program. Up their number, get some stories to tell. The normalization of sex outside of committed exclusive relationships makes students who are uncomfortable with that—which seems to us like most students—doubt themselves. They feel out of step with the times. It’s not that hookup culture is intrinsically bad or good, but it exercises power as an ideal form for what young people “should” be doing or should want.6
Physical pleasure is a prominent sexual project. Guys sometimes describe it as “getting my nut.” Men’s “nut” is taken for granted as a goal of sexual interactions. We heard plenty of stories in which the flow of sexual pleasure ran in one direction: from women to men. Few seemed to question this as a logic of heterosexual interaction—a hand job in the library stacks, a blow job a girl gives her guy friend one time when they are drunk, a hookup set in motion when a girl decides that she feels bad for a guy who hasn’t had sex in seven months. At least some of the campus orgasm gap reflects heterosexual interactions in which men don’t even try to pleasure women.7 These one-sided hookups reinforce the stereotype of women as desireless sources of sexual gratification. Imagine if two friends meet routinely for a meal where only one eats and the other one always cooks. Inattentiveness to the sexual pleasure of one party is, in part, an erasure of their social equivalence. To a nontrivial degree, the basis of society is reciprocity.8 And yet heterosexual encounters often lack such reciprocity, denying women’s equivalent standing to men, and invalidating their sexual citizenship. Consensual encounters of this nature are a training ground for sexual assault, schooling young people to accept as normal sexual interactions in which a guy’s pleasure is the only outcome that matters.
Boutros ascribed his girlfriend’s low expectations for sex to the same inadequate sex education from which she’d gleaned that withdrawal would be effective for pregnancy and STI prevention. But they also reflected her prior experience. He recounted the first time they had sex, “I was like, ‘sorry, that was awful.’ And she was like, ‘no, don’t worry, I’ve had a lot worse.’ And when it—when it got good she was like, okay, yeah, no, this is not what I’m used to, which was nice, I guess, it was a bit of an ego boost for me.”
Men sometimes talk about women’s sexual pleasure in a way that seems more a question of prowess than of care, but Boutros—like Austin—seemed genuinely committed to his partner’s enjoyment. Boutros responded to the question about what is important to him about sex by saying, “for them to be into it . . . like, if they’re not into it, it’s pointless. Really, what’s the point of having sex if both parties aren’t enjoying it?” Boutros’s girlfriend was being kind in not affirming that their first sex together was “awful.” He was emphatic that mutual sexual pleasure was the whole point of sex. And while she was pleased with this development, it seems that she never considered that pleasurable sex was something she could expect. To get a sense of how his girlfriend might have experienced the “sex on the desk” that he found so amusing, we asked him, “Did you orgasm? Did she orgasm?” “Yes, I was—I don’t know about her, she got really wet, which I normally take as a good thing. When I asked her, she said yeah, but like all girls say ‘yeah.’” Boutros was one of the more attentive men we talked with, and seemed genuinely concerned that his girlfriend experience pleasure. And yet he wasn’t sure about the orgasm—after all, “all girls say yeah.”
Sexual projects can also skew toward emotional intimacy. When we asked students to tell us about their best sexual experience in college, the stories they chose to share frequently signaled a longing for physical intimacy as an expression of care. These stories also revealed students’ fears—not just of rejection, but of creating disruption among their friends. Zoey, a bisexual sophomore from Massachusetts, met Dennis while working at the radio station. They were just friends—he already had a girlfriend—but she was starting to “catch feelings” for him. The phrase “catch feelings” was common among students, framing intimate feelings as out of students’ control, or even potentially undesirable; they were more like a cold, which she “caught” but could not direct. Zoey wasn’t sure about being with someone she was so close to. She was afraid it wouldn’t work out and then she’d have nothing—no friend and no boyfriend. One day Dennis told Zoey he wanted to share an incredible view with her, and so they rode the subway down to 34th Street, pushed through the crowded sidewalks, and waited in line to get to the Empire State Building’s observation deck. Pulling Zoey close to him as the sun set, Dennis told her that he’d broken up with his girlfriend and said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” He kissed the top of her head and stepped away. He seemed overcome. She pulled him back to her and they kissed, surrounded by strangers. Zoey said it was one of the sweetest experiences she’d ever had.
These “first kiss” stories sometimes had an almost cinematic element; John, for example, recounted walking his (now) girlfriend back to her dorm after her sorority’s crush party (where sorority members explicitly invite their crushes to an event). While the fact that he went as her date to a crush party might seem like a fairly clear declaration of interest in being more than friends, the date had been arranged by her sorority “big,” so he did not know if she really liked him. His intentions were clear, at least to him. At the end of the evening, as he walked her home, down the freshman dorm’s wide cinder-block hallway to her door, their pace slowed. He was hoping she’d do something to indicate interest, but nothing happened. He told her he had a great time, and gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder. He turned to leave. She called out, “Hey, wait.” He whipped back around, and reached for her. Their lips touched. They didn’t have sex for months. But what John recalled so distinctly as the best sexual moment of his time in college was that turning point, when they shifted to being more than just friends.
Sex also offers a route to self-definition. Doug described himself as a “baby gay,” and was very explicit about how Columbia’s New York location and historically LGBTQ-friendly campus provided him with an opportunity to come into his own as a gay man.9 His parents had tried to prepare him to launch as a self-determining sexual adult; they talked with him directly about taking care of himself physically and about their own values regarding sex and relationships, encouraging him to limit sex to people he cared about. But though he’d come out to them before leaving for college, they never spoke directly to him about what it meant to him to be a young gay man. To his mind, that meant acquiring a lot of sexual experience. He proudly described how intentionally he had managed this, seeking out HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP, which all but eliminates the risk of contracting HIV) and regularly getting tested for STIs. For sex, he’d open Grindr on his phone, chat briefly with someone, and arrange to meet in his dorm room, texting his roommate to say that he “needs the room.”
Students use these intentional assignations to test out gendered sexual identities. Justine, an engineer, came out as bisexual before college. But having never had sex with a woman, she asked one of her female friends if they could hook up so she could try it out. On occasion they’d get together, hang out, and have oral sex. Justine’s descriptions sounded like she wasn’t really interested in her friend other than her social proximity and her sexuality; her partner was a placeholder for all women.
There are elements of sexual projects that are not about whether students are heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, cisgender, transgender, or queer. Rather, they’re about being particular types of men or women. Esme (whose experience of being assaulted by a stranger was described in Chapter 1) had grown up watching the television show Girls. It played a powerful role in forming her sexual values. Her college sexual project has a clear narrative arc: she wanted to make out with a lot of random guys, lose her virginity, and then settle into a committed relationship. During the fall of her junior year, Esme was out at her favorite bar with a friend when two guys came in. She’d already hooked up with one of them, and the other, James, she knew from a class. Esme and James “vibed,” she recalls, and spent several hours drinking, talking, and making out—first at that bar, then at another. They were both seeing other people—and Esme’s semi-steady boyfriend was actually James’s friend—so the whole episode felt “a little wrong.” To her, that made it all that much hotter. He invited her back to his place nearby, saying that she could sleep on his couch. She went along, knowing that sex was still very much a possibility. When they arrived, she said she didn’t actually want to sleep on the couch, and James admitted he didn’t want her to either. Esme described the rest of the night—her best sexual experience at college, as she recalled it—as “solid sex,” twice, followed by spending the night cuddling. What made it so fun? The recklessness—“it was not supposed to happen”; in fact, it was “generally destructive for both of us.” She remembered his “crazy nice” apartment and, laughing, how she declined to give him her number the next morning as she left. “The reason I love it so much, or like, really like the experience, is because I felt ice cold, being like, ‘No, I don’t think I should give you my number . . . even though the sex was really good. I’m sure I’ll see you around.’” His pierced scrotum and fully tattooed arms provided lots of colorful details to share with her friends the next day.
Esme had arrived at college with a well-developed sense of her own sexual citizenship, fostered by her parents, who had always comfortably answered her questions about sex and relationships. Her recounting of this story—first to her friends, but then also later in her interview with us—illustrates the complexity of even something as seemingly obvious as sexual pleasure; her delight in the story is not just the “solid sex,” but also the pleasure in seeing herself as a certain type of person—someone who could be “ice cold” in charting her own sexual future. What doesn’t appear in her story is her boyfriend; she was so unphased by the consequences of her actions for their relationship that she only noted them in the interview after we prompted her. Some may find Esme’s story to be emblematic of modern women’s sexual agency, while others may read it as cruel, coarse, or inconsiderate.
Octavia, similarly, was all about being a cool girl. Medium height, biracial, with startling green eyes and long, wavy hair, she had a steady supply of attention from guys. The threesomes that she had had a couple of times were not, for her, about being bisexual; she knows that guys find it a huge turn-on, and she wants to be the girl who is “down for anything.” But sexual projects that are not intrinsically relational—those with a focus on one’s own pleasure, for example, or a single-minded quest to accumulate experience—pave the way for sex in which the other person figures more as a sex toy than as an equivalent human being.
Not having sex can be a form of asserting one’s identity as well. Students’ sexual projects can be a demonstration of their religious identities—sometimes in ways that are about the relationship itself, and sometimes in ways that seem to have little to do with the other person. Diego, who was active in one of the campus’s many Christian student groups, was not a virgin, and he wanted to have vaginal intercourse with his current girlfriend. He liked her a lot, and felt that it would deepen their connection, as it had in his past relationships. But she didn’t want to, and he was okay with that. His sexual project was secondary to his life project of finding a partner he loved and respected, and who was interested in marriage.
Mateo, a third-year student in General Studies and a devout Christian, had trained himself to look only at women’s eyes when he was talking with them, to keep himself from having lustful thoughts while gazing at their bodies. In the past, sex was “kind of his drug.” Before college, and before finding God, he had worked in a gym, where he would frequently meet women; his goal then had been to have sex with as many women “out of his league” as he could—frequently in his truck in the gym’s parking lot. But since his religious conversion, he avoided sex altogether. His sexual project was all about his religious identity.
Religiously engaged students, particularly those from groups large enough to provide their own dating pools and offer ongoing social infrastructure, enjoy what many other students on campus lack: a social organization with an explicit and ongoing conversation that frames sexual projects in relation to community values. There are certainly religious students whose identities are bound to a sexual project that delays intercourse until marriage; this is part of a broader commitment to a life well lived. Among these are the Barnard seniors whose doors are decorated by their peers to mark an engagement—rare nationally in this age group, but not uncommon among the modern Orthodox who are part of the campus’s vibrant Jewish life. For other religiously engaged students, the picture is less rosy: there are far more women than men, producing very intense gendered power disparities. Some religious traditions communicate about sexual projects in ways that do not promote a sense of sexual citizenship, or morally regulate sexual behavior in ways that produce private guilt or public shame; these too can generate considerable harms.10 Particularly for queer students, some forms of religious life offer more anguish than social support.11
Accumulating experience does more than alleviate anxiety; it also provides stories to share with friends, sometimes to bond with them, sometimes to jockey for status. Steve’s story started out sounding very much like the story of someone being assaulted, and then pivoted as he realized that even if the young woman had basically forced him into a sexual experience, she also freed him from what he saw as the stain of sexual inexperience. It began when he was out with his friends at one of the neighborhood bars, celebrating the end of finals after the fall semester of his freshman year. He was pretty drunk, and had tried cocaine for the first time that night. He started talking to a group of women at the bar, and one of them suggested that they go back to his room. Prior to this, Steve had had no sexual experience.
She sorta forced me into it a little bit. She was, like, “Can we go to your room?” And I was just, like, didn’t know what to say, and so I was, like, “All right, let’s, let’s go!” It’s not like I had planned or wanted to do it really. The thing is it’s not something I wanted to do, really, like, I wasn’t particularly attracted to her or anything. I didn’t know how to say no, I guess. Or I just, I guess part of it was, like, I kinda just wanted to get it over with, you know.
They went to his dorm room and sat on the bed talking for a few minutes. He then told this woman that he had never even kissed anyone. He said that he was afraid, and didn’t know what to do. She turned and started kissing him. He didn’t pull away. He fingered her, and then they both performed oral sex on each other. After that, she said they should not have penetrative sex (he suggests that this was because she didn’t want to take his virginity). When they were finished, she asked if he wanted to cuddle. He declined, saying that he wanted to go back out to meet up with his friends. He was excited to tell them about what had happened.
My whole life I was, for whatever reason, just, like scared of being sexually intimate with someone. I used to always be scared of things that I didn’t know how to do. I was afraid of being bad, I guess. I was pretty happy, ’cause I kinda just realized like, “Why am I so afraid? Like . . . this is ridiculous. I’m holding myself back,” you know? I was just really happy.
Steve’s fear of “being bad” paralleled the language that Simon had used. Steve was clear that he had not sought out the sexual interaction, and his description of it was mechanistic, with little discussion of pleasure, but once it was over he felt an intense relief. His virginity was no longer a “thing.” Now he could talk about the experience with his friends—which was more a discussion of his own feelings and his having finally “done it”; it didn’t have anything to do with this particular woman herself. Steve seemed fine that she “kinda forced” him into this experience, since it got him over the hurdle of his fear. Other students told us of getting their first time over with by finding another virgin during orientation week, and deliberately arranging to have sex so that they could each go on their way with their college sex lives, not having to worry about their first time anymore. This reflected a kind of college project defined more by what people did not want than by what they wanted. “Negative” college projects—to know that you didn’t want to be a virgin, that you didn’t want to be bad at sex, that you didn’t want to be seen as inexperienced, or too experienced—often seemed easier to vocalize, or at least more common than positive ones. A more positively articulated project was often elusive. Simon and Steve both knew what they didn’t want. But neither of them recounted getting any adult guidance about what they should want. Simon managed to figure it out for himself and seemed to be doing fine. Steve was still struggling, driven largely by that urge that led him to run out of bed and back to the bar after his first time, an urge to see what his friends thought, more than what he wanted or valued.12
Diana’s shaved head and monochrome dress gave her the air of a penitent. A junior, she described herself as “previously heterosexual, currently asexual.” But in her freshman fall, sex was a way of racking up achievements. She’d fallen in with a group of super-wealthy women, who would “blow like $5,000 a month on brunch.” Mystified, we asked how you spend that much money on brunch. Apparently, it requires drinking a lot of champagne. It may also require a good bit of exaggeration. Regardless, she struggled to pay her part of those brunch tabs, running quickly through her earnings from working at an amusement park the summer before college.
The main Sunday brunch activity was to pass around your phone, showing the Facebook profile photos of men you’d “gotten with” the week before. That competition was the only upside of an experience that she described as “gross.” She’d been at a party in one of the senior dorms, just her and two other freshman women and a bunch of men who were athletes, all on the same team. She and her friends had each done a couple of shots before going over there, and they had some of the joint that the guys were passing around when they arrived. Her friends went to another room in the suite, to continue to smoke. Soon after they left, the situation changed quickly:
There was, like, an unheard signal, and all the guys left except me and this really hot guy. You know, I just feel like it was this, like, alpha shit. Like, he was the best one, so they were gonna, like, let him have sex with me. I mean, it was just really kind of messed up. At the same time, I was like, “Well, like, we’re obviously gonna have sex now.” And so he closed the door and didn’t even say anything. He just started taking my clothes off. You know, I was, like—I was okay with it.
Diana performed oral sex on him; he didn’t reciprocate. According to Diana, “He didn’t even pretend to think about my satisfaction. We just had sex, and then he handed my clothes back to me.” She dressed and walked out, only to find that the many of the team members had been standing there, listening in. Diana felt used. But the using was mutual, even if the pleasure was not. This experience—senior, athlete, hot guy—scored some rare bragging rights at brunch. “I had a good chip in this case.” To characterize this sex as impersonal—as one quite reasonably might—is to miss the most important point. It solidified social relations, but not between the two people having intercourse—rather, between each participant and their respective friends.
Diana’s brunch triumph has a backstory related to her sexual projects, which included both a specific, performative social identity—she wanted to be a bad girl—and the development of sexual skills. In high school, she had wanted to be “good at sex.” She was very explicit about what she was looking for and was, in her own words, “very efficient” about finding it: she “swiped right” on men on dating and hookup apps who listed their ages as between 18 and 30 (“swiping right” means that the app tells these men that you’re interested in them, provided they also swipe right for you). She told them up front that she didn’t want to have intercourse. She had rules: no guys who sent dick pics, and only those who could string together an intelligent sentence. If they were decent guys, she’d hook up with them. Looking back, Diana is thankful she was never able to bring herself to have intercourse with them, and that none of them forced the issue.13
As the end of high school neared, Diana became increasingly annoyed that she was still a virgin. She was a planner. There was little romantic or even sexual about her plan. She started dating her first boyfriend with “losing my virginity” as almost the sole goal. When we sat down to chat with her four years after the fact, looking back on her relationship, the word she chose to describe how she treated her boyfriend was “abusive.” After she’d gotten what she wanted, she cheated on him—intentionally choosing his archenemy. Her boyfriend was crushed; Diana didn’t care.
Most students have an exaggerated sense of how much sex others are having; few know that this generation is having less sex than those a generation ago. There’s a competitive quality among some peer groups about each member’s sexual standing, where groups seek to advance their own status, but also compete with one another about who is, by some collectively agreed-upon metric, winning. The people they’re having sex with are not the prize, they’re the pawns in the game. Underneath this is no small amount of fear—of not keeping up, or of leading the pack “too much,” or maybe even of being ridiculous. For Diana, that moment of passing her phone around at brunch outweighed the unpleasantness of the night before.
For high-status men, this competition can take the form of seeing how many freshman girls, and which ones, they can have sex with in the early weeks of the fall semester. The summer before college, Murray and his high school friends looked over the Facebook pages for each guy’s future classmates, publicly making the list of which “cuties” they’d have sex with. Reflecting back on having had sex with all three of his designated choices during the first couple weeks of his freshman fall, he made clear that the thrill was the competition, more than the sex itself. “It’s definitely more about hooking up with hot girls and telling your friends about it than like any real sexual thing. ’Cause like everyone can get laid.” He continued, making clear that the audience that mattered for these achievements was not “broader Columbia, just sort of within your friends.”14
Peers figure powerfully in determining whether an experience advances one’s sexual projects. During orientation week, for example, Pratish and a girl he’d just met, Jolie, thought it would be fun to hook up in the stacks of the East Asian Studies library. Through a staircase, past the vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and long oak tables of the library’s majestic main reading room, lie several floors of stacks, connected by metal staircases. It is rarely crowded, and was empty that night in the middle of the week before Labor Day weekend. They made out a bit, and then Jolie gave Pratish a hand job. In the moment, and at first afterwards, Pratish was delighted: “It was actually really funny. And to me, it’s, like, such a funny story. And, like, I—I enjoy that, like, that was a funny experience and I definitely don’t regret it, and that was, like, a fun time.” Afterwards, though, things got awkward. Jolie told a couple of her friends, and word made its way back to Pratish’s friends, who made fun of him because she was not “their stereotypical pretty girl.” Pratish was clearly defensive about this; he maintained that she was funny and that they’d had fun together. But it turned out to be embarrassing for him. He may have enjoyed Jolie, but his friends mocked him for it. This influenced his future sexual decisions, as well as how he felt about his time with Jolie.
The axis along which peers evaluate a sexual interaction is brutally clear—does the person raise your status, or lower it? The “risks” of sex to which students are most attentive are not pregnancy or STIs, which can mostly be managed with morning-after pills and antibiotics. The social risks feel far more pressing. In students’ recounting of episodes of sex that stand out in their memories, we see them most attentive to such social factors: the partner’s broadly perceived attractiveness, and their peers’ responses, and what the sex will mean for their social standing. Such risks are more salient even than whether the interaction was physically pleasurable. The pleasure of sex that most students seem ultimately concerned with is its social pleasure, or status enhancement.
In residential college life, friend groups and fellow student activity members become substitute family. That’s a good thing. These chosen families are students’ most important source of support and emotional well-being. The consequence, though, can often be perverse. Students frequently told us that relationships with sexual partners probably wouldn’t last. They would fall apart over summer, or after graduation, or because one person was leaving for study abroad, or even during the school year when there was just so much else they had to do. Students can be reluctant to begin a relationship within a friendship group. The chaos or fracture that a breakup can cause within a tight-knit group of friends makes dating within your group of close friends feel too risky. The possibility of losing your chosen family, or disrupting the dynamic within an extracurricular group, just isn’t worth it. The terms “floorcest” or “hall-cest” to denote having sex with someone on your floor or hall conveys the intensity of the proscription against sex within one’s immediate social group. The potential awkwardness outweighs the rare but enormously valued potential outcome of finding love that fits within your life. And so students turn to those on the fringes of, or even outside, their friendship network. What at first glance seems like reckless behavior—looking for sex with people who are acquaintances rather than friends—is actually a hedge against the risk of losing one’s greatest source of support. Students often avoid intimacy with those with whom they have the most in common, or people they already really like. Instead, risk aversion presses them to take a shot among the relatively unknown. And because it can feel awkward to get naked with someone you don’t really know, students who hook up hoping that it will turn into a relationship are frequently drunk. Yes, parties are both places to drink and places to meet prospective partners, but the drinking also serves as a kind of emotional anesthesia; recall Margot, who shared that she “only has the courage to hook up when drunk.”
It’s not just embarrassment—there is a broader set of social risks that students are managing. Apps to connect with prospective sexual partners intersect with the sexual project of accruing experience, offering a way to catch up for students who feel that their “number” is too low. Digitally mediated sex is efficient. If a student meets someone at a party, it’s impossible to tell if they’re available or already partnered, straight or gay. This could lead to a whole wasted hour at a party—when social time feels very scarce. Swiping right or seeing that they’re single skips all these steps, connecting students directly to available and interested prospective partners. It offers emotional safety as well as efficiency, getting students past that first possible rejection. Despite being all about the cool-girl pose, Octavia was disarmingly honest about her fear of rejection. There were two ways that Tinder figured in her current ongoing hookup. First, it had helped move things to the next level. As she recounted,
It’s hard to meet new people at Columbia. People are very cliquey—you go to a bar, and everybody’s already in their own groups, and it’s hard to know for sure if someone is attracted to you. For example, Macauley and I, we knew each other . . . but because we matched on Tinder, that gave us a reason to talk, and that gave a confirmation that we were both attracted to each other. Versus, like, if I just meet a guy at a bar and talk to him, he could just be being polite. . . . If you match with someone online, that’s like, one hundred percent they’re interested.
Octavia’s reliance on apps ebbed and flowed, depending on “the month, and what new people I’m juggling, and what old people I’m juggling.” Which led to the question, “Why always the need to pull in new people?” She assessed the situation brutally. “’Cause I get uncomfortable if I don’t have a . . . I have to be dating, if I’m single. Because I feel shitty if I’m just having sex with Macauley and he’s not my boyfriend. That’s, like, not okay with me.” She laughed. “I’m just like, ‘if you’re not gonna wife me up, I’m not gonna be monogamous with you. It’s not happening, sorry.’”15
She rotated between apps, deleting them in frustration, or because she felt they were too distracting, and then reinstalling them when she needed to be “juggling” more people as she tried to work out the role of sex in her life.
In high school I would use it when I was feeling anxious or feeling lonely . . . and now I use it like, “o my god, I’m stressed and anxious, I just need to have sex.” It will make me feel better, it will make me feel less lonely. It will make me feel supported.
Octavia was reflective about this.
It’s bad to use sex to feel better. I feel like if you’re using a chemical, like sex creates chemicals, dopamine and serotonin . . . I personally think it’s bad to use alcohol, drugs if you’re feeling shitty, you should be using things when you’re in a good state, you shouldn’t be using things to make your state better.
She was trying, she said, to “move away from that.” Her goal was for sex to be “more to bond with the person I like rather than trying to make myself feel better. Like, I’ve found a lot of other coping mechanisms when I feel stressed or anxious or lonely, like being out with friends. But I still sometimes, when I feel shitty, want to have sex.”16
Octavia responded without hesitation when we asked about her aims for her sexual life: “So I right now am really—I really want a boyfriend. I really do, and that’s a weird thing to want. It’s not a weird thing to want but it’s a hard thing to aim for.” Octavia had a rich emotional vocabulary and well-developed capacity to reflect on what drove her actions—including a fairly scathing analysis of the way that she used app-based sex as an emotionally protective countermeasure to Macauley’s reluctance to “wife her up.” Octavia, like most of her peers, struggled with a totally understandable fear of rejection. The disjuncture between Octavia’s aspirations for how sex should fit into her life, and her actions, constantly seeking “new people” to juggle, was not unusual; what stuck out about her story was how fearlessly clear-eyed she was in admitting that her resistance to being exclusive with Macauley was a performance of independence.
Octavia was hard on herself. College can be a very lonely time—particularly in the first semesters, when students have left home but have not settled into a groove with new friends and established activities. In this context, for many students, hooking up is to intimacy what instant ramen is to food—not really a long-term substitute, but good enough to kill the craving in the moment. Before students have made friends—real intimate friends, to whom they can confess that they are lonely or homesick or scared—it’s easier, and more socially acceptable, to get a little drunk—or in some cases, very drunk—and hook up with a relative stranger. It might be scary, but lying in bed with a friend of a friend at least provides a little human warmth and physical connection. For many students, hookups are a form of “satisficing”—finding something that is good enough (sufficient) and allowing it to satisfy a desire. But satisficing prevents some people from seeking what they actually want. An ongoing hookup might keep the despair and loneliness at bay. But eating those instant noodles also means that you’re not going to be hungry for dinner.17
Margot, an Asian junior, shook her head in frustration, talking about how hookup culture kept people from going out on dates: “Like, at Columbia, or at college in general, relationships start from hooking up instead of the traditional, ask someone out, take you on a date kind of thing.” So when she hooks up, “it’s like, in the back of my mind, I’m hoping for something more.” A striking element of that “something more” that so many students seek is just how low the bar is. They say they are looking for a guy who is “not a creep.” Someone, as Oona said, who asks you some “sweet questions,” or as Guy said, who “wants to talk after sex,” or as Winona said, “will just say hi to you when they see you the next day.”18
Jay, a young bisexual man whose parents are from India, was clear that his sexual project was really just physical pleasure. He described an encounter with Mostafa, with whom he’d connected on Grindr. They were in Mostafa’s apartment, and before Mostafa penetrated Jay, he paused and asked if it was okay. Jay noted that appreciatively, distinguishing it from some people who are “a bit more aggressive” and just turn you over, taking conversations previously conducted over Grindr as consent for all activities.19
Across a whole range of sexual projects, what consistently separated interactions that verged on or constituted assault from those that did not was this moment of recognition about the other person’s equivalent humanity. That doesn’t mean that sex for pleasure, or skills-building, or to impress one’s friends, leads automatically to assault. But these sexual projects, because they have so little to do with the other person, lay the groundwork for assault. They are contexts that lend themselves easily to impersonal sex. We’re not against hookups or casual sex per se. We’re concerned about it in a context where people (mostly women and queer students) lack clarity about their own sexual citizenship, and where many (mostly, but certainly not only, men) also fail to recognize equivalent citizenship in the person they are with.
Early in our fieldwork, we asked students a question that we thought was really important—“What is sex for?” Most students couldn’t answer it. We got a lot of “um, making babies,” and some blank looks. Eventually we scrapped the question in favor of other ways of eliciting students’ sexual projects. Except for those students whose grounding and ongoing participation in religious life offered a framework for them to think about sexual interactions in relation to morality, or those students whose parents took an active role in having conversations about what sex was for, most students have to figure out the sexual projects question on their own. They have grown to physical maturity surrounded by a cacophony of messages about sex: fear-based messages about the dangers of sex; incitements in popular culture to act and do and achieve; an internet filled with pornography; but often very little in the way of actual conversations. They’d been told time and again what not to do—don’t get pregnant, don’t get a girl pregnant, don’t get HIV, and now, don’t assault anyone, and be careful about getting assaulted. They are unbound by conventions of gender; pressed to consume; stressed, lonely, and insecure.
But what should sex mean? Recall Simon nearly vomiting from nerves, trying to force himself to live out what he thought should be his fantasy of sex with a hunky sophomore, and then figuring out for himself that he really was not comfortable having sex with someone he didn’t know. And so even “normal sex” includes a lot of struggle; young people are confused, and sometimes unkind or even cruel, as they seek to figure it out. When they arrive on campus, the big message that they get is about consent. For a lot of them, this is like starting with calculus when they’ve never had arithmetic.