This article first appeared in print journal Sept./Oct. 1998.

When Eric Konigsberg investigated the sexual habits of today’s college students for Spin magazine, he found out a lot more than he’d bargained for.

Konigsberg asked one male student and one female student at Vassar College to keep journals of their sexual exploits during one 14-week school semester. The writer also talked to other students about their sex lives. The results turned out like some hedonistic nightmare:

Having reached the point of nearly complete license, they had created an environment that seemed melancholy, nihilistic, groping, purposeless, apathetic, lifeless… (“Sex Ed.,” June 1998).

Vassar was once one of the “seven sisters,” a group of East Coast schools that included expensive, established, women-only colleges like Wellesley and Barnard. Some of the sisters merged with men’s colleges, but Vassar simply opened its door to men in 1968. Now 30 years later, men remain a minority and “straight women outnumber men nearly two to one,” said the article.

The students interviewed had as few hang-ups about opening their lives to the writer as they did opening their beds to their fellow students. The male who kept a journal for the story recorded sexual encounters with 10 people—not quite one partner per week. The female recorded only a conservative three partners.

Other students told plenty of stories about “pseudo-orgies” (in which they hang out in a dorm room, drink, and get gradually naked), about students propositioning each other in the school’s dining hall, and about the yawning chasm that has opened up between copulation and love.

No one talked about falling madly in love or about getting hurt. Wrote Konigsberg, “No one fought to save a romance, and no one worked to start one.”

Instead, much of the emphasis was on bedding and being bedded, even when sex was a seeming afterthought. “When they did end up in bed, it seemed to have been just that—ending up there by chance, or due to someone else’s insistence.”

But numbers aren’t the only reason Vassar students are so sexually active.

“It’s difficult to name another school that makes as many ostentatious pledges to sexual openness,” wrote Konigsberg, describing the institution’s coed dorms and sex-saturated student events.

One Expert’s Perspective
Walt Mueller is president of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and publishes a youth culture newsletter. He regularly immerses himself in pop culture, so he wasn’t particularly surprised by the Spin article. “I’ve heard this all before,” he says, “over and over.”

“Should we be surprised by these behaviors in a young adult population that longs for connectedness and has been raised largely by media messages that promote free expression of sexuality?” he asks.

While some may question the article’s anecdotal approach—or even Spin’s agenda (its editor is the son of Penthouse publisher, Bob Guccione), Mueller doesn’t think we should dismiss the message because of the messenger.

“While the article may not accurately reflect the sexual reality of 100% of today’s college student population,” he says, “it’s at least an accurate portrayal of how some are living.”

In addition, Mueller says some of the article’s findings are confirmed by his own conversations with youth workers and high school students. One youth ministry vet told him that kids today “are so much more sexual in the way they dress, talk, and behave. And they feel the freedom to be so much more sexual in front of adults. They don’t even try to hide it.”

As for high school students, Mueller has found that while not all are “doing it”, most are feeling a growing freedom to “talk about it.” These signs of increasing sexual frankness and openness represent the practical consequences of society’s growing sexual permissiveness and the media’s growing explicitness.

While some who read the Spin article may want to bury their heads, Mueller says it made him even more excited than he already was about the prospects for youth ministry today.

“The article reflects the gnawing emptiness, purposelessness, and the search for meaning in our culture,” he says. “Students are looking to connect with themselves, with others, and with God in significant ways.”

But youth workers who approach teen sex realistically need to say more than “just say no.” Mueller calls for an approach to ministry that is prophetic, preventive, and redemptive.

•Prophetic. Youth workers need to talk clearly and openly about God’s design for sex. Don’t be vague or coy. Instead, talk about sexuality as frankly as kids do themselves, and as clearly as do the movies and TV shows they watch. But at the same time, make sure to include the important missing elements in so many teen discussions about sex—God’s high view of humanity and sexuality’s important role in fostering communication and intimacy between husbands and wives.

•Preventive. Youth workers must help kids develop practical strategies for maintaining sexual purity. That requires more than merely reciting lists of sexual do’s and don’ts. Instead, help young people see through the sexual lies and empty promises of today’s culture and create a stronger, deeper set of personal values.

•Redemptive. Living a life of sexual purity has never been easy, and it’s certainly not easy today. You will undoubtedly encounter a growing number of kids who are “sexual casualties.” Your job is to lead them to faith, forgiveness, and a new sense of the truth about sexuality. t