The Sex Habits of 784 College Students

To get a feel for nationwide developments in university gender, we partnered with SurveyMonkey to review students from varied experiences at numerous four-year universites and colleges all over the country — from Harvard toward University of Minnesota to San Diego condition. A few caveats: The poll was designed by journalists, perhaps not personal boffins. The like the debatable question of intimate assault, we instead bluntly expected participants whether they’d already been raped, while most public-health surveys as an alternative describe the work of forced sex in a number of other ways as well as over a series of concerns.

More individuals will declare that they will have skilled rape if you don’t actually keep these things identify as rape survivors, so less college students mentioned they are raped within survey than have actually in recent nationwide campus scientific studies. (However, a high portion of individuals inside our study mentioned they are aware some other pupils who’ve been intimately assaulted.) In addition, despite our very own best attempts for a straight gender split, even more ladies taken care of immediately the poll — it turns out that problem to getting teenage boys to sit down still for a survey is actually a well-known issue.

There are a lot of things that interested us about the findings: College women, as a bunch, have actually an important anxiety about intimate coercion; males, by contrast, overwhelmingly fear rejection — as they are more or less doubly scared of bad performance in bed as women are. But the thing that intrigued us most was actually that for all your narrative prominence of “hookup culture,” the scholars which replied to our survey happened to be interestingly sexually conservative.

Evaluation by Amelia Thomson-Deveaux

*This post seems in the Oct 19, 2015 dilemma of

New York

Magazine.