After months of binge-watching Sex and the City with my mom on rainy evenings in high school, I can’t help but fall prey every now and then to the voice of Carrie Bradshaw whispering in my ear. It was in one of these Sex and the City inspired moments that I began to wonder: Does Kenyon’s ubiquitous hookup culture truly represent what most students desire? In other words, what does the average Kenyon student want most: sex or true love?
Before arriving at Kenyon, I had a preconceived notion about what social life here on campus would be like. I’ll be honest—my expectations were very far from the truth. Knowing that Kenyon was a small, quaint liberal arts college in rural Ohio, I anticipated that the average student would be more interested in poetry than casual sex. Before I got here, I was beginning to worry that there wouldn’t be enough of a party culture for me, and I’m not exactly known for being the girl who parties hard on the weekends.
I was wrong. As it turns out, Kenyon students are very interested in sex! That’s clear by the number of hookups that I find myself accidentally witnessing during parties or hearing about the following mornings. People do it, people talk about it, and people seem to enjoy it. Actual romantic relationships, however, appear to be more scarce. I rarely see couples out in the open. Anytime I do, I feel surprised that one has miraculously emerged from the woodwork of Kenyon’s social hive.
I couldn’t help but wonder, is there a lack of true romantic love at Kenyon? And if so, is it because students are genuinely more interested in casual sex, or is it because no one wants to admit that they’re secretly hoping for love? I decided it was time to find out.
Because the term “hookup” is so infuriatingly ambiguous, I began each interview by asking the interviewee what they define as a hookup. The answer was virtually the same for everyone: a hookup can be anything. Most people said that hookups can range from making out to penetrative sex, but one person even said that a hookup can be as simple as a date without any overtly sexual actions involved.
Multiple interviewees said that they hadn’t particularly enjoyed past hookup experiences, but if the opportunity arose, they would still hook up with someone again in the future. I asked one of the interviewees if she expected to have a more positive experience hooking up with someone in the future than she had in the past, and she admitted that she probably wouldn’t enjoy it any more than she had before. So my question was, why do it at all then?
My interviewee answered that she’d hook up with someone again for the same reasons she had before. She had engaged in hookups during high school primarily out of boredom. She wasn’t in a relationship, so she thought, “Why not?” She noted that social pressure is another important reason that people choose to hookup with others. For teenagers and young adults, there is an air of social status that lingers around the topic of sex. “We’ve tried so hard to make [sex] lax and free and whatnot, but there is a lot of pressure in it for everyone,” said my interviewee. “I think we regard people who have engaged in more sexual relations as being more experienced and somehow more wise [sic] and more worldly.” Sex is associated with maturity, and maturity is associated with respect. As a result, many young people form respect for their peers based in part on their sexual experience.
Romance, in stark contrast, is often viewed as immature. When I think of romance, images of red roses, heart-shaped chocolates, and flowing skirts come to mind. I often associate romance with a level of superficiality and naivety. These connotations are not necessarily fair. They are derived from a more central truth, which is that romance spawns vulnerability. When we are in love, we are emotionally vulnerable. We are far more likely to release our inhibitions and give way to the jaded clichés of roses and chocolates that may seem unbelievably banal to our less starry-eyed friends.
Talking to the people around me, I realized that a large part of my perception of Kenyon’s hookup culture has to do with my inherent age bias. One of the reasons I don’t know very many people in relationships is because I’m a freshman and most of the people I surround myself with are freshmen. We haven’t known each other for very long. It’s only October, and romance takes time.
As freshmen in college, we are determined to be perceived as intelligent, capable young people. We are hyper-aware of the impressions we make on those we meet, and we are often on our guard, careful to let only the best sides of ourselves shine through to the public eye. It makes sense, then, that we would be wary of romance. We don’t want to be perceived as immature, superficial, or naive. And perhaps above all else, we don’t want to make ourselves more vulnerable than we already are.
Everyone I interviewed said without hesitation that they desired love more than sex. And yet, most of those people also said that they thought the average Kenyon student was more interested in sex than love. This suggests that more people are looking for love and romance than we expect, but most of those people assume that they are alone in their desire.
For the most part, our generation adamantly discourages sex-shaming. After listening to people talk about their feelings on love and sexuality though, it seems to me that we may have inadvertently replaced sex-shaming with romance-shaming. Instead of worrying that our peers will think we are overly promiscuous, many of us now fear that they will think we are too conservative or immature for not choosing to partake in casual sex.
Although Kenyon does boast a more active hookup culture than I expected prior to joining the student body myself, the truth remains that there is something for everyone. If casual sex is what you are interested in, you’re in luck because plenty of other people are too! To quote one of my interviewees, “The freshman class is insanely horny.” However, if you are a romantic or someone longing for love, hope is not lost here at Kenyon. Despite the casual air we may project, when it comes down to it, most of us really do love love. If you search for it, the chances are that you’ll find it.
When it comes to love, sex, and romance, every person is looking for something a little bit different. Naturally, there are individualized fears and worries that come with that. Love and sex make us vulnerable, yes, but they also bring us in touch with our own humanity. Whether it’s a hookup or a relationship, being truthful about what sexuality and romance genuinely mean to us as individuals can be an important way of coming to understand ourselves.