To the "beautiful people," friends and lovers, frequently the same, and TDCK, paragon of patience.
-L.S.D.
* * *
"IT'S WHAT'S HAPPENING, BABY!"
All over the United States, a new kind of sexual morality is being practiced in colleges and universities.
The students say their behavior-which consists of doing just about what they please-is more moral than "following a bunch of outdated rules."
What do they do? How wild is their behavior? This book tells you.
And-depending on what you think of the so-called new morality-you'll be either shocked or pleased by what you learn.
But whether you like the new code of college behavior or not, you can't escape it. Because, as one uninhibited coed expressed it: "It's what's happening, baby!"
* * *
INTRODUCTION
The sexual behavior and attitudes of the college generation of today are not the same as they were forty years ago ... or thirty ... or twenty ... or even ten. Even those who have been out of college no more than five years express the sentiment that things are no longer as they were. We are currently witnessing the fastest rate of change in this area ever observed. Beyond that, there is relatively little agreement.
A generation ago, when the famous Kinsey surveys were made, there was alarmed talk of a sexual revolution, a new morality, or merely a breakdown in the old morality, with heavens-only-knows-what as a result. Twenty years later, these observations are still with us. The questions are the same, and the answers are not much different. But now the questioned have become the questioners, and today's parents show nothing more than the same concern for their children that their parents expressed for them.
Magazines are running articles on the same questions they have been covering for years; if anything the trend is more toward curbing undue alarm than setting down moral proclamations, and-above all-the emphasis is on education. We must know what our young people are doing, and why they are doing it; what their sexual attitudes are, and how they feel about their behavior and that of their classmates. Only then will we have some idea what to make of it all.
Reports, studies, statistics, and analyses have their place, but the best way to learn what college students think and do is to ask them; this book is written by a college graduate after years of questioning fellow students, and, later, student friends. Their responses have been candid and unabashed; they are eager for people to learn the truth about what is happening, rather than, as one student put it, "reading every lurid expose scandal printed, and believing that's what is happening everywhere." Says another, "A lot of us feel we are behaving much more morally than our elders. We'd all get along better if they were to understand how and why this is so ... But they are old; they're set in their ways. They don't even want to listen!"
This book is written for those who do want to listen ... and learn.
-L.S.D.
CHAPTER ONE
IN LOCO PARENTIS
Not long ago, the Dean of Women at an eastern state university was speaking candidly to a reporter on the subject of the rules her school had for the students, particularly the restrictive rules for the women students. As she spoke, her face was creased with the frowns of dilemma; her position was a very difficult one, and this too she tried to express:
"If you left it all to my own judgment," she began, "I would not consider all these regulations necessary. I know many of the students to be mature young ladies, and they consider these regulations unreasonable and unnecessary; they are not likely to get into the trouble these rules are intended to prevent. 'We are adult women,' the upperclassmen tell me, 'and these rules are for children.' And this is a point on which I must agree; the rules are for children. They are for the children of parents all over this state who hold us responsible for the behavior of their sons and daughters while they study at this university. Every youngster is his parents' child, even if he is fifty and his parents are seventy-five; this attitude is inescapable.
"I have had indignant parents march into my office, complete strangers to me; 'I want you to know that my daughter is pregnant! Why didn't you do something to prevent this?' Unwilling to face the fact that their own responsibility in the matter is at least as great as ours, parents all too often find it easy and convenient to blame us for their failures. This particular woman went on to explain that her daughter had been spending afternoons and evenings in the off-campus apartment of her boyfriend, and insisted that we should have had enough control over the girl's whereabouts to prevent this; it was useless to point out that we are similarly responsible for several thousand girls, and full-time supervision and chaperonage is out of the question.
"The mother was not interested in this. Her daughter had gotten into trouble one hundred miles from home, beyond parental authority; she was a 'good girl' and this never would have been able to happen at home, swore the mother. 'I thought my daughter was in good hands when I sent her here,' she charged.
"This is just one instance of a case where a parent expects the university to function as a baby-sitter; we have to live with the fact that this is their attitude, and because most of them are footing the college bills, they feel that they have a legitimate concern.
"At this university, we are in an even more difficult position than the private school; we depend upon the state legislature for our financial support, and many parents complain directly to the legislators. One prominent businessman was highly incensed because he had seen a copy of the college newspaper with a review of a lecture on the topic of sex given by one of the chaplains here. He sent me a copy of the letter he had written to the legislators; in it he made the statement, 'I sent my daughter to college to get an education, not to learn to be a promiscuous, sex-crazed tramp!'
"The main point that the chaplain had made in his talk was merely that it was demeaning to have an affair with a boy one did not love-demeaning to love, sex, and the individual. But this father felt that because the chaplain discussed premarital sexual relations without condemning them summarily, he was obviously condoning them.
"There was a time, a few years back, when an open lecture on such a subject would have been taboo here; unfortunately, at that time we had been receiving criticism from parents and students alike for failing to provide any sex education or forum for sexual discussion. It was another case of parents projecting their responsibilities and failures on to us.
"So we allowed our more conservative people to approach the subject, and found ourselves criticized by another faction. Different parents were blaming the same problems on lack of sexual discussion here, too much sexual discussion here, or what they vaguely charged was 'the wrong kind' of sexual discussion. At this point it is obvious that we shall continue to be criticized regardless of what we do.
"We have to answer not only to the state legislature and the parents, but also to the students, who can be as much a problem as their parents when their demands are not met. It's not an easy job."
It certainly is not an easy job. It is the age-old disagreement between parents and their offspring, with the university acting as go-between and receiving abuse from both sides.
"In loco parentis" was a familiar phrase around colleges several years ago, and it still is, although with the tone of resignation assigned to a cliche. Should the college administration function "in place of parents"? All too many parents say yes. The students who feel that "college is a place to grow up" say no. Administrators have to put up with criticism and abuse and protests from the former, and unrest, demonstration, and often out-and-out riots from the latter. They step delicately, trying to maintain a workable balance between the two. However, as the gap between the mores of the parents and those of the students grows wider, the colleges and universities are finding themselves in a singularly unenviable position. Administrators are being increasingly called on to account for their positions to trustees. Let's take a look at some of their stands and the reasons they offer for them.
A few years ago, the dean of one of the eastern Ivy League women's colleges was in the news with her comments on student sexual behavior. Her name was Sarah Gibson Blanding, her age was then 63, and she was the only woman president in over 100 years of the history of Vassar college.
The college had stated that "the college expects every girl to uphold the highest standards"-a catch-all phrase similarly represented in most colleges. The applecart of complacency was upset when a student committee requested a definition of "highest standards." Miss Blanding thereupon summoned a compulsory convocation. Her statement to the 1450 girls in her charge not only raised a furor at Vassar, but provoked great controversy on the subject of student sex in newspaper headlines across the country, particularly in newspapers of other colleges and universities. Sarah Blanding could hardly have touched off a greater ruckus if she had recommended pre-marital sexual intercourse....
In fact, she had done quite the contrary. She bluntly spelled out the edict that Vassar considered it indecent for any student to drink excessively or to have pre-marital sex relations. Vassar would not condone such activities, and students violating these "innate standards" would be subject to expulsion. A rather confused poll appeared in the college newspaper shortly thereafter, showing that 52% of the students agreed with the president, while 40% considered their private lives their own concern.
Vassarites, and indeed college students across the country, debated whether a college has the right to impose moral standards on its students. One girl told the pollsters: "If Vassar is to become the Poug-like Victorian Seminary for Young Virgins then the change of policy had better be made explicit in admissions catalogues." Other students merely expressed the opinion that such rules were simply unenforceable.
Many others, on campuses from Maine to California, interpreted the Blanding edict as little more than a warning to college girls to be more discreet; it was quite obvious that the ultimatum could be easily ignored as long as such deviant behavior would not occasion public attention. A 22-year-old Vassar senior said at the time, "From now on, the student who has made up her mind to have an affair will be more discreet. And the student who has not made up her mind will look to the college for guidance."
In general, the decision was taken more seriously by parents, journalists, and moralists than by the students themselves, one of whom commented, "I don't think that any girl is going to tell her boy friend: 'I can't go to bed with you because Miss Blanding said I shouldn't."
On another campus, one which was involved in a poll of administrative policy, the dean of students replied that 'sexual relations between students, heterosexual or homosexual, need not be the direct concern of this or any university as long as they are engaged in privately and with discretion."
Another responded,, "We prefer to make no statements about the private sexual conduct of the students at this institution."
And a third commented, "Unless some particular case is brought to our attention, we do not wish to interfere in any way with the sexual activities of our students. They know the rules and the mores, and they make their own decisions."
These comments were typical. Most schools scrupulously avoid the subject of sex among students. Occasionally a newsman will approach an administrator with a prevalent rumor regarding sex activity, only to hear the perennial, "We know nothing about it; to our knowledge, nothing of the sort takes place on our campus." Some administrators made such statements up until the afternoon that some campus sex scandal story broke in the newspapers....
It soon becomes quite apparent that the universities and colleges really do not wish to assume responsibility for the sex lives of their students; they simply wish to placate the alarmists and avoid scandal. The simplest way to do this is to publish a handbook with sufficiently stem-sounding rules; this then can be shown to concerned parents as evidence that the school is fulfilling its moral obligations.
John T. Rule, writing in Atlantic magazine, says " ... the easiest procedure in handling non classroom conduct on the residential campus is to institute strict regulations for dormitory and fraternity living which protect the college from external criticism. Such regulations in their extreme form generally forbid the presence of one sex in any living unit of the other except "on the first floor" and in strictly controlled and chaperoned groups. Through the summary dismissal of transgressors, the institution can avoid external criticism ... Almost all state universities operate this way. The pressures from alumni, legislators, and the vocal voting public to preserve an acceptable moral posture are far too great to be resisted."
Some of the results of such proper-sounding legislation by the colleges never get publicized. One college forbids women to go "above the ground floor" while visiting or attending parties in a fraternity house. As a result, one enterprising fraternity chapter designed and built their new residence so that the social and recreation area was at ground level from the main, street entrance; the land sloped downward in the back, and all the bedrooms were, at least technically, well below the ground floor.
CHAPTER TWO
BRINGING IT OUT INTO THE OPEN
Sex is a part of life; no university can negate this basic fact. The students who reach college have often been too occupied with their high school or preparatory school work to have gained the sexual experience of their non-college-bound classmates, and they view the four-year college experience as a forum, a proving grounds, and-in the case of students living away from home for the first time-the first real opportunity for sexual self-determination. The universities and colleges are aware of this, thus it is not uncommon for freshman orientation week to include addresses which touch on this delicate subject either by implication or directly, depending on the school.
The regulations themselves say a lot by implication. Expecting a coed to return to her dormitory at a reasonable hour every evening is a euphemistic way of saying that she is not supposed to stay out all night with her boyfriend. Rules which allow a coed to sign out on week-ends only for their parents' home, or the home of another female student, make it quite clear that neither are coeds expected to go off for week-end trips with their boyfriends. Of course, the rules are unique at each school, but whatever they are they function as a mirror of the sexual behavior expected.
It is not uncommon for a speaker to be considerably more outspoken. Many college handbooks simply point out that "morally acceptable behavior is expected of all students at all time, on or off campus" and that violation of these terms is likely to result in expulsion. Of course, most administrators are loathe to define "morally acceptable standards (of behavior.)" Says one young lady, "They just don't want you to sleep with anyone, but they're too chicken to put it in those terms." The deans explain that the regulation usually acts as a catch-all for any 'scandalous" actions that may be brought to their attention.
One handbook for incoming students simply states, "No woman student may visit any male student, graduate or undergraduate, in his private room, apartment, or dwelling." The Dean of Students is well aware that this is one of the most commonly ignored regulations, but points out that it is needed as justification to "appropriately discipline any student whose actions while in violation of this regulation are brought to our attention." It is also, she states, "reassuring to parents who read the handbook" and "a model for the incoming student who is looking for guidelines."
And not a few have tossed this regulation up to their dates as a means of avoiding a compromising situation. As one young man said of such a girl, "She said she was afraid of being found in violation of the rules, and I went along with that. But we both knew what she really meant, yet we were able to avoid the embarrassment of having to put it so bluntly, or else offer a weaker excuse."
At a more progressive, independent school, with a more liberal reputation, students undergoing orientation lectures are told, "What you do away from college is your business. In certain respects, what you do privately on campus is also your business. But we will not tolerate any behavior that will result in adverse publicity for this institution." It was added that the remark was as applicable to public drunkenness, political activities, disturbing the peace, and alienating the local residents as it was to sexual activity.
As a rule, the administrators leave the business of sexual proscription and prescription to others. Dorm counselors add their own comments at house meetings. Housemothers may or may not elaborate on these; in most cases, however, they act predominantly as chief-of-police, with the counselors as deputies. The laws are the rules set down in the handbook, and sexual activity is usually ignored as long as the letter of the law is obeyed.
The next major group to offer sexual advice to the college student is the clergyman. He may be affiliated with a church in town, or he may actually be on the university staff as chaplain. In some cases he is both. Of all the announced orientation and related lectures at which attendance is not required, a clergyman with the publicized topic of 'sex and the college student" is likely to draw the largest crowd. Some will be the curious, interested only in hearing if the speaker will say anything to support their own preconceived attitudes. Many will be followers of the speaker's church, eager to learn what they will consider their church's counsel on the matter. A small minority comes hoping for lurid commentary on the "price of sin."
One girl admitted that she attended such a lecture because "religious functions" were the only reason an entering freshman girl at her school was allowed out of her dorm after seven! (Upon her return to the dorm, the counselor in charge, also a Catholic, remarked sternly that she had failed to see her young charge at the Newman Club meeting. The girl then had to admit that she had been attending the Congregational minister's talk on sex instead.)
The religious talks range from vapid reiterations of the heavenly retribution alleged by church doctrine to candid questions and realistic answers about highly intimate problems related to sex life. Occasionally a speaker will gain a reputation for saying something sensible about sex; one of these was the Congregational minister above, and this was the reason the Catholic girl-as well as many others of different faiths-had chosen to attend his talk. What had he said that earned him the respect of so many of these young people?
His entire talk was an extended metaphor, dealing with the necessity for deciding whether or not any given action was appropriate for the situation. He progressed to interpersonal actions: was the activity between two people "an appropriate expression of their relationship?" All this was said without any real mention of sexual specifics. However, his ultimate example was very well-taken:
"If a girl sees a classmate of hers on campus, a boy she knows but slightly, and runs up, throws her arms around him, kisses him passionately," said the minister, "that could hardly be considered an appropriate expression of their relationship. On the other hand, if I had been away from home on business for several months, and my wife greeted me at the door when I returned, and I just shook her hand and said 'Hi, honey. Good to see you again. When will dinner be ready?' That could hardly be considered an appropriate expression of our relationship." This example elicited amused smiles, but the students were impressed. Why had this speaker said something they were able to accept?
For one thing, he had dictated no doctrine of behavior! He had not said "you may do this; you mustn't do that." He had acknowledged that these young adults had to make up their own minds about such matters, a statement with which they were quite willing to agree. Then, he had followed up by providing some good points on which these decisions could be based. Whereas one speaker earlier that week had admitted that it might be alright to sleep with someone only if it was someone you really loved, this minister was unwilling to try to impose even that value system upon his listeners. His advice could be interpreted usefully by each individual student, according to his own complex sentiments.
This, clearly, is the kind of advice students need and welcome.
One visiting clergyman ended his lecture by dictating a list of recommended reading for students interested in any of diverse topics: the church's view on birth control, premarital sexual relations, contraception measures, effective lovemaking, homosexuality, sterility, impotence, frigidity, masturbation, and so on. All were reputable, scholarly works by authorities in the field. It was a dazed and harried bookstore clerk the following week who received requests and orders for dozens upon dozens of copies of The Art and Science of Love by Dr. Albert Ellis, as well as numerous other books in the sex field.
One speaker who announced that he was willing to answer any questions received such posers as these:
"If education is so important, and a girl finds herself pregnant, wouldn't she be wiser to seek an abortion in order to be able to complete her education?"
"I suspect my roommate of being homosexual; what should I do about this?"
"If your parents have refused to say anything about sex at home, where is one supposed to get reliable information?"
"How safe is the rhythm method of birth control?"
"Don't girls and boys really have entirely different views about sex? The girls want love and marriage, and the boys just seem out to get as many different girls as possible."
"What is your opinion of girls who carry safes (male contraceptives)' in case their dates don't?"
"Are morals really lower in our generation, or have things always been just about the way they are now? Isn't it just that sex is being played up more, and advertised, and people are more willing to talk about it?"
"How can I be sure that a guy I sleep with won't blab to everyone about it and ruin my reputation?"
"Isn't petting to climax a better solution to the problem than indulging in coitus?"
"How can I talk a girl into letting me make love to her?"
"Are oral-genital acts perverted?"
"If a girl does not wear underwear on a date, is that supposed to mean that she is willing?"
"How far should you go on a first date? Second date? Third date?"
"I have been invited to a men's school for a 'college week-end.' My date says he has found me a room in town to stay. Do you think that is properly chaperoned?"
"What can I do when a date complains that it is not fair of me to let him get so aroused and then not satisfy him?"
"I have been invited to a fraternity party and told to come in just pajamas, that it is a theme party. Is this on the level?"
"Where can a couple go on this campus to find a little privacy?"
"What sort of things should I ask about any proposed blind date?"
"Is it okay to go to the student health clinic if you think you have VD? Will they put it on your record if you do? Or report you to the city health service?"
"What is the best contraceptive for women?"
"Is it true that there are pills that can cause an abortion?"
"My girlfriend says she wants to remain a virgin, but has suggested anal intercourse instead. Is that okay?"
"Boys who date me once never ask me out again. Why?"
"How many times a day is it healthy to masturbate?"
"How can I tell if a girl really means no when she says no?"
"Can I sleep with a guy and still have him respect me?"
"I am pretty and well-built; I was taught to dress in an attractive way. I guess you'd call it sexy. My dates are always trying to paw me; do you think I'd get asked out by a nicer kind of boy if I dressed in a plain unattractive fashion instead."
"I am very 'well hung.' All the girls I go to bed with say that I hurt them. This is very frustrating. What can I do?"
"Do girls make out only with guys who have their own apartments off campus, or at least a car?"
"Do girls really like the smell of men's cologne or aftershave, or do they actually think that guys who wear them are sissies?"
"How do I convince my girlfriend to get a diaphragm? I hate rubbers!"
"Is it safe to park along Eastman Lane, or will the police bother you?"
"What are a girl's most sensitive erogenous zones?"
"Can you catch mono (mononucleosis) from kissing?"
College students are curious about sex; they want to learn everything there is to know. Books about sex are always popular reading in the dorms and fraternity and sorority houses, and sex qua sex is the most popular of "bull session" topics. Some of the questions raised above are dealt with elsewhere in this book; others are personal matters that only each individual can decide for himself; yet others are answered in more relevant books on the subject.
However the questions are answered, they are being asked increasingly openly on our college campuses. And for better or worse, answers-some answers-are being provided.
CHAPTER THREE
IT'S A DATE!
Almost every phase of college life has changed somewhat in recent years, and the practice of dating is no exception. For one thing, the date is no longer the formal institution that it once was, with its elaborate ritual and routine. Where once a boy would ask a girl for a date weeks in advance and plan for the occasion with care, the average college date of today is much more casual. Rarely is a date planned for more than two weeks, and usually less than one; formal dances and college week-ends are virtually the only exceptions.
Once, if a boy made a date with a girl, it was for a specific occasion: "Will you go with me to the Football Dance?" or "May I take you to the movies this Friday?" Presently, however, it is more common for the boy to simply ask, "May I see you tonight?" There is no specific occasion or planned activity, and even the hour may be left indefinite. This does not mean that no one makes a date any more for a specific party, dance, concert, lecture, or movie; it simply is an indication that such concrete plans are not necessary. Increasing number of college girls willingly accept dates for unspecified activity and trust the boy to plan something to their liking.
Whom do college boys date? Coeds, as a rule. They may meet them in class, at campus activities, or through friends. Most colleges prepare a student telephone directory, giving the dormitory or other residence of each student, and listing house or private phone numbers; therefore, it is not too difficult for students to locate girls they may know only casually.
At least one school prepares a freshman directory, a small handbook with photographs submitted by the students on application, along with such data as the student's home town, age, and the department in which he or she is studying, or his or her stated major. These books were found to have an unplanned use: upperclassmen would obtain copies, select attractive girls from the photographs, and phone them for dates, implying they had met briefly on campus; with the large number of new names and faces encountered by any incoming student, few might realize the truth. But the handbooks served the same function for the girls; each dormitory or sorority house usually had a complete set of the directories for each of the four classes in residence, and it was not uncommon for a girl receiving a phone call from a boy she did not remember or perhaps did not know to check his photo out while still on the phone, and to accept or refuse a date on that basis. Unfortunately, by the time some had become seniors, they bore very little resemblance to their pre-freshman photographs!
The major change to take place in recent times is the decreased hesitancy of girls to accept blind dates. At one time, the only girls who did so were those who had not been asked out, and they were frequently palmed off on boys unable to find dates, or so shy that they preferred to have a friend arrange something with some girlfriend of his date. But times have changed, and at many schools girls accept at least as many dates with complete strangers as with persons known to them. Let's see how the various arrangements work:
One form college girls have learned to be wary of is the "Joe sent me" type of caller; usually he will phone and introduce himself as a friend of someone the girl has dated ... which may or may not be true. If it is true, then the girl may-with good reason-wonder what her date said about her that might interest his friend in seeing her. Here is one coed's story of what happened when she accepted such a date:
"Wynn called and said that he was a classmate of Barry's. I'd been out with Barry a few times, and if this friend were anything like him, I imagined he'd be good company; Barry and I used to spend a lot of time together in his room listening to good music and sometimes playing chess, which we both enjoy. That night, Wynn picked me up and drove me straight back to the house and we went up to his room. He promptly put on the record-player, but it was piled with make-out music, the stuff they bill as "music for dreamy dancing" or something of the sort. I did not care for it, but I didn't want to be impolite. But you can imagine my surprise when the next thing he did was turn out the lights and plunk himself next to me on the sofa ... and I hadn't even known him a half-hour! He seemed very surprised when I showed no inclination whatsoever to start necking with him, and after a while we were both pretty confused.
"Finally we managed to figure out what had happened. Wynn had asked Barry about me, and what the two of us did up there in his room. The reply had been that we just listened to music and played games. And that was what Wynn thought he had meant by 'playing games,' and that was why he had asked me out!"
By far the most frequent form of the blind date is the blind double date: a student will ask a girl out, and when she accepts he'll ask if she can find a date for his friend. The girls seem to prefer this arrangement, believing in the safety-in-numbers theory. Or if either or both of the boys turn out to be uninteresting, they can always talk to each other. Whereas some students engage in elaborate interrogation of the looks, interests, and preferences of the candidates, others are willing to "fix up" a date's friend with anyone who happens to be willing. Anything can happen on such a date. On one, the main partners had a spat, and the other two people were so busy trying to make peace for them that they never really had a chance to get to know each other. And on other occasions, each finds that he or she prefers his or her friend's date, and as soon as possible everyone switches partners.
Even more frequent than the arranged-by-a-friend date is the blind date with no referrals or recommendations whatsoever. On Friday or Saturday afternoons or evenings, calls porn into any large dormitory: "Anybody want a date for tonight?" It is no exaggeration to say that any girl who wants to go out frequently can do so as often as she wishes, even if none of the boys she knows would ask her out. This is also an ideal arrangement for an adventurous girl who feels she does not know until the last moment whether or not she's in the mood to stay home and study or go out ... and dreads the thought of making a date only to find herself uninterested, tired, or pressed to complete some work at the appointed hour.
What happens when such a call reaches the dormitory? It is usually answered by the girl on reception duty (which may be a paid position, or a rotated assignment) or-on off-hours-anyone in the lobby near the phones. Or if the phones are on the corridor, by any girl living there. In the case of lobby phones in a dorm with a telephone intercom system, the girl on duty may call a friend she knows, or several, to see if anyone wants a date. Anyone interested may then come to the phone and talk briefly with the applicant. For the residence with a public-address system, it's much easier. The girl on duty simply flips the master switch and announces to the entire dormitory populace: "Anybody want a date tonight?"
"What for?" comes back the frequent reply.
"A fraternity party," says the girl at the desk, having checked.
"What house?" someone wants to know.
"Lamda."
"Do you know which member (if it is a member) is calling?"
"No."
"Oh...."
And then the girls will make up their minds whether or not the offer sounds promising. Some prefer not to let their friends know they are thinking of accepting a blind date, and will run down to the person on duty to accept, rather than announcing their intent over the dorm-wide public address system feedback. Some ask for questions about the date mostly out of curiosity, never considering accepting unless the occasion is something special.
It is not uncommon for a boy-or more usually a group of boys-looking for dates to actually show up at a women's residence. If any girls are milling around the lobby, they may flatly announce "Any of you girls want a date for tonight?" If not, the girl at the intercom has to take over. This may produce embarrassing situations such as the following, when the girls on the floors are unaware that the prospective dates are within earshot:
"Attention: there are five guys here who want dates. Anyone interested?"
"Who are they?"
"They're visiting for the week-end from Holy Cross."
"Fraternity?"
"Yes."
(Pause) "Are they good-looking?"
The girl on duty blushes, and finally replies, "They're standing right here by the intercom ... "
"Oh," says someone. "I'm sorry...."
"Well," says someone else, enjoying the game, "are they?"
If the operator thinks so, she can say so; if not, all she can say is, "Come down and take a look for yourself."
Hopefully, there will be enough people in the lobby on various business that a small group of girls passing through to check out the new arrivals will not be too obvious. Maybe not, and one of the boys will ask the girl on duty if those are the girls who "came down to check us out."
With this sort of thing going on, it is no wonder that many schools have to pay in order to find someone willing to take over such a touchy job on date nights!
A night at the inter-com can be quite amusing, however. Here are some conversations one might overhear:
"Anyone want a date?"
"How tall is he?"
"Pretty tall; I don't know. Who's asking?"
"Carol ... Carol Benson."
"That's what I thought." (Carol is six feet tall and hates to have to tower over her dates.)
* * *
"Anyone want a date tonight?"
"Is it Rock Hudson?"
"Huh?"
"Unless it is Rock Hudson, I've got too much homework to do to go out tonight."
* * *
"Who wants to go to a party at AEPI?"
"Who would want to go to a party at AEPI? Would you?"
* * *
"Who wants a blind date tonight?"
"Not me! I won't date the handicapped..
* * *
"Anybody want a date with a blond senior?"
"Is it Walt Samson?"
"No."
"Okay..
* * *
"Anybody want a date?"
"No. Care for a fig?"
* * *
"Who wants to go out tonight?"
"Me ... but I can't. I came in late last night, and I'm under detention."
"Anybody want a date with Al Wallet?"
"That drip? No thanks!"
* * *
"Anybody want a date for the concert?"
"Who needs one?"
* * *
"We have two guys here who want dates...."
"Do they have a car?"
* * *
"Anybody want a date?"
"Only if he's a biology major; I'm cramming for a bio exam..
* * *
The last few years have seen the advent of the newest form of dating: computer dating. The first firm to approach college students with this arrangement was Operation Match. Since then, nearly a dozen new companies have been set up to match college students for compatibility. International Date-Line is another of these. Finding themselves in a somewhat limited area, most of the others seem to have branched out into non-collegiate dating, under such names as Data-Date, The Match Box, Party-Date, and D.A.T.E.
Of the two firms that send materials widely to college students, Compatibility Research's Operation Match seems the more popular. For one thing, it was the company that originated the idea; although a group called Contact organized quite shortly thereafter, Operation Match still leads the field. Jefi Tarr, one of the two Harvard juniors who began the firm, and now its 21-year-old president, describes the motivation and operation in this way: "The essential idea behind Operation Match is the pooling of resources into the biggest little black book ever, and using a computer as a clearinghouse for the information. At the time the idea seemed like a natural for college students, who have learned to avoid the cattle shows known as 'mixers.' We didn't really know then how right we were ... My own background is in Social Relations, and Match seemed like a great vehicle for applying the study I was doing on dating habits, and then using the information for analysis in my thesis.
"When we had written a questionnaire and consulted with professionals in the field we had a good experimental mechanism with which to begin ... We devised the double-answer form in order to avoid the mistake of arbitrarily matching people with similar traits or people with contrary traits under the assumption that 'opposites attract.' After all, compatibility is more like chemistry than physics. The double-answer form asked each participant to answer each of the seventy-five questions twice, once describing himself, and once describing his or her ideal date. As one of our representatives put it, 'One man's kook is another's ideal.' ... 8,000 lists of names and addresses arrived in 8,000 college mail boxes on the same morning. For a few days the telephones got a real workout and we all wished we owned stock in A.T.&T."
As a result of suggestions and occasional mix-ups, the Operation Match Quantitative Personality Projection Test underwent revisions; it is currently in phase 4. The introduction reads in part:
"HAVE YOU MET YOUR MATCH? OPERATION MATCH is a computer matching project-the only one of its kind. It's the brainchild of several mixer-weary Harvard graduates who realized that most young adults know what kind of people they enjoy dating. Blind dates were fine up to a point, but there had to be a better way than the present haphazard system. Why not use a computer?
"HOW DO WE KNOW IT WILL WORK? WITH OPERATION MATCH, you answer a personality test especially designed for you and your dating habits. This test has evolved through matching over 200,000 young adults in the last year and a half. Evaluation questionnaires were sent out and the results analyzed statistically. This analysis has continually enabled us to refine the questionnaire and programming, and now we're able to take the blindness out of a blind date.
"... When OPERATION MATCH receives your 'vital statistics', they are placed in the IBM 7090 computer memory file. The computer then scans the qualifications of every member of the opposite sex from your area and selects the five or more matches best for you."
The MATCH Questionnaire has eight sections. The first is absolute factors: sex, race, education, religion, age, and height.
The second lists a catalogue of interests ranging from folk music, drama, creative writing, art and law through community service, movies, mountain climbing, automobiles, and playing bridge.
A section on attitudes asks if one has strong religious convictions, if one believes in a God who answers prayers, if one prefers to associate with people who believe in God and attend church; it asks if one considers romantic love necessary for a successful marriage, if one considers oneself sexually experienced, and "Is extensive sexual activity preparation for marriage, part of 'growing up'?"
The next section deals with reactions to specific situations: What would you do if asked to take over a job doing door-to-door sociological surveys which required answering some quite personal questions? What would you do if your blind date turned out to be friendly but embarrassingly unattractive? Are you inclined to believe an honor student who says she came home late from a date the night before because the car her date was driving broke down?
The next item relates to area: how far away are you willing to travel for a date?
A section on general information asks about field of interest, political affiliation, schooling, personal habits (drinking, smoking), social class, academic records, church attendance, family income, and so on.
Section 7 asks for scores on such qualities as fondness for children, conformity, marriage-mindedness, political concern, athletic ability, family attachments, grooming, and reading habits.
The final item deals with the physical appearance of oneself and one's ideal date.
The questionnaire ends with the comment: "All data provided OPERATION MATCH is the property of Compatibility Research, Inc. and will be kept strictly confidential. OPERATION MATCH thanks you for participating and wishes you and your dates the best of luck."
Compared to the slick friendly approach of Operation Match, other operations may appear sloppy and illiterate. The introduction to one of these reads, in part, "WHY NOW ... As you must have already heard, the craze of computer dating has swept the country with astounding speed. The emotionally indifferent computer has been turned into a 20th century Dan Cupid armed with punch cards and tapes ... why now, after this new business has already given birth to its giants, is another vast network being born? The most likely conclusion would be aimed towards an attempt to saturate the country with this new fad and reap the harvest of wealth it presents, even at the expense of force feeding our nations (sic) youth. This organization is far too (sic) informed to believe that the intellectual population of our country is naive enough to allow their minds to be subjected to endless arrays of seemingly meaningless questionnaires (sic), masked with different covers, but inherently the same. Our purpose is not to beat to death a good thing, but to improve upon it. Yes, indeed, the cold metallic computer has been given a statistically oriented heart, but its indifference has been replaced by the cold impervious attitudes of big business. We are not merely offering a quick service that can easily be accomplished and then cast aside, but are rather offering you a chance to become an honored member in (sic) a great new social experiment. Our side of the picture will not be accomplished by just the subsequent mailing to you of five or more computer matched dates ... So you should see now we have come to you, personally, and to establish a life long social bond for the benefit of all parties concerned.
"Look around you, ask your friends, you will see we have come in force, in force to you, and in force to stay."
One college language major read the above carefully several times, asking, "What does all that gobbledygook mean? It's not even coherent English! If I were not already familiar with computer dating, I wouldn't even have any idea what they were trying to get at!"
The questionnaire from this organization was somewhat better than their introduction, but it was still comparatively poorly written, and-like all questionnaires of this nature-the multiple-choice answers given were frequently insufficient to answer the question accurately. Some of the questions were somewhat less than coherent, although they did deal with highly-relevant issues:
"The movement among the young adult generation to find a more profound reason for believing in a superior being for other than the belief itself is:
(a) blasphemy
(b) an enlightened search
(c) a futile endeavor"
"It is my opinion that any intimate relationship between myself and a member of the opposite sex:
(a) should be very marriage oriented
(b) should be free of any definite long term ties
(c) will result as fate decrees"
"It is my opinion that mingling between members of visual racial differences:
(a) is a situation that should be avoided
(b) is necessary to accomplish the goal of brotherhood
(c) is proper if the intimate relationships are of the same race"
"It is my opinion that in marital situations in which divorce is imminent and children are involved:
(a) the couple must stay together at all personal cost
(b) divorce will be best for the children who would otherwise be raised in an unhappy home
(c) divorce for the children's (sic) sake is a pretense"
"It is my opinion that in cases where two people of diametrically opposed religions do decide to marry:
(a) the matter of religious training of the children must be pre-determined and set in one direction
(b) the children should be allowed to decide their own religious fate
(c) the decision to marry must be reconsidered and changed"
A situation section leaves the choices equally restricted ... or uncertain:
"You and your date are parked in a (sic) isolated spot. Before long the sexual mood is reaching a tense moment. You would then:
(a) let nature take its course
(b) suggest a more appropriate setting
(c) stop the activities where they are
(d) carry on without reaching a higher form of expression"
What is all that supposed to mean? No one seems quite sure, but several students agreed that they could not answer such a question with those alternatives unless the relationship between the dating couple was made much more specific.
On many other such choices, thoughtful youngsters comment that their response would be none of the choices offered, as in a situation where while registering at a hotel one observes two people being refused accommodations for reason of race or religion. Choices given are merely: voice a protest in their behalf, say nothing and agree with the move, say nothing and leave the hotel, or other.
Another example of oversimplification occurs in this situation:
"You are at a wild party where L.S.D. has just been introduced. You will
(a) try it
(b) leave the party in disgust, saying nothing
(c) try to stop others from trying it
(d) other"
Next, on this form, the student is asked to agree or disagree with such "quotations and situations" as
"No man is an island unto himself"
"Some of my best friends are" is a statement (sic) always used by prejudiced individuals.
"There are always two sides to a just story"
"All that glitters is gold"
"If the shoe fits wear it" and
"Out of sight out of mind"
All members of a small student group gave up in disgust after trying to figure out what some of these items were supposed to mean.
Under "vital statistics" this form offers an impressive number of interests, with even more impressively minute distinctions; seven types of art and eleven types of music are fisted. Additional information deals with location, sex (male or female), religious interdating, race, religion, age, height, eye color, physical appearance (choices available are: sexually attractive, physically attractive, physically average, and sexually average!), body structure (tall and slender, tall and broad, short and slender, short and broad, or medium in height and weight), and dress-conservative, ivy league, radical, or casual! ("Where," asked one girl, "does that leave me? I'm short but neither slender nor broad, and I dress either very sloppily, or in the latest "pop" fashions ... would that be called radical?")
Computer dating presents other problems. One boy failed to fill out his form completely and received a list of five other boys as his "perfect partners." And one should not overlook the possibility that many predominantly homosexual students might look for ideal dates if the computer were programmed to allow for combinations of the same sex!
Nor were all the matches acceptable to both parties. There is a report that one young lady was surprised and dismayed when she was aggressively attacked on her first computer date. "You wrote in a high score on sexual experience," he reminded her with a lecherous grin.
One disillusioned young man checked out two of the girls on his list with an old freshman photo album, and then decided to take a chance on an unseen third, only to put her on the next train back to New York one hour and twelve minutes later, thereby setting some sort of record for brevity of a computer-date!
One campus-representative of the computer services referred to cases of engaged couples filling in questionnaires and being matched up with each other ... but there is also a case on record where an engaged couple applied and the girl ended up marrying one of her other matches.
Arnold S. Feldman, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, has expressed skepticism about computer dating in these terms: "Machines can't do anything 1,000 Chinese can't do with abacuses, and I wouldn't want 1,000 Chinese picking a date for me."
There have, however, been success stories. At Harvard, an amateur astronomer who was also a varsity swimmer was desperately looking for a girl who would time his laps in the pool and also be willing to wake him up at 3 a.m. and go outside to watch comets with him. The computer digested this information and came up with a Radcliff girl who was "fed up with Harvard pseudo intellectuals." and wanted someone who enjoyed both indoor and outdoor sports. They were last seen going steady.
And by far the best success story was that reported in newspapers across the country in an Associated Press dispatch: Neal Bitran, 23, and Arlene Gotkin, 19, both of New York, were matched up by Operation Match's computer. They showed up on each other's lists, and had announced their engagement shortly before AP ran their story.
According to most college students, computer dating is a novelty, and one of the minor ways of finding a suitable date for most; however, the trend is towards increased use of what appear to me modern scientific methods, and it looks as though finding a date via computer-matching will soon be regarded as a method as ordinary as any other.
CHAPTER FOUR
DANCE OR ROMANCE: WHAT TO DO ON A DATE?
Once the date has been set, our young man is faced with the perennial problem: where shall I take her, and how shall we spend the evening? The question is one which is as old as time ... or at least as old as the practice of dating itself. Burlesque halls echoed to the laughter of comedy teams rehashing the situation of the young lady who expects to be entertained in lavish fashion, and the young man who is short of funds and would really prefer to sit on the love seat necking all evening. Things haven't changed much since then, though.
For the overwhelming majority of college students, there is a financial problem. Many students are on scholarship; some are working their way through school. The stereotype of the penniless student is so ingrained that when one college student recently published a book entitled The Impoverished Students' Book of Cookery, Drinkery, and Housekeepery, there were many who voiced the opinion that to refer to "impoverished students" was utterly redundant. And they were probably right.
Aside from the financial, there are other limitations on dating: at most coeducational schools where the girls live in dormitories, a couple can not go too far away from campus and yet be assured of plenty of time to make it back before curfew hour; and who wants to waste all that time driving to and fro when that time could be spent in more intimate fashion? Add to that the fact that most students do not have cars in the first place, and the dating destination becomes quite limited.
At this point, it is necessary to make the major distinction between city (or near-by suburban) schools, and those in more rural areas. The city students have the entire range of diversions that any city offers; those at a rural campus face much x greater limitations. For both, however, there is usually a number of on-campus activities: movies, lectures, concerts, dances, etc., in addition to perhaps more of same at some near-by college, and whatever the town or city has to offer.
Speak to the girls; what do they want or expect to do on a date?
"I expect my date to take me somewhere where there is something specific to do-a movie, or a dance, or a show. He's asked me out, and he should entertain me, not sit around and count on me for diversion."
* "If it's a first date, I want to go somewhere in a group; if my date turns out to be uninteresting, at least I'll have someone else to talk to..
* "We should go out and do something together that we enjoy doing separately."
* "I don't much care where we go as long as he does not leave the decision up to me; I can't stand that."
* "I like to go someplace where we can drink and talk and dance; there's not much sense doing anything else on a date."
* "It depends on the guy where we go. Like if he's not at all a good dancer, I'd much rather he took me to a movie, even though I like dances.""
* By Jay F. Rosenberg, published by the Reed College Alumni Association, Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
And the boys; what do they say?
* "I want a girl to let me know what kind of things she enjoys so I can decide where to go on that basis; once I made a date with a girl I know and got tickets to an informal dance on campus, and when I picked her up that week-end, it turned out she had broken her leg in a skiing accident two weeks before and had failed to mention that to me. So we just had to sit there all evening, because it was too late to make other plans."
* "If a girl accepts a date with me, she should be willing to do whatever I decide."
* "I ask the girl if she has anything to suggest, and if not I expect her to be content with whatever I choose."
* "I like to find out what my friends are doing, and double (-date) with one of them, to wherever they were going."
* "Where I go to school, there's not much else to do, so we always, it seems, end up going to a roadhouse and drinking and dancing and leaving early enough to go parking on the way home."
Asked her opinion of the ideal date, most girls confessed that if their date could afford it they'd like to go out to dinner, to a show, and then maybe to a night club, if such things were available.
The typical boy, on the other hand, readily confessed that he would rather not spend a great deal of money on a casual date, and was happiest when he found a girl who was content to spend most of the evening in some form of sexual activities. This brought up the question of dates spent doing nothing else, and the surprising answer came up that a great many dates are spent doing nothing else but "making out" at home, in a parked car, in the woods in good weather (at country campuses), or even in a friend's borrowed apartment or a motel room. Asked if they felt that was the ideal way to pass time on a date, most confessed that it was.
There is an obvious conflict here. A great many dates seem to be compromises between the two positions, male and female. One girl at an Ivy League school reports:
"When I go out with a boy from , he usually takes me to one of the college spots (drinking and dancing) and we usually double, or go with several other couples. They usually have cars, and we know that they want to go home early enough to park on the way. It's funny, because the girls usually stall, and say they want one last drink-and they sip it slowly-or they 'go into the ladies' room and stay there a long while, while the boys try to hurry them, saying we have to leave soon in order to get back before curfew; sometimes we naively tell them there is plenty of time, and pretend we don't know what their plans are.
"Of course, if you are with someone you like, it's different, but I'm talking here about the usual casual dates that you don't really want to make out with anyhow. It's like a game, seeing if you can avoid parking, because they sometimes make you seem very rude if you refuse their advances after they've taken you out. I know one girl who got so fed up with this routine by the beginning of her sophomore year that she refused to accept any dates at all until she met someone special when she was a junior. I almost can't blame her; it really is sort of a rat race."
Another female student, this time one at a small private school in the southwest, was more specific in her complaints:
"I guess girls really know why guys ask them out on dates, but they like to pretend that maybe it really might not be sex after all. So you go to a dance with someone you don't know at all well, and during the slow dances he'll start pressing up close and maybe you can feel his ... you-know ... pressing up against your leg, and if you try to wriggle away he'll just hold you tighter. And then after he'll say he wants to walk outside somewhere.
"It's okay to do anything you want with a guy you know and like, but these are like almost total strangers, and they tend to treat a girl almost as though she were nothing more than a masturbation device for them. You'd think they'd give up as soon as they got the idea that you weren't interested in them that way, but they don't seem to care. I think college boys are very self-centered ... some of my girlfriends like to date older men, and that seems to be why. College boys are too young; they're not interested in satisfying girls, nor do they seem to know how."
No matter how many college girls one interviews, the opinion is the same: the boys are all out after sex, regardless of whether or not the girl welcomes such advances. Some girls get resigned to such a situation, as this young lady did:
"A guy spends money on taking you out and he expects something in return. I'll go along with that up to a point. It seems to be the price of popularity, and if I go out with enough guys, I'll sooner or later run into one who might be good marriage material."
Another girl is even more realistic:
"I don't happen to enjoy these make-out dates all the time, but that's the way I'd be if I were a guy; you have to understand that in order not to mind it."
Will a girl become a social wallflower if she refuses the advances of her dates? Not at all? Why? Because the male ego seems unwilling to pass along word of rebuff. One girl explained it in these terms: "I've probably got the worst reputation on this campus, and let me tell you that I won't even kiss my date goodnight if I don't particularly like him. That's the problem. Someone started these stories to get even because I refused to play with him, and then someone else must have believed him and asked me out. When he could not get anywhere with me, he would not admit that he had failed with such a reputedly 'hot number' so he just told more stories about the wild things I had done with him, and the thing just kept snowballing.
"Things are so bad now that no guy who goes out with me any more would dare to go back to his friends and tell them he had done any less than make love to me. They all think all the others have. I don't know how it got started ... spite, I guess ... but it really doesn't bother me that much. I know the truth. But I am really tired of every damned guy I date pawing me right off as though I were such an easy mark! I have to put each one down the same way, and then they consider themselves failures and would never ask me out again. I am thinking of transferring to another college next year; this is not fun at all."
Another coed tells of hearing reports that she had engaged in a variety of scandalous acts with a male student at her school; she was all the more upset by such tales because she had never even been out on a date with the young man in question! Her roommate had even a more unfortunate story to tell: she had decided that the best way to curb such rumors was to readily accept male advances ... up to a point. But after one such date, one student found her such a pushover, in his opinion, that he told his friends that he had slept with her because he was certain she'd agree to that if he asked her out again....
Male students also have their stories to tell about the way they spend their dates; one apologized for being unable to ask the interviewer up to his apartment in these terms:
"My roommate is up there with this girl he's seeing at school. You see, he has this steady girlfriend at home, and they are thinking of getting married, so he's saving his money. He won't take a girl out. Whenever he sees this girl, they just stay home and make love. Cheap entertainment, huh?" Increasingly, college students-especially men-seem to be accepting sexual activity as a good cheap way to spend time on a date. And the number of girls who find this idea perfectly acceptable would be surprising only to someone who was not familiar with today's college students.
CHAPTER FIVE
FRATERNITY LIFE
"Gross!" exclaimed one college student, and from all the reports available, that one word seems to best sum up fraternity life.
"On paper," stated one fraternity affiliate, "a fraternity may look like a pretty noble organization. But what it really boils down to is a bunch of dirty guys living together." Many other argued that this was an uncalled-for exaggeration, but few wished to take issue with the contention that fraternity life tends toward the sordid.
Because of a lot of official disgruntlement by the administration with Various aspects of Greek society life, the fraternity has begun to appear as a vanishing institution on the college scene. At most large schools that do have fraternities (and sororities), invariably fewer than 50% of the students are affiliated. There are undoubtedly good reasons for joining; the feeling of belonging to a selective group is not the least of these. In some families, boys are pressured to join the same fraternity that Dad did when he was in college; other families feel that there is a certain prestige in belonging to one of the Greek-letter brotherhoods, and they do not want to see their sons missing out on any phase of what they consider essentially college life. Also on many campuses, the fraternity councils try to perpetuate the myth that unless one belongs to a fraternity, one is simply a Nobody. And nobody wants to be a Nobody on campus!
The administrators have many complaints, and not the least of these is that the fraternities unfairly discriminate. They are said to set up an artificial superior class within the school, and then discriminate against the "independents"-those who have not joined a fraternity. Inter-fraternity or Greek Councils play a major part in student activities and government in schools that have them, and this role is frequently disproportionate. Those who side with the Greek set argue that college life would be pretty dull without the activities organized by the fraternal groups-the float parades, the dances, the Greek week annual competitions, the sings, the charity projects, the carnivals, the bake sales, the car washes, and so on. And where would all the students go on Friday and Saturday nights if it were not for the fraternity parties? The local taverns, the school cafeteria, and the student union could simply not contain them all!
Three to five years ago, the major discrimination scandals began to break into the news. Whether or not specified by national or local charter, certain houses refused-in practice-membership to non Caucasians, non-Christians, Negroes, Jews, Orientals, Catholics, non-Catholics ... or whatever the restrictive practices specified. The charges and counter-charged approached the sublime. One fraternity apologist has argued that if no discrimination were allowed, his house would have to admit female members as well! And somewhere, a coed made the papers by trying to join a fraternity on the grounds that refusing her admission constituted a case on unconstitutional discrimination, illegal, immoral, and patently-unfair.
On campuses where dormitory rules do not allow men to have women guests in their rooms, fraternities are often popular because they are located off-campus and do allow such privileges. Another reason to join a fraternity, for many, is the often voiced feeling that dining anywhere else is preferable to dining in a University dining hall or commons, and many of the fraternities have their own dining facilities. Most fraternities provide housing for at least a portion of their members, and most students find these accommodations far preferable to the institutionalized atmosphere of dormitory life.
Various aspects of fraternity experience give rise to the stories that occasionally come to light. The most evident of these is the practice of "pledging" prospective members, hazing them, and then forcing them through elaborate initiation rites. If the routine stories are eye-openers for most, the unusual incidents can be startling. Here is an account given by a pre-law student:
"In the fraternity I pledged, there were a fair number of athletic types, and they managed to come up with some pretty diabolic things. Once, they got to the jock straps (athletic supporters) of all the new guys, and they permeated them well with oil of wintergreen. If you know anything about that, it can become extremely painful. When the boys got around to wearing them, they were not able to figure out what was wrong. In the guise of being helpful, the older brothers told them to wash the inflamed area with very warm water; that opens the pores and makes it much, much worse. After a while, most of them got the idea that they had been taken in. I remember one guy who got mad as hell because he had a date the next night, obviously with a girl he was in the habit of laying, because he began really yelling loudly about how sore his penis and testicles were, and how he was not going to be up to anything the next night, and if he ever found out who the son-of-a-bitch was who had done that to him, he'd wring his neck, and on and on. It was really a pretty dirty trick ... no, they never got to me, because I never really went in for athletics, and besides I learned about it too soon, and I was wary. If you're looking for it, you can smell the stuff pretty readily."
Another student reported that one fraternity hazed its pledges by requiring them to unzip their trousers any time, anywhere, on demand. And of course, the brothers delighted in catching a pledge in a quiet comer on campus talking to a girl, and have a command performance in front of the astonished girl, who never quite knew if that was all there was to it, or if something more scandalous was to follow.
Although it is occasionally suggested that a fraternity would be a haven for homosexual activities, such things are actually quite rare; in fact, fraternity-men tend to be more violently opposed to male homosexuality than any other student sample. The following story, then, is likely to be the exception rather than the rule; it comes to us courtesy of a student from a northwestern state college:
"One day a batch of us were just sitting around in the fraternity house having a bull session, and we somehow got to discussing homosexuality. No one would admit to having any solid experience in the field, and then someone suggested that everyone should have a chance to see what it was like. No one was afraid of turning queer, but it was in the middle of the week and they'd all been drinking, and someone made it seem like a good idea. There were a few nervous jokes, like asking one of the other brothers if he'd like to get started, and then finally the guy who'd first suggested it asked us if maybe we couldn't use the pledges, or a few of them at least, to find out. You know how it is with pledges; the brothers tend to consider them flunkies for any job no one wants to do.
"So we called in a few, and told them what we wanted them to do, and a couple of them looked as though maybe they were getting into the wrong house and might de-pledge right then and there. So we explained to them that none of us were queer, but we were interested in finding out what it was like. (Besides, I don't think most of those guys had ever been Frenched by even a girl!)'
"We got the three of them on their knees in front of three of us. They didn't look too happy about it, but they did want to seem like good sports. Everyone else gathered around to watch, which must have made them all the more self-conscious. We felt funny about it too, at first, but it began to get quite obvious that we all were enjoying it (except maybe the pledges!), the others started making jibes about how this might turn us queer for life, or how maybe we were really queer all along and had never let on.
"'Who's next?' somebody asked. But the poor pledges looked so unhappy about it all that finally we let them go, making them promise not to tell anyone else about what happened. We could have gotten a terrible reputation on campus for that little scene!"
If these are the exceptional cases, what are the common ones? Fraternity harassment rites run the gamut from the sophomoric to the diabolically sexual. Driving an initiate to a distant point with no money on him ... and perhaps less than the normal amount of clothing ... and leaving him to his own devices to return within 24 hours is still a favourite game to play. Reports exist of students being actually tarred and feathered, although the "tar" more often turns out to be something more innocuous, such as molasses.
Other students are required to show up in some public place in foolish attire and engage in some foolish activity; one Saturday afternoon found such a group of initiates in a busy downtown shopping area, dressed in American Indian garb, complete with war paint on their faces, carrying tomahawks, beating on drums, and threatening to scalp passersby if they did not contribute a few coins to the tribe's "Squaw Deal" fund.
In fact, it has become axiomatic in that town that whenever someone shows up in absurd dress behaving oddly, the townspeople simply shrug it off, assuming it to be another of "those fraternity pranks." This attitude was altered only when robbers in Halloween masks held up one of the local banks; "this time they've gone too far!" thundered the chief of police, but when the dust finally settled, the blame was in fact laid on genuine bank robbers, and not masquerading students.
In another part of the country, it was common to lash a fraternity pledge to a telephone pole somewhere in town and leave him there all day, with a sign directing passers-by to ignore his pleas for aid. It was up to the enterprising pledge to convince some sympathetic citizen to release him. Often the pledges were thus bound in tattered clothing indicating a struggle, and the sign placed by them read, in a hasty handwriting, "THIS MAN IS DANGEROUS. Do NOT release him. The police (or local mental hospital loony squad, or FBI agents, or MPs, or a doctor plus the only person this lunatic will listen to) have been called. He may speak coherently in order to obtain your sympathy and use every trick in the book, but do not release him. HE IS DANGEROUS!" Small crowds would gather to observe the madman or trapped fugitive, and spirited conversation would take place in an effort to determine just who the young man was, and why he was tied there.
The practice was discontinued after the brothers decided to enhance the performance by painting obscenities on the person bound to the telephone pole, and one pledge was reported to have been found shrieking hysterically, "For God's sake, someone get me a pot and help me! I've gotta piss!" This story brings to mind the following account: "We were really terrible to our pledges two years after I joined. We had a few brothers who must have been real sadists, and they thought up terrible things to do to the pledges for initiation, and no one objected for fear of seeming like a sissy and wanting to go easy on the boys. So we started off by holding a beer party for the pledges the night before, and we filled them with all the beer they could drink. Then, when they were really loaded, we carried them (literally, in some cases) back to wherever they lived and put them on their beds. Then we gagged them well, and tied them securely to their beds and left; on each door, we put a sign saying that they were busy studying, and under no conditions were they to be disturbed until the next evening. We checked that evening to see that someone discovered each of them, and it was really a mess; they'd wet their beds and were hopping mad. Few, if any, of them could remember quite what happened.
"Another thing we did was decide to make wine, sort of, so we bought a few big barrels and lots of grapes and we told them to show up in old clothes. Then we held them down while one of the brothers scrubbed their feet with a floor brush, which tickled some of them pretty badly. Then, one by one, we sent them into the barrels to mash the grapes, and we kept them tromping around in there for nearly an hour each, until they were pretty exhausted. By the time the-last one got out, the whole basement was a mess. We left all the grape juice in one of the kegs to ferment, but it never really tasted any better than rotten grape juice, and I think they eventually threw it out.
"Then they decided that the pledges should have a masturbation contest, so we got them all together in a room and told them they had to do it. So they all dropped their pants and started. There was one guy who couldn't quite make it; he said that he'd been out with a hot date the night before, but I don't think anyone really believed him. They made him sit down naked in the middle of the room, right in the pile of come, and then they made all the pledges urinate on him. It was really gross. A lot of us walked out, but a few of the guys who were running the show seemed to think it was all great fun ... Word of it got around, somehow, and I don't believe they've ever had another scene like that one since. The whole campus was talking about it..
More commonly, the initiation scene is more in the nature of a prank; the initiate is led to believe that something really drastic is taking place, when in fact he is being fooled; here are the two major variations on this theme:
"Here's what we used to do to our pledges," reports a student from a southern Christian college. "We'd take some grape juice or something else pretty watery, and we'd heat it up on the stove so it'd be pretty warm. Then we'd blindfold the pledge and take him to the bathroom to urinate. If he couldn't, we'd get someone else to do it, and if no one else did, we'd use this gadget to squirt the water into the bowl so it really sounded like someone was urinating. Then we'd hand him this glass of warm liquid, a little wet around the sides, and tell him to drink it. Some of them looked pretty relieved when they realized by the taste that it was something else, or at least thought they did. Lots of them gagged on it, and said it was nauseating. At least one guy puked...."
'I'll tell you how we did it," began another student. "We'd buy some fairly ripe bananas, and we'd add a little water, and we'd mix up this awful mush. It really did look bad; it was a pity we had to blindfold the pledge, 'cause this stuff looked just about as bad as what we wanted them to think it was."
If one were to suggest that all such scandalous activity took place at the initiation ceremonies for pledges, he would be obviously betraying his lack of information. Crass behavior seems in order in a fraternity house as often as the opportunity presents itself. Here is how one somewhat disillusioned fraternity member assessed the situation at his school:
"You always hear all these gung-ho all-American stories about fraternity life, but it just isn't like that. The guys at my house spend about as much time at studies and other essentials as anyone else, and we have some good men in the house to coach or tutor the dull or lazy ones. But you should see how they spend their spare time! You can go from room to room seeing guys lying around in their underwear, guzzling beer from a can, and leafing through a copy of Playboy or Vogue or one of the other men's magazines. Never mind the image they try to present of the urbane wealthy bachelors; these are the guys who buy most of their magazines.
"They'll sit around or have bull sessions where everyone tries to out-impress everyone else with tales of his sexual prowess, the conquests he's made, the promiscuity of certain coeds, and various gassing about sexual technique, the best contraception for a girl to use, and so on. There's about ten times as much talk about sex as there is actual sexual activity, and you can be sure that there is no small amount of that either. But lots of these guys act as though there simply wasn't anything else to life, from the way they talk. A couple of times each semester, someone will borrow a batch of stag movies from somewhere, and they'd show them in the basement. Hardly anyone missed those parties; it was all the same stuff rehashed, but they'd all show up to see it each time. I think our housemother had some idea of what was going on, but she was a good egg with a boys-will-be-boys attitude, and she stayed away and never bothered us.
"So here, somebody would get the films and a projector and everyone would pack into the recreation room downstairs, mostly sitting on the floor, and they'd show them for a couple of horns one night. Sometimes they'd repeat them when they were done or the next night, maybe. There were usually a couple of the teaser ones thrown in, you know: some half-dressed girl comes on and wiggles around and maybe does an exotic dance and finally strips down to a bra-and-panties costume. Or maybe you'll just have some model sit there in a bikini and blow soap bubbles at you, or play with a 'beach ball, or suck on a lollipop and pout. Then they'd get on to the real things, and some of them were pretty old, with not much plot.
"They had one where this couple drove out to the country in an old car, and then they set up on a blanket in the grass. You see them undressing eventually after necking a bit, and then they run their hands over each other and she gives him a breast to put in his mouth. All the acting is very stilted, and the female lead looks like a very bored prostitute, and the men look as though they had never been in a film before, much less while laying someone! Then he grabs her by the head and makes her take his penis in her mouth, and after you see about five minutes of that he climbs up on her. Then they do that for about ten minutes-nothing else, just in-and-out, in-and-out. Finally he comes, I guess, and you see a man dressed as a tramp come out of the woods; he pulls out a knife, and scares the other man away. He looks at the naked girl, and she looks at the big bulge in his overalls. Then he indicates she should lie down again, and he gets undressed, and then he lays her for a while-just like the last one, only his penis is a lot bigger. I forget what happened; I think her boyfriend comes back with a policeman and scares the tramp away after he's done, and then maybe they both make love to her at once somehow. It doesn't really matter, you know....
"They especially seem to enjoy the films with the lesbian scenes in them, and even though they see them, you still hear them wondering at bull sessions what it is that lesbians do. Anyhow, when the films are over, you get a few feeble excuses, and everyone runs back to his room to masturbate. Except for once we had this kid who was studying psychology and sociology, and he wanted to discuss the sexological aspects of the films with someone (because that was the field he said he was studying for), but he couldn't find anyone else who was interested. They'd just all run back to their rooms and masturbate..
It does not always end there. This same student went on to discuss a "live" party his house once had:
"One year someone arranged for a big-deal performance for us, and some older guys showed up too; I think it was somebody's father who'd arranged it, and a batch of his friends. Anyhow, this man came out to the house with three girls and he set up a little stage. First he showed us a few movies-the usual kind-and then he had the girls do strip dances to music ... about what you'd find in any strip club. Then two of them began to play with each other, and finally they undressed each other, with everyone watching, and made love to each other. They'd nibble on each other's nipples, and finger themselves and each other, and finally they went down on each other in a sixty-nine position; the guys were all gathered around the stage to watch, up as close as they could get, but the guys who ran the show told them to keep their hands off.
"Then they stopped and the man helped one of them strap a big dildo onto herself, and then she made love to the other girl as though she were a man. Most of us had never seen anything like that before. They were on some sofa cushions that someone dug up for them, and the girl on the bottom really came from the job the other girl did on her, or else she was a damned good actress.
"Then when they were done they left the stage and the other girl got up there, and undressed slowly to sexy music they were playing, and then she lay down on the pillow naked and started to play with herself. Of course, the guys had been making wisecracks ever since the performance began. She lay so that we could get a good view of her, and she opened up her lips, and let us just about peer deep into her; then she started wriggling her hips, and dipping her finger in and out, and when one of the guys made a particularly lewd remark about what she needed, she sat up and asked him if he was ready and willing to give it to her. That sort of caught him by surprise, but he said he was, so she had him go up to the platform, and she undressed him, with everyone watching.
"He had a pretty good erection, and she took it in her mouth for a while and then told him to slip it to her, and he did. We watched them a while, and he came pretty soon, but she said she was ready to take on another. Then the other two girls announced that so were they, and we noticed that they had set up on cushions in two comers of the room, so two guys dashed for them, and then we all took turns, watching and waiting to take a crack at whichever ones we wanted to lay. They did about anything anyone asked them to do, and they'd let you do about anything. The older men sort of had precedence, since they were reportedly paying for the whole thing. Sometimes the girl took on two or three guys at once, and occasionally one would say she had to run off and get cleaned up a bit.
"It was really something; I never saw anything like that before or since ... I don't know how common that sort of thing was, but I'm pretty sure we weren't the only house that ever did it. You'd hear stories...."
No matter what the fraternities do, everyone is urged to consider them harmless pranks. But occasionally, something completely unanticipated happens and someone gets hurt. Here is the true case history of such an event:
Arnold's condition was known technically, medically, as infantile genitalia. For reasons not known, his genitals had not matured properly, and at the age of 17 they looked like those of a preadolescent boy. Neither is it known whether or not Arnold's fraternity brothers-to-be were aware of his condition, although they were somewhat, implicitly or explicitly, aware of his lack of sexual experience.
When initiation week came around, the brothers decided they should have a girl for their pledge, and a willing girl was located for the job. With several brothers gathered around, the girl was brought in and Arnold was informed what was expected of him and his pants were promptly removed for him by two of the boys.
It was at that point that he instantaneously underwent what psychiatrists later characterized as a "traumatic regression." He suddenly and completely entered a state akin to shock; for eight days, he babbled incoherently and behaved as a very young infant might. He had to be fed, washed, and carried about. He wet his pants or bedding and had to be put in diapers. He cried at the slightest discomfort.
As a result of this episode, it took intensive therapy and nearly a year of care to restore him very gradually to the emotional age of seventeen. Of course, no one felt to blame for the unfortunate incident, and it would be hard to say that anyone could have had any idea in advance what was to take place, but nonetheless it did happen, and comparable tragedies happen from time to time as the fraternities continue such ordeals and frenetic practices.
Fraternities are accustomed to extreme behavior; most fraternity brothers are considered rather odd if they fail to get teeteringly drunk at least once in a while. Some idea of the acceptance given such behavior is reflected in a popular college humor magazine joke, in which a father approaches a fraternity house later one night looking for his son.
Father: "Does Winslow Smith live here?"
Voice from inside: "Yeah. Just dump him on the porch...."
Most writers acquainted with the college scene will assure you that if you are looking for wild life at college, check out the fraternities. If there is none there, there is not likely to be any anywhere else at their school.
The fraternities are proud of this reputation....
CHAPTER SIX
FRATERNITY PARTIES, FRATERNITY BRAWLS, AND FRATERNITY ORGIES
The college fraternity party is a singular occasion. For thousands upon thousands of college students, it is their major-and perhaps only-form of amusement. There are four necessary ingredients:
* a large room, usually a fraternity house basement or living room
* people, the more the merrier, usually the bothers and pledges and their dates
* music, suitable for dancing, and invariably much too loud
* drinks, preferably beer, with wine and mixed drinks running a slow second and third.
The fraternity party, as it is known to countless college students, cannot exist without all four of these elements.
On some campuses, through some extra-legal machinations or other, fraternities are not permitted to serve alcoholic beverages; the usual pretext for this official ruling is that the state drinking age is 21, and most of the students are well below that age. No matter. Everyone drinks just the same. Campus or local police may be called in to enforce these regulations and report violations, but they are not likely to find many. The students are too clever for them.
Let's say that the punch is spiked; vodka is likely to be used, and no odor will betray the secret. Even a sample of the brew may not be conclusive, and one can hardly seize a sample for chemical analysis. No liquor bottles, sealed or empty, will be found in the house, and if the punch is alleged to contain a 'spike" the students can always insist that they had nothing to do with it, and some rival from another fraternity must have slipped in a small amount in order to cause them trouble; if they stick to this story, no one can prove otherwise.
Another way of getting around modem prohibition is simply to drink elsewhere-anywhere else-and arrive on the scene well-enough "oiled" that no further drinks will be needed to ensure a successful evening. At such parties, however, it is not uncommon to see couples slipping out for another drink down the street, in their car, or even in the bushes; after all, rules forbid alcoholic beverages "in the house" or "at fraternity functions"-and one need not be a pre-law student to know that one is "home-free" if he does his drinking out in the back yard, unofficially ... especially when the party is indoors, and he has technically left it!
There are other parties where participants will be seen carrying innocuous-looking paper cups, and all one can see at the "bar" are mixers and other soft drinks. Where is the liquor? In the cups, one drink at a time. The boys will slip out and pour a shot into his cup, and another for his date, return to the party, and both cups will be filled quite innocently with ginger ale or soda water. In the face of extreme danger, the evidence can be downed quickly.
Chaperones at such parties are often sincerely puzzled as to why everyone is behaving progressively more intoxicated when there is no liquor in evidence....
All of this is merely further proof that college students today are determined to do exactly what they want, despite any laws or regulations to the contrary, and that they have sufficient ingenuity to arrange to do so, in most cases, without being caught. And, as long as nothing comes to public attention, most administrators are unwilling to call for a strong detective service to root out violators. Thus, the drinking at fraternity parties continues, despite official proclamation to the contrary in some places.
Live bands are the most popular form of music, and there are always several commercial groups available in college areas; frequently they are composed of ambitious students, but this is not necessarily so. With the advent of louder music, complaints from near-by neighbors, and the acceptance of discoth�que (a fancy name for "record hop") dances, music may be provided as well by tape or records. This does not necessarily reduce the din, however, if the music is stereophonic and the volume is high. On many campuses, a standard way of finding out where the parties are is to drive past the houses and listen for loud music from the street.
Although theoretically held in a single party room, most parties in fact end up all over the house, if for no other reason than the number of people present. Even at that, dancing is frequently accomplished in crowded quarters. A dance-floor area built to accommodate thirty couples embraced in a slow fox trot is hardly enough for half that number performing some of today's more epileptic popular dances, with pelvises rotating and arms flailing. The only relief is provided by the fact that the dances require the expense of so much energy that most of the dancers are quite willing to take turns and sit out a few dances to rest up.
With the burgeoning numbers of college students, fraternities find they have more members than their houses were built to accommodate; in addition, most of these events are open to anyone else a member may wish to invite. Therefore, generally regarded as the best form of inexpensive entertainment, fraternity parties are invariably crowded. In many cases, "crowded" would be a mild understatement; they are mobbed. Guests are found standing, sitting, dancing, crouched, and huddled everywhere in the party room. Drinks must be tightly gripped to keep jostling passers-through from spilling them. There is less drinking than desired because of the physical difficulties of maneuvering from one part of the room to another; the trip may take ten minutes or more, and above the din calling one's date's name is likely to be futile.
The refuge at these parties is some other part of the house, frequently the upstairs sitting room when the party is in the basement. There, the housemother is likely to be found, chatting with girls who could no longer tolerate the din, the crowd, or their dates. Or perhaps their dates have ditched them; in either case, the housemother is there to exchange small talk with the refugees. In addition, there is probably a short line outside the bathrooms, a small group may be raiding the refrigerator, other couples will have slipped outside for some air (or another drink), or relative privacy, and yet others will have removed to the bedrooms. What goes on there is anybody's guess; only the participants (and anyone to whom the boy may later boast) will ever know.
However boisterous these parties may be, conduct otherwise is generally quite decent in public. Public! Who would want to even exchange a kiss in the midst of all that madness?
As the hour grows late, couples tend to leave, heading perhaps back to the girls' dorms, allowing ample time to stop and park somewhere quiet on the way. Most fraternity parties, by agreement, end officially early enough to get coeds or girls from neighboring schools in before curfew; the lights are turned on (having been low or replaced by candles all the while), the music is turned off, and the guests are politely turned out. The girls appreciate this; it saves them having to urge their dates to leave the party before it seems over, in order to get them home in time.
If the party has been less than successful, it may break up earlier, leaving a few die-hards still dancing in the basement at closing hour. By about eleven p.m., almost everyone who is going to end up thoroughly drunk has reached that stage. Someone invariably gets sick from too much drinking. There are not infrequently incidents: someone starts a fight, one of the girls behaves wantonly, the police may have been called in to quell the noise, or someone may have been injured while dancing. (The advent of the twist brought a small epidemic of dislocated bones and other related injuries that were reported by the wire services.)
When there are incidents, however, they tend to be sensational. According to a typical college girl who insists that she should know, "There is nothing more gross, vicious, immature, or irresponsible than a bunch of drunken fraternity boys!"
How do the girls know? Stories filter back; from the time the coeds return to their dorms, and for days and weeks later, stories are passed from ear to ear. They are not taken too seriously or with too great alarm or disapproval; college students have come to consider drunken behavior pardonable on those grounds, and "He was drunk at the time" is considered a perfectly good reason to pardon any behavior, no matter how extreme.
The acceptance of drunkenness at college is reflected in the great number of synonyms, euphemisms, and dysphemisms for the state. Almost as though mere drunkenness were not enough, the student will tell you that he was bombed (out of his mind, plastered, polluted, or occasionally soused. Nor did a student go on a drinking binge that resulted in a hangover; no, he tied one on last night. And our student announces a simply desire or intent to become intoxicated; rather, he is going to hit the bottle, get stinko, lift a glass, do a job on himself, land a good one, get poisoned, booze it up, get potted or plowed, get socko, get stoned, or get loaded. If he is hoping to drink so much that he passes out, he wants to hang one on. And a myriad of other terms are used locally.
Drinking is in fact so common that "to go out drinking" is a quite ordinary way to pass an evening with a few friends, or pass time on a date. It has become an end, rather than a means, or merely incidental. In a simple sense, college students get drunk to amuse themselves and, perhaps inadvertently, their companions.
For the male students, getting drunk is fairly safe; someone is certain to bring them home and put them safely to bed. Arrests for drunk and disorderly behavior are a slight hazard, but even then not too serious. It is the coed who has to be very careful about exceeding her alcoholic limit. On many occasions where girls fail to return at curfew, it turns out that they had too much to drink and simply lost track of time, or passed out somewhere. And when the male company is equally drunken, anything can happen. Here is one coed's account of stories that reached her ears:
"Some of the things that have happened were so bad you could hardly believe them, but they must have been true because no one could or would invent such a story. Up in House, there was a girl who went to a fraternity party at College
(a small private men's school located near the university in question) and they gave her plenty to drink. Just before curfew, a car pulled up, and someone sort of tossed her out, and someone else helped her inside. She was a real mess, hair, makeup all sloppy, stains on her clothing, and her blouse buttoned up wrong. She was carrying her handbag in one hand, and her bra and slip in the other. And she was drunk and very giddy.
"The best account they could get from her (and another girl who was at the same party) was that everyone had been drinking a lot, and ended up on the floor, and they began undressing the girls that were too out-of-it to stop them. People were rolling around partly dressed, and the boys were grabbing bare breasts here and there, and everyone was feeling up everyone else, and some of the people were actually having drunken sex on the floor. This was in someone's room; the party was supposedly downstairs.
"This girl was lucky, though; she was wearing a tight panty-girdle, and they couldn't get it off her; otherwise they would have raped her ... Now everyone I know is wearing tight panty-girdles on dates with boys they don't really trust. It's the modem version of a chastity belt....
"There was a girl right here on this campus who went to a party at one of the fraternity houses, and she got very drunk; I think she probably passed out. I don't know whether the boys were mad at her or something, or just drunk and having fun, but they took her into the kitchen downstairs and laid her ... no, they lay her on a table, and they took off her panties. Then they got this large jar of peanut butter, and somehow they filled her full of it, put her panties back on, brought her to, and sent her home. It's the worst thing I ever heard of....
"There were other stories about how girls got drunk, and maybe they were making out with someone, or maybe they were stripped, but anyhow they were brought back to their dorms just before curfew without their clothes ... or without some of them. One girl stumbled into her dorm wearing nothing but her shoes and her winter overcoat; a friend of mine was there when it happened. The worst thing about it is that the counselors and housemothers are likely to see what's going on, and then they have a regular inquisition, even though at this school they really can't do too much to you as long as you get back in by curfew. But they can make you feel even worse about it than you already do.
"I've also known of lots of girls who went out with boys and actually got so drunk they didn't know what happened to them. A girlfriend of mine did that once, and when her menstrual period was late that month, she got really worried and was afraid she had been raped by the guy. Fortunately, she hadn't been, as far as anyone could tell, but it was really terrible that she couldn't even remember; I don't think she's ever let that happen again!
"I know of at least one girl who went out on a double date, and by the time the evening was over no one was fit to drive home. So she called the housemother to say that it looked as though she'd be late, and she explained why she did not want to encourage anyone to drive home. The housemother called the campus police, and sent one of their squad cars over to the next town, and one of them drove the four kids back to campus in their own
. car. That was a sensible thing; I've heard of times where no one was fit to drive, but the girls kept insisting that they had to get back to campus for curfew, so someone took the wheel anyhow, and some kids have been arrested for drunken driving, and others have had accidents ... when a girl comes in late, no one really believes her excuse, I don't think, so they get penalized no matter what it was if they're late ... I think this causes some unnecessary accidents.
"Then there was a really bad case of a girl who got drunk; they took pictures of her undressed, and it was an awful mess. What was worst about it was that the boys of course didn't know who she was, but it turned out that her father was pretty well-to-do, and besides he had been a member of the fraternity where it happened! So he came to campus and demanded that the photos and negatives be destroyed, but by then some of them were in circulation already. The fraternity got rid of the ones they had, but no one could do much about the rest, and anybody who had them didn't say anything, and you still hear about someone-or-other who is still holding on to a copy. They tried to hush it up, but there wasn't much they could do; almost everyone on campus heard about it, but really not too many ever knew who the girl was.
"Silly things happen too. I heard about this girl who passed out at a fraternity party, and someone found her there later in one of the rooms and no one seemed to know who she was, and since it was already after curfew someone suggested that maybe someone had invited her up to the college for the week-end, and that she had just gone to sleep. So they let her stay there, and when she got up in the morning and went back to her dorm, everyone had been looking for her, and she had been reported missing to the state police, and no one wanted to believe her story, and they called the fraternity, and someone there vouched for the fact that she'd been asleep there all night, but they were still very upset about it because she had spent the whole night there, and I guess the Dean or the housemother or someone considered that unqualifiedly sinful, sleeping with a house full of boys. Of course, she kept complaining that it was not her fault that she'd passed out, or that the boys had failed to wake her and get her home; she said that she'd laid down in that room because it was quiet and she felt sick. I don't think she ever really admitted that she'd actually passed out from drinking, but it seemed pretty obvious to everyone.
"If I ever go to fraternity parties, I never have more than a few drinks; you never can tell what might happen."
The above comments referred to perfectly ordinary, routinely scheduled parties. They were not billed as orgies or beer brawls, but they did nonetheless get pretty wild. Now let's examine some of the more specific functions.
In many fraternity circles, it is common to bill occasional parties as theme parties. Beach parties tend to be held in the dead of winter on Northern campuses. The party room is decorated with beach themes-shells, beach chairs, umbrellas if possible, towels, perhaps a mural of the sea, some fishnet, and so on. Some really gung-ho fraternities have been known to bring small boats into the party room. Although the uninformed and the unwilling are not likely to be barred, everyone is encouraged to wear beach attire, be it fringed cutoff jeans with a sweatshirt, or actual swimming costumes. At one such party, two boys showed up in full scuba (underwater diving) gear, and were the hit of the party, despite their habit of tripping everyone nearby on their flippers. People show up in resort-area T-shirts; occasional persons who have worked as life-guards show up in that stereotyped garb, perhaps playing the role to the hilt by running around loudly blowing a whistle and telling the guests to get out of the water because sharks have been sighted, or grabbing girls, patting their breasts, and saying officiously, "Sorry, Miss, but there are no water wings allowed on this part of the beach," and steering her off.
The music may be chosen to fit in with the theme, as well as the refreshments. The bar may be decorated as a hot-dog stand, and a little room off to one side may bear a large sign reading, "Get your CRABS here!" At one party of this sort, a barbecue pit was actually constructed in the middle of the basement floor, the lights were turned down, wave-splashing music was played, and the guests had a beach-picnic-style hot-dog and marshmallow roast right there. Others actually imported a large pool of shallow water for wading. And one group dumped a load of sand on the floor of the basement party room, and were very disappointed when their efforts were not appreciated.
There is something singular about putting on a bathing suit in Michigan in January, wrapping a coat tightly around yourself, and heading out for a party with the temperature below zero. It's all part of the college attitude that "anything that's different is likely to be fun." Need there be any further reason for a theme party?
Another popular theme is the toga party, frankly billed as the Roman Orgy by some of the more daring. Although the billing is frequently exaggerated, the style may be quite authentic. Such affairs have been known to include Roman orgy dinners in full splendor, including trays of grapes in every comer and an entire roast pig. Even at the less pretentious Roman Orgies, pledges or servants in blackface act the part of slaves, fanning people with feather fans and serving the food. Guests sit on cushions on the floor (even though they may be dancing the very latest dances in the next room), and only at the most elaborate parties does anyone wear a proper period costume. What then? For the girls, Greek or Roman style nightgowns if available; if not, dress like the boys in togas. Togas? Well, not really. Bedsheets, to be honest. Usually those from one's own bed, belonging to the linen service to which most students subscribe.
A toga, in case you've never worn one, is a remarkably comfortable garment, however unsuitable they may be for dancing the twist or the frag. And knowing that your "toga" is nothing more than a draped and pinned sheet adds the fun of "dress-up" to the party. There is frequently one additional rule; nothing is to be worn under the toga, except perhaps underwear, and at some parties even that is considered unsporting. Poorly pinned togas slipping off in the middle of the dance floor only add to the merriment.
Even more popular than the elaborate toga party is the simple pajama party, at which the more modest may wish to add slippers and bathrobes. Several years ago, a distraught mother wrote to one of the more popular advice columnists to express her anxiety upon learning that her daughter-who attended one of the finest colleges-had attended such a party. Wasn't that rather improper, she asked? The columnist admitted that she had never attended such a party, and had not even been aware that they took place; she asked her readers to tell her about such events from their own experience.
The mail poured in. The parties were usually described as being like an ordinary party in every way except that the guests wore pajamas, as a novelty. One girl suggested that the parties were to give one the fun of pretending to be "wicked" without actually so doing. Others reported that such parties were known to them, but that they would never go to them. The overwhelming majority insisted that pajama parties were not 'slumber parties" but merely a form of costume party, and that any decent girls attending them wore perfectly respectable pajamas with underpants and bra underneath, not shorties, peek-a-boo gowns, or negligees.
Another cause of alarm was the report that the guests at such parties spent the evening lying around on-horrors!-mattresses; in fact, this is commonly the case. Mattresses are dragged downstairs and line the walls. "Sitting on a mattress," insisted one coed, "is no more indecent than sitting on the floor." Another girl said, "If that's all our parents think mattresses are good for, then they are the ones with evil minds...."
The finest pajama party reported boasted a slide-and-tumble room, made out of mattresses. To enter the house, one climbed up a ladder and tumbled down a slide which was a steep incline with mattresses over it; the rest of the reception room was carpeted with other mattresses, and occasional upturned chairs or tables underneath provided for gymnastic variation. The entire scene, as described, was as much fun as the proverbial barrel full of monkeys,-and as innocent as a toddler's birthday party.
One girl protested strongly about criticism of pajama parties:
"At one time, the waltz was considered indecent because a man actually held a woman in his arms; modem variations on the fox trot were criticized because they had evolved into little more than making out to music. So the kids started doing other dances, where the parties don't even get near each other, much less touch. But the older people still complain, this time claiming that we make suggestive gestures in our dancing. They'll always be objecting to something; they've got to. Now they raise a fuss because we go to pajama parties; would they be any happier if we didn't wear pajamas at them?"
On the whole, theme parties are quite tame; however, those looking for sin or evil will see it everywhere, even at a Roman Orgy that resembles a sexual orgy in name only.
This is not to say that wild parties are absent; on the contrary, they are very much present, but are not publicized for obvious reasons. A vestige of the double standard remains in many places, and most student groups are wary of doing anything extreme at an open party with "nice girls" present; one might turn out to be not so nice, and report the matter. One of the lesser-known of these occasions is the fraternity 'spite party" which has become an annual tradition at the house described below, and reportedly elsewhere as well. The comments are those of a sociology student who was friendly with a member of the fraternity in question:
"I don't recall quite how I met David, but it was while I was a freshman. We became good friends and I sometimes went to parties at his house with him when he lacked another date. He lived there. Toward the end of my second or third year, I asked if I could come over and talk to him the following Saturday night, and was surprised and puzzled to hear that he didn't want me over there because that was the night of the spite party.
"'What's a spite party?" I asked.
"David was reluctant to describe it, but finally explained that once a year, in the late spring, the boys in his house would invite all the girls they held grudges against to a party. A party of sorts. Some brothers brought girls to whom they had been referred by others. In short, it was a gathering of all the girls that the fraternity members liked the least.
"It wasn't easy to get him to explain what they all had against these girls, but he implied that some were promiscuous sexual bitches that no one respected, and others were girls who liked to tease a guy, but refused to allow sexual intercourse. He couldn't be more specific, suggesting only that each individual guy had reasons for wanting to get back at some girl, or several.
"Someone would call from the house and make a date with each of the girls and pick her up early in the evening. Once back at the house, the boys were likely to abandon their dates and stage a happening which they referred to as 'a horror show."
"I was frankly fascinated, and told David that I wanted to be present. He put up quite a fight, and finally agreed if I'd promise to stay out of sight. He told me he'd make sure all the brothers knew who I was so they wouldn't bother me; now that I look back on it, I'm awfully glad he did!
"David brought me over early that evening, and we stayed up in his room until the girls began to arrive. They sort of looked like ordinary college girls, in pleated skirts, knee socks, loafers, and shirts or sweaters, mostly; I don't think any of them were from my school, because I didn't recognise any of them. I had to be careful to keep from staring at them; I was trying to figure out what they were like, or what they might have done that earned them an invitation to this party. Aside from some hardened features, they might have been a random sampling of college girls, for all I could tell.
"A number of the boys took the girls up to their rooms as soon as they arrived, and I could only assume they were intending to bed them as quickly as possible. There was lots of beer, and everyone was drinking a lot.
"I just sat in a comer, and occasionally talked with some of the girls who were sitting alone, trying to find out what they were like, and maybe get some idea why they had been included. I'm not sure I ever really got the answer to that question. David came down and sat with me occasionally; when I asked him about this girl or that, he did not seem to know most of them, but said that he had seen several before at the house.
"By ten o'clock, most of the boys who had stayed around were extremely drunk. They gathered everyone into the living room and announced that they were going to put on a skit. A few people were still dancing in the basement, which was a mess. They had a juke box and a bar, and there was beer spilled all over the floor, and there had been a lot of bottles thrown around and broken, so the floor was littered with suds and broken glass by the time they chased everyone else upstairs.
"Then the skit began. It was the worst thing I've ever seen. It wasn't really a skit. Mostly they just fooled around in an insufficiently rehearsed way, and then they sang some extremely gross songs. I had trouble catching most of the words, but the tune and refrain were familiar, and what I did hear was insultingly coarse; I think some of the verses-they were holding a few typed sheets with them-were supposed to refer directly to certain of the girls present, and there were also obscene gestures, and guys trying to unzip each other's pants.
"It was fascinating, if in a morbid way, to watch the girls during all this. Some were frankly confused, offended, or upset. Others acted as though such coarse behavior was to be expected from a group of drunken fraternity boys, and they had become resigned to it. A very few seemed to actually enjoy what was going on. The 'show" eventually broke up in confusion, and most of the boys disappeared through a doorway, which then became the focus of attention. Arms, legs, and heads came into sight and then disappeared quickly. There were obscene gestures. Then there was a naked leg, followed by the rest of somebody being shoved into the doorway in his underwear, and then retreating. Someone else appeared wearing a bra with grapefruits in the cups, a towel tied around his waist (and ranging nearly to his knees), and socks.
"This sort of thing must have gone on for maybe fifteen minutes. All the girls just sat there because they didn't know what to do, and-for the most part-they had no way of getting home. A naked pair of buttocks sidled across the doorway. Then someone poked a hip and leg into sight, waved his penis at the audience, and quickly disappeared. Someone else crawled past on hands and knees, stark naked. Then another boy, under protest and also nude, was shoved into sight briefly.
"Then someone began to shout obscenities at the girls. I just closed my eyes and took a deep breath; I could hardly believe everything that was happening.
"Somehow, as gradually as it had begun, the
'show' died down. I don't remember where everyone was and what they were doing, but they were pretty rude to all the girls, or else gross-really crude. One of the guys had gotten into a pair of pants and going from girl to girl asking if she'd let him lay her for ten dollars. It was hard to describe, because the whole thing was carried out in a rather awkward manner. The whole thing was pretty cruel, but if they were really out to stage a horror show, they could have planned it and done a much more deliberate job.
"I had a headache from all the confusion, and I was a little sickened to see how horrible a group of boys could be, so I left when it seemed as though whatever was going to happen had happened, and it was just more of the same.
"David tried to apologize to me for what had taken place, but I wouldn't let him, and assured him that as soon as I got over the shock I'd be glad to have had the opportunity to see such a scene in action.
"To this day, I'm really not quite sure what to make of it; I'm glad I was there-well, no, not really glad I was present, but I was glad that I'd seen what it was all about. I'd never have guessed they had such things otherwise. I don't imagine the girls who get invited do much talking about them ... in fact, I'm pretty sure that most of them never realized what was going on...."
That, then, is the fraternity party, from one extreme to the other. It is not a picture that could be painted by a single student; it is the result of reports from every faction of the college population. In the course of four years as an undergraduate, no one will see but a small part of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SORORITY LIFE
Accounts of wild times in sororities tend to be grossly exaggerated. For one thing, the girls with hell-raising impulses do not usually wish to give up the time required for participation in sorority life. And it requires a great deal of time indeed, much of it spent at mindless chores. Many sororities expect their pledges to spend all of Saturday afternoon doing domestic chores at the house: washing windows, dusting draperies, cleaning floors. More time is required for pledge meetings, where the girls are expected to learn sorority history, songs, and traditions.
At some schools, the competition for "house average" is quite keen, and thus members are urged to get the highest grades possible. Their older 'sisters" have been known to lock them into their rooms if their scholastic records seemed unsatisfactorily below the house average. There, for long hours, they are coached in difficult subjects. In many cases, each house has the most thorough file possible of past exams given by each professor in each course; these are often illegally obtained, and students are encouraged to use them in preparing for exams.
When it comes to all-Greek activities, every girl is expected to rehearse for and participate in singing competitions, march in processions and parades, help to prepare floats for parades and snow sculptures for winter carnival celebrations, and help with preparations for parties. A girl who does not show a cheerful willingness to accept all of this imposition on her time for the sake of membership is not likely to be invited to join.
In addition, traditional work must be done. Each pledge is likely to be expected to spend long hours carving, painting, varnishing, and polishing a paddle to be presented to her "big sister"; some sororities expect pledges to make scrap books, and others insist on a handmade dress or other costume. All week long, sorority life is a life of long hours and little free time. Unless one chooses to go home instead, weekends tend to be even more hectic. Not only are they the time that most of the special events take place, but it is also Friday and Saturday nights when the dating takes place. And what better way to find dates for your boyfriend's fraternity brothers than by intimidating the pledges at your house? No girl wants to be thought of as unsociable, especially not when the request comes from a sorority sister ... some of whom make it sound like more of an order than a request. As a result of such expectations, many girls who would much prefer to stay home and study, or perhaps go to a movie with friends, are badgered into dates, blind dates arranged for them by sorority sisters. Occasionally the results are pleasing, but more often a young girl finds herself stuck with a date whom she not only finds unattractive, but overly aggressive as well.
In discussing the situation with one young man, he made this comment: "If you are looking for a quick lay, date a town girl; if you would like to eventually have a long affair with a girl after you've gotten to know her, choose an independent (no sorority affiliation); but if you just want a quick feel and lots of necking right off, but probably nothing else, date a sorority girl." And whether the girls like it or not, that is the attitude of most college men toward the 'sisters"-especially the fraternity men.
Consequently, one freshman had this experience:
"This sorority had shown an interest in me by inviting me to their open rushing events, and I got to know some of the girls and prospective members. One Friday night about seven o'clock one of the sisters, a sophomore, came to my room. She said that she needed a date for a fraternity brother of her boyfriend. I told her that I was really too busy and not terribly interested in a blind date, and I suggested that she find someone else.
'"Will you go if I simply can't find someone else?' she asked. I didn't want to be disagreeable, so I said okay, and asked her to please try to find someone else, thinking it would not be difficult. A half hour later she came back and said that she couldn't find anyone else, and that my date would call for me at eight. By that time, I'd nearly forgotten all about it, and had slipped into a bathrobe and started to write a letter home. So I got dressed in something nice, not even knowing where we were going because she'd rushed off before I could ask her.
"Promptly at eight, someone announced through the inter-com that I had a caller. When I got to the lobby, there were two boys waiting for me. One said he had a date in the next dorm, so we went and picked her up. My date was a junior, and the other boy and his date were sophomores. His name was Marlin, and I certainly couldn't complain that lie was not attractive. His conversation was not too brilliant, but he was pleasant enough, and even though I would have rather been home (in my room) I decided that I might as well make the best of it and try to have a decent evening.
"The other boy had a car he seemed to have borrowed from someone, or brought up for the weekend, and we drove out to a roadhouse where there were a lot of other college kids. There was loud music for dancing on the juke box, and our dates ordered us each a beer without asking. I don't usually like to drink beer, but I sipped it all evening because it was cold and wet, and the place was hot and stuffy. The music was giving me a headache, and we could hardly hear each other talk, not that the conversation was very interesting.
"We danced a bit on the crowded floor, and the others had another round of beers. About 10:15 the boys suggested leaving, and it sounded like a good idea because I really wanted to get out of there by then. The night air felt good. We drove back towards campus, and I wondered where we were going because curfew was not until midnight. We were riding along a quiet side road, and suddenly the driver pulled off the road into a loggers' turnoff, stopped the car, and wordlessly moved over to his date, whom he began to kiss.
"I frowned with displeasure and tried to nonchalantly look out the car window at the night stars, but it was overcast. My date leaned over and pulled my face to him. Of course, I resisted. I'm not in the habit of casually letting myself be kissed by guys I do not like. And suddenly I was growing to dislike this Marlin and his sneaky friend all the more. So I whispered 'no,' thinking that would make my stand perfectly clear. But he said 'why not?' as though there was really something strange about my refusal. What was I supposed to do? Just tell him flatly that I didn't like him? So I said simply, 'I don't want to."
"But it soon became quite clear that he was more interested in what he wanted than in what I wanted, and he held my head tightly and forced his kisses on me. From then on it was just one big wrestling match; he'd put his hand on me, and I'd push it away, tell him to stop, or abruptly change position. I was far too busy to notice what the people in the front seat were doing, but I once noticed that they'd sunk out of sight, and once I recall hearing them breathing heavily. Meanwhile, Marlin was really getting out of hand; he kept unbuttoning my blouse, and pushing my skirt up, and feeling my breasts, all almost faster than I could rebutton, rearrange my clothes, or push him away. It felt like I was wrestling with an octopus, and every time I tried to tell him to leave me alone, he just grabbed my head and crushed his lips onto mine and stuck his tongue into my mouth so I could hardly breathe, much less talk. It was just awful; I was a virgin at the time, and I wasn't about to give it up to any crude slob like him!
"Worst of all, I was afraid to make too much noise, or say something that would sound stupid to the people in the front; they were busy, but I am sine they could hear us, so I just kept trying to push this guy away. But he was leaning his weight on me, pinning me down, and reaching up between my legs and playing with me through my panties, and then through the leg-hole. It might have felt good if it was someone else and I had invited it, but I was really furious with this guy. I was determined to resist as long as possible, and scream if I really thought he was going to try to rape me; I wasn't quite sure what he had in mind.
"The next thing I knew, he had unzipped his pants and exposed his penis, and I got sort of scared and disgusted all at once. It was getting late, and I knew they had to get us back to the dorms by midnight, and I kept wishing I could see what time it was in the dark car. I just knew that I did not have any desire for him. It was one of my first dates up there, and I didn't really know how to act, and I felt like crying or screaming or running, except that I did not want to make a fool of myself. I was afraid the story would get back to the girl who had arranged this horrible ordeal, even though I was sure that if this is how girls in her sorority were expected to behave, I had no intention of joining!
"Marlin started to press his hot penis against my leg, and then tried to force my hand down to touch it. When he couldn't get me to keep my hand there, he finally gave up, and then kept rubbing up against me and all the while breathing heavily. I was just sort of reclining half under him and trying to ignore him and pretend that I was elsewhere; I kept trying to think about other things. Finally he came from rubbing up against me, and what a mess that was.
"I was sort of relieved that maybe he'd leave me alone now, but I had this awful gooey stuff on my new skirt, and on my good cashmere coat and on the lining. I imagined it would stain, and as soon as he got off me I reached for a tissue and tried to clean up, but there was an awful lot of it, and the tissue kept shredding. Finally I had to speak to him and ask to use his handkerchief. He'd used it to wipe his penis, so it was also pretty gooey and I don't think it helped much. We just sort of sat there until the other couple decided it was time to go back. I was really ashamed of having to walk back into the dorm that way, with my things all stained, and I tried to fold them in front so it would not show where it was wet.
"We hardly said anything else to each other because he was satisfied, I guess, and I was so disgusted with him. But on the porch of the dorm, he stopped to say hello to two guys he knew, and because I guess he thought they were watching him, he kissed me goodnight there for an unpleasantly long while. Again, I was too embarrassed to make a scene, but as soon as I could I broke away and ran inside and signed in and went to my room, and took off my coat and skirt and tried to wash them clean. I had tears of rage and frustration in my eyes.
"When I saw that girl again the next day and she asked me about the date, if I had enjoyed it, I simply shrugged and said not especially. I think it still hurt me to even think about it. Needless to say, I never went out on that kind of blind date again, and I had nothing further to do with the girls from that sorority."
This is one girl's story; others seem willing to put up with such arrangements as the price of the supposed prestige of sorority membership. And of course, on any campus the different houses have their different reputations. Whereas the girls in one house have a reputation as prudes, those of another are characterized as permissive. To some it may seem curious that girls of similar inclinations seem to group together according to sexual attitude even though it is very rare for college girls to discuss such matters, much less be honest with each other about them. However, it is incidents like the above that allow the prospective sorority member to glean some idea of how girls in a given house behave; also, there is some truth to the notion that if girls form groups on the basis of compatible personality types, social backgrounds and attitudes, and so on, they might well have similar sexual views.
Do you want to know where the wildest girls are on any coed campus? Ask the men, especially the fraternity men; they can tell you.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SEX IN THE CLASSROOM
Sex in the classroom? How? Why? What? Except maybe in biology class, the concept may sound highly un-likely, yet some things of a distinctly sexual nature do take place. The most obvious place is in the class still offered at a few institutes of higher learning identified as "hygiene"-a thin euphemism for sex education. For a variety of reasons, most schools do not offer such courses: they either feel that it is too delicate a topic, or too late by the time a student is of college age, or simply not the business of a college.
Such a course is, however, offered by at least two of the four colleges clustered in a broad valley in New England; of the four schools, one is a state university, and the other three are small private colleges of highest repute, two for women and one for men. It has been a recent practice among the four schools to allow students at any one to do work at any other and transfer the credits, especially if the coarse in question were not offered at the school where he was enrolled. As a result, a young woman studying at the state university decided she would like to take a course in sex education under the exchange program; it was given by the same instructor at the men's school in the university town, and also in one of the women's colleges, some ten miles away.
She applied for enrollment in the course at the nearest school. For no other reason, she was denied admission to the course on the grounds that the men students were likely to be inhibited in their free discussion and questioning by the presence of a girl in the class. Of course, she was told, she was most welcome to take the course at the other school if she was willing to make the long trip several times a week.
What was so candid about this course that the instructor refused to give it in a coeducational setting? Some of the reports by enrolled students sounded rather sophomoric. Large phallic reproductions were employed in a discussion of the physiology of the male sexual organs, reported some students. Movies and slides of the genitals were also employed as visual aids, and details of masturbation, copulation, and abnormal sexual practices were frankly discussed. Causes of personal sexual difficulties were explained, as well as techniques of copulation and masturbation.
Students enrolled in that course were careful to avoid any form of sexual activity where they might be observed by friends and teased about, "Doing your homework, I see!" Many reported having taken a ribbing for even taking the course in the first place! One of the most widely discussed aspects of the class was the lecture given on contraception. Oversized prophylactics were allegedly unrolled onto oversized erect penis models, and a cutaway sectional model (in full color!)' of the female genital area was used to demonstrate the proper insertion and placement of a diaphragm, as well as the use of contraceptive creams, jellies, and foams. And cautious illusions were made to the day the lecturer used models of the same sort to illustrate the position of the penis in the vagina during intercourse. And a small but significant minority admitted to finding some of the lectures sexually stimulating....
Surprisingly, there was never any scandal concerning this class. However, at least one school has been hit by severe controversy over certain art classes, life drawing, to be specific. It had been traditional for the class to use models wearing decently modest bathing suits or leotards. This was to be expected in a provincial school; however, the inclinations of the new art instructor were not. A traditionalist, he decided that one simply could not properly draw the figure unless one could see the figure, and that meant nude.
He arranged for an experienced nude model to pose for one of his classes; by the next day, word had gotten around, and throngs of curious students and faculty, and indignant administrators, came by to peer in from the outside window, or to glance in the window in the doorway while passing by in the corridor. Annoyed, the instructor taped paper over the door-window, and drew the blinds tightly. Still the curious crowded the hall and the window edges; finally the class had to be halted because of the noise and confusion. The instructor was called in for a little chat with his department head and one of the Deans. As a result of the ensuing disagreement, he left the college, the drawing class went back to partially-clad models, and the school paper was printing the rumors that the nude model had been posed in indecent positions.
Meanwhile, medical schools have been having more serious problems with their dissection students removing genitalia from their cadavers and placing them under a friend's pillow as a prank....
And psychology classes have been told that the best way to see first-hand evidence of the invalidity of survey-and-questionnaire techniques would be to attempt to obtain reliable chastity statistics by asking each girl at that college whether or not she were still a virgin....
And history students have been chortlingly passing on the traditional story of how the debauched Catherine of Russia died, namely that a large horse fell on her when the cables broke as he was being lowered....
And irate citizens have demanded that 'sexual reproduction" lectures be deleted from the zoology courses at yet another school....
CHAPTER NINE
HOMOSEXUALITY ON CAMPUS
When one of the more enlightened colleges recently announced that "private sexual conduct, heterosexual or homosexual, between students is not to be considered a direct concern of the administration," many eyebrows were raised. Civil liberty groups hailed the proclamation as a sensible one, while others accused the college of shirking its "responsibility" to students. But the fact is that this school's administrators had decided that they could not possibly police private sexual conduct, and did not wish to institute unenforceable laws. Besides, insisted one of the policy-makers, there's not that much homosexuality in college to worry about. Here he was wrong, according to numerous authorities; the most recent conclusion to the contrary comes from the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry in their 1965 Report (Number 60) entitled Sex and the College Student, Formulated by the Committee on the College Student.
Mentioning the Kinsey statistics concerning homosexual behavior, the group goes on to say bluntly that Homosexuality occurs frequently in the college age group. "College officials," points out the paper, "confronted with facts of homosexual behavior have sometimes sought refuge in the idea that the highly select and endowed nature of the college student population eliminated the possibility of such behavior."
Careful research and frank discussion with students make it quite clear that the officials are simply trying to ignore a very real situation. "The college official," continues the study, "does not usually encounter these problems unless they are brought directly to his attention. They may come through the reports of students, through arrest by municipal police, or occasionally through a student's own request for help." In most schools, homosexuality is treated as a psychiatric problem, and homosexual students are referred to trained counselors or psycho-therapists for treatment on an individual basis.
These statistics, however, only tell part of the story. Who are the students who engage in homosexual acts at college? Where do they do so? With whom? Under what circumstances? How often? And for what reasons? The following cases should offer some enlightenment in this area; they come from young men who at one time or another engaged in homosexual behavior at college.
"We had quite a large gay (homosexual) crowd where I went to college," admitted a strikingly handsome blond youth. "A lot of people sort of knew about it-the students, anyway-and no one seemed to mind us. There was even one guy I remember who was especially blatant: his name was Hank, and he was almost a stereotyped little faggot. He used to walk up and down campus blowing kisses at the boys; occasionally he'd make a conquest in the locker room. I once saw him at it with one of the guys on the football team-the straightest-looking guy you could imagine! They were off in a back comer when hardly anyone was around, and this guy was standing there with his pants off. He was built like a real stallion, and Hank was down on his knees in front of him, with his eyes closed and a dreamy expression on his face; you could tell he was enjoying every minute of it. I didn't stand there staring too long! And the football guy was just standing there enjoying it with nothing more than a vaguely-interested look on his face. I guess Hank did that sort of thing pretty often ... for some reason, he never did get around to me though...."
This young man had many of stories to tell: "Boys there boasted openly if they were rough trade (homosexuals with exaggeratedly-masculine, almost sadistic, tastes in sexual activity) and they were generally admired for it ... There was a lot of gay activity. One boy performed fellatio of a group of thirteen or fourteen others one afternoon, one right after another. They accepted him as part of their group and included him in certain activities. They'd have parties and have him 'do his stuff' on every guy present, like he was some kind of showpiece or new toy.
This kind of thing was not rare at all ... One boy got gonorrhea and everyone in the group caught it at an orgy. It took us weeks and weeks to get a cure because everybody kept screwing around so much. A few times we thought we were over it, just to find that someone was still infected and dosing us again. I think one boy had the same dose of clap four times before we finally all got rid of it."
College students, as a group, tend to be quite tolerant about homosexuality; the more intelligent or intellectual the group, the less anyone is likely to look askance at incidents of homosexual behavior. The least tolerance was exhibited at schools with an overwhelmingly middle-class population, and at schools with a distinct religious orientation. One girl tells of this incident:
"I was taking art classes at night, and there was this homosexual guy who was pretty obvious. He didn't bother anyone, but the girls teased him a little, and some of the boys were sort of unpleasant to him. I stayed late at art class one night, and the two of us were the only ones left. When I explained to him that I was waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up, he smiled in a cute, shy way and said, 'I'm waiting for my boyfriend too .."
Although most incidents of homosexuality at college are quiet and private, this is not so in every case. One student at a southern college reports: "There are these older businessmen from town who throw parties for us. They get the guys drunk and spend a lot of money on them, and then take them home to their offices, or apartment, or a hotel for sex. Sometimes it's singly, and sometimes it turns into huge mass orgies. Once a really nice looking man about 40 took me home to his apartment and he spent all evening performing fellatio on me; he must have done me six or seven times before we fell asleep, and once again in the morning. He didn't want anything else; he just wanted me to let him do me. I actually think I enjoyed it more than he did ... There were some boys who were favorites among the men, and they used to share them sometimes. There were two who liked to share my friend Jim, one of them having anal intercourse with him, and the other doing Jim and having Jim do him, in a sixty-nine position.
If he did not have other plans, I think they would have actually kept him, just for that purpose ... Lots of the kids, both girls and boys, had sugar daddies where I went to college; a few of them even paid tuition and such expenses, but most just gave them gifts, parties, maybe small sums of money. One or two got the use of cars to drive on the week-ends. We all usually shared the profits from such things with our friends."
Yet another boy reported this unusual situation:
"We had a gay dentist who did free dental work in exchange for a couple of nights of sex. The boys shared him equally and went over there in groups sometimes for orgies at his place. He was not old and not bad-looking, and he had all kinds of sex gadgets that he made in his lab. He had vibrating things to use on a boy's penis; I'm not sure what they were; I only heard about them ... Sometimes boys who didn't owe him for anything because they just didn't need dental work would go over to join in the fun."
According to these students, their overt homosexuality was engaged in discreetly, and off-campus for the most part. There was no reason for it to come to the attention of the college officials, and there was never any difficulty.
The group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, however, reports a typical case where the participants were neither so lucky nor so discreet. The case involved two seniors, Mike and Jim, who were observed by another student practicing mutual masturbation in the shower in their dormitory. Overwhelmed with self-righteousness and revulsion, the student informed a faculty member and suggested that the two ought to be dismissed from college.
The faculty member interviewed both Mike and Jim, both of whom readily admitted that they had been involved in homosexual relations their freshman year, but had discontinued overt behavior as of their sophomore year. On the occasion when they were observed, the action had been impulsive and had taken place following a class banquet at which both had been drinking heavily. The faculty member then discussed the matter with a colleague, and they decided against any administrative interference, and initialed no official action. Later, the first teacher explained that his decision was based on the fact that the boys were but one month from graduation; had the situation occurred earlier, he would have considered referring the matter to the dean or the college psychiatrist.
In a way, the whole matter hinges on who may happen to discover the homosexual activity, and what his own attitudes are. Increasingly, our college students are taking the attitude that such activity is a private matter, and not one to be reported vindictively or to expiate one's own guilt feelings about such matters. Just as some circles require liberal "broad-minded" attitudes that result in association with other racial groups to prove the absence of prejudice, such student groups frequently encourage open acceptance of homosexual students as evidence of mature "open-minded" attitudes.
Old social attitudes, however, still linger. The GAP report defines the personal aspect of the problem in these terms:
"Discussion of homosexuality has increased in literature and in the popular press, but the personal airing of problems continues to be difficult for those confronting homosexual feelings for the first time. The individual student may worry about homosexuality without finding an opportunity to vent his anxieties; he may have been exposed to misinformation and partial truths that lead him to misinterpret his own feelings, and a homosexual encounter or a homosexually tinged friendship may come to have a distorted significance. Self-doubt may be initiated by the individual's feeling that he has failed to match some abstract idea of masculinity; he may then interpret this failure as evidence of homosexuality."
There is another rarely-cited reason why homosexuality flourishes in a college environment. With so many of the available coeds still clinging to notions of premarital chastity, male students are thwarted in their search for a willing sex partner; prostitution is no longer the fully-acceptable source of casual sex that it once was for the college man. Consequently, a small-but substantial and increasing number of young men are beginning to give serious consideration to homosexual liaisons. One such student sums up the matter quite neatly in these terms:
"I'm not a homosexual, even if I do have relations with men; most of them are not homosexuals either. Most of us would probably prefer to be having sex with a woman, but college living, especially where I go to school, does not give you the opportunity for heterosexual relations, and few of the girls take as casual an attitude about the whole subject as the guys do. If you're horny, you're horny; you don't want to start a romance or a fancy affair; you just want to find someone you like who happens to be feeling the same way at the same time, and you'll take care of each other. My friends and I understand this. We consider ourselves lucky to be able to take such a sensible attitude instead of being prejudiced. All the guys who are scared stiff of homosexuality, all they can do is masturbate. But sex is something where people can interact, and we prefer this to just giving ourselves hand jobs.
"Besides, lots of us just started out curious about what homosexual acts were like, so we tried them. We've all developed our preferences and our aversions, and I think we still all prefer women when they are available. But, as I said, that does not happen as often as we need some sexual outlet.
I know very few people think the way we do, but we are very pleased with things as they are, and feel we have hit upon a very good solution."
Other members of the small minority agreed of the discrepancy between indulging in homosexual acts and "being a homosexual." The difference commonly cited was that "homosexuals are afraid of girls; they love each other because they are unable to fall in love with girls, so men are the only sex left. If you can relate sexually to a girl, then you are not a homosexual." What are you then? "You are bisexual. AC/DC, they call it. That's if you can react almost equally-on a sexual level-to both."
Although the days of blind prejudice still linger, it is currently very much the exception rather than the rule when a male student chooses to report another student for homosexuality, or berate him or even attack him with fists. Part of the reason for this is the increased education received by college students in the field of psychology. Students learn that an attack on homosexuality is an expression of insecurity about one's own masculinity-and what student would choose to behave in a manner that would make that apparent to his sophisticated classmates?
Thus far, this chapter has dealt with male homosexuality. This is not to say that incidents of female homosexuality are absent on the college campus. On the contrary, the GAP report states flatly that instances of homosexuality occur among women students probably as frequently as they do among men, particularly in residential colleges. "Gradations of feeling between members of the same sex range from affection and admiration through idolization, crushes, and covert sexual responsiveness to outright sexual gratification. Social custom, however, tolerates public display of affection and tenderness between women to a far greater degree than between men. In contrast to men, women tend to express the intense emotional aspects of a homosexual relationship more frequently than the physical aspect. Even the physical aspect shades over into the accepted feminine role of tenderness, care, and nurturance with the result that female homosexuality may easily pass without full recognition by either the participants or others."
It is no surprise to persons familiar with homosexuality at college that certain schools tend to attract persons of a homosexual bent, and that such schools have an unusually high rate of homosexuality. It is a process of natural selection that groups persons of similar inclinations at the same schools. For example, persons of distinctly heterosexual orientation will generally prefer to attend a school that is coeducational or is at least located near at least one other school where members of the opposite sex study. Any city school is likely to qualify, or any state university or college. However, consider a small school for women in a remote town well inland in the eastern United States. The enrollment is relatively small; the school is a private institution, and the educational emphasis rests strongly on liberal arts.
Few girls given strongly to dating, or male companions, or frequent and diverse entertainment would consider being "buried" at such a place; however, for the girl who has no interest in standard 'social life" and may have overt or subconscious lesbian inclinations, such a college would seem ideal. Of course, her ostensible reasons for choosing such a school might include a serious dedication to getting an education, avoiding the temptation of multiple distractions, and so forth, but the fact remains that many girls with homosexual tendencies do end up at such schools. The administrators are aware of this; in fact, no small proportion of the administration and faculty of such schools is made up of homosexual women.
Here is the description of such a school, the one referred to above, by a graduate of that institution presently in her mid-twenties with a distinctly lesbian orientation:
"When I applied to _________ College, I certainly never imagined that I'd come out as a lesbian several years later. That is not to say that the college did it, but it certainly didn't stand in my way! ... I'm not sure why I picked this school; I suppose maybe I really didn't want to be around a lot of men, and the atmosphere this school offered seemed peaceful and suitable to my temperament. I liked the sort of girls they had there, in the way that you like people who seem to have the same interests and attitudes as yourself. Before the end of my freshman year, I must have realized that quite a few of the girls there were involved in lesbian friendships; they didn't do anything very overt, but you could tell that they were quite close. I still was not myself able to think in terms of sexual relations between girls; I'm sure I could not have been able to guess what two girls might do sexually, but I somehow understood that certain friendships were rather special and closer, emotionally, than any I'd ever noticed before.
"In my sophomore year, I roomed with a girl I had met, and I guess I sort of had a crush on her, although I was not thinking in such terms at the time. We became very close, though of course nothing physical took place between us; she had to leave school the next year, but we still keep in touch by mail. At that stage, I just imagined that the greater intimacy among the girls was caused by the absence of men near-by, and I never thought much of it really.
"When I was a junior, we had some sort of scandal of a minor nature because one of the girls had been found staying overnight at the home of a male instructor, and they hinted at all kinds of things. And of course many of the girls left on week-ends to be able to see their boyfriends, so there were many things to reinforce the belief that things were not so different there. But my senior year roommate changed that. She was sort of butch (unfeminine) and she developed quite a crush on me. I liked her too, but I was still really too naive to realize what was going on.
"When she first touched me, it was in a warm sisterly fashion, but as we grew closer I came to realize that there was a distinctly erotic nature to our relationship. Sometimes we'd fall asleep together in the same bed, cuddling each other. It was about that time that I began to seriously consider the possibility that I might be a lesbian.
"Eventually, with her leading the way, Ellen and I progressed to more intimate love-making. First it was hugs and kisses and caresses, and then we got to what you could call mutual masturbation. I felt funny about it at the time, but El must have been perfectly aware of her homosexuality by then; she did not seem to show any conflicts about it. Of course, on the outside our behavior was perfectly proper, and I don't think anyone but a few close friends ever suspected our relationship."
One should not get the impression, however, that homosexuality is the exclusive province of the non-coeducational school. Here is the story of one girl at a large university:
"If I had ever thought about it, I am sure it would have occurred to me that there was something different about the women who taught in the physical education department. Almost all of the phys/ed. teachers I'd ever run into were somewhat masculine. In this school, they were all ages, and everyone I can remember wore her hair short, and I think they were all single. I now realize what a perfect place that department would be for the homosexual woman, but at the time all there ever was were stories among the girls about the overfriendliness of one of the older women; I think she was head of the department. I had occasion to go into her office about some change in my schedule, or special permission to arrange something, and she was always warm and pleasant and smiling at me.
"By chance, after the first visit, I heard the stories circulating among the girls, and I made a point of trying to notice the next time I was there. I smiled back at her and was especially warm and pleasant. When I left she asked me to drop by sometime just to chat, but I never did because I kept so busy and because the gym building was way over on the other side of the campus. And she acted a little bit eccentric besides, so we were never sure quite what to make of her.
"The next time I had occasion to see her I needed her signature on something, and she had something of interest-I forget what it was-sitting around the office, or tacked up on the walls, and I went over to look at whatever it was while she was looking over the papers I had handed her. The next thing I knew, she was standing just behind me, rather close, asking me what I thought of it and telling me something about it. I was sort of trapped in an awkward position, because if I did anything to move away from her it would become quite evident that I was considering her forward, and it could have been very embarrassing for both of us. At one point she put her hand on my arm. I don't remember how, but I finally maneuvered away subtly when it was time for me to leave, and we parted with friendly glances.
"I never went back to see her; in fact, I must have actively avoided her. I was young and sort of scared of that sort of thing. Now I almost regret it; it would have been an interesting experience to have started something with her. She was a handsome woman with gentle features and grey hair; she was about forty, I'd guess...."
This is not an isolated incident. Nearly every school has at least one person in the women's physical education department to whom such behavior is attributed ... or actually evident. Girls report seeing their gym teachers standing around locker rooms, watching girls change, when there was really no need for their presence there. But most of their sexual orientation seems to remain covert; instances of actual sexual contact are relatively rare, although one girl reported this:
"When I was in college, I already knew I was a lesbian, so things were rather difficult. I had to keep turning down dates; my friends there tried to fix me up, and I am sure that they thought I never dated because no one asked me; I had to keep assuring them that I just was not interested in most of the boys I met. I implied that I had a boyfriend at home, or that I was only interested in older men, not college boys.
"If it hadn't been for Martha, though, it would have been very difficult for me. She was about thirty with short blonde hair and a very fresh face, a bit angular. She coached the volleyball team I played on, and when she felt she knew me well enough she asked why I seemed sad and a bit lonely ... and didn't I ever date? I suddenly felt that I could trust her, and I explained-a bit too bluntly perhaps-that I just wasn't interested in boys. And after that everything happened so quickly I can't even remember the details, but we became best of friends, and then lovers. My entire social life was dependent on her; I'd stay at her house on weekends, or we'd go away skiing in the winter together. She introduced me to her gay friends, and at last I felt comfortable in a group; I didn't have to pretend and hide my true feelings any longer. They were wonderful people.
"I am sure that my college years would have been just hideous if it had not been for Martha." And another student at another school reports: "Teachers are often involved with students in their sex activities; I have known of cases where students actually received higher grades than they deserved as a result of such things. You hear about it as a joke, but it really does happen. And these are both ordinary heterosexual affairs and homosexual ones; mostly the latter. They cause less suspicion when the people are seen together...." And a graduate student recalls:
"Where I did my undergraduate work, one of the top professors at the university, Dr._______, the noted biologist, was known as homosexual by almost everyone on campus. No one seemed to mind. He was really pretty nelly (effeminate) for a man in his position, though. He'd giggle unabashedly in front of anyone, and just about every male student who had taken a class with him claimed that Dr. had made a pass at him once. I'm sure that most of it wasn't true, but after a while no one wanted to admit that he was one of the few boys Dr. had failed to make a pass at!
"He was respected in his field and respected as a person. The college was especially glad to have him, because he could always be called on to squire the old-maid Dean of Women to all the social events. I don't think he had very much respect for her as a person, but he seemed to enjoy playing the part of her escort with good grace ... I never met a person on campus who didn't like and admire Dr. ."
The overwhelming consensus among the persons who made such reports was that because college people like to consider themselves more open-minded about such things because of their intelligence and education, such incidents were accepted without condemnation. Only one exception was reported, by a handsome art student who led a thoroughly bisexual life:
"There was a bit of a scandal about my relationship with Lars, so I left school before my senior year was over. Lars was married, but he and I had become very close friends. We went everywhere together eventually, to both faculty and student functions. It's funny how some doors were closed to us when people realized our relationship, but many many more were opened to us. Lots of people thought the whole thing was rather charming, and we were welcome at a great number places neither of us had been invited to before. We never expected any trouble, and we were very surprised when it came from Lars' wife. I guess she felt after a while that he was just spending too much time with me and not paying enough attention to her, so she sued for divorce, and in the action she named me as co-respondent, for alienation of affection, or something of the sort, and word got around and things got so bad that I finally just left school to escape the pressure."
Fortunately, such cases of ruined reputations and ruined careers are the exception rather than the rule.
Homosexuality does exist on our college campuses, at least as frequently as elsewhere, but thus far the colleges themselves see no cause for alarm. They merely insist upon discretion and the absence of scandal.
CHAPTER TEN
PORNOGRAPHY ON CAMPUS
The subject of pornography on campus may sound like a rather odd one to the female college graduate; she is not likely to have ever seen any of it. The most risque things the girls are ever likely to pass around is a revamped version of the old "purity test" that most girls first saw in high school. Essentially, this is a list of "have you?" questions, with points assigned. Some typical ones might be:
* Have you ever kissed a boy in a car?
* Have you ever gotten drunk on a date?
* Did you ever let a boy go all the way?
* Did you ever let a boy see you naked from the waist up?
* ... from the waist down?
* Were you ever pregnant?
* Did you ever have an abortion?
* Did you ever let a boy French kiss you?
* Did you ever stay out all night with a boy?
A point system accompanies, and a girl goes down the test, marking down her plus points, and then the girl who showed her the test asks only for the total. On the basis of the total, one is told that one qualifies as anything from "lily white" through "a little bit naughty" to "a real nymphomaniac" or "a woman who's been around." Such quizzes pass from hand to hand and, in a distinctly schoolgirl fashion, are considered rather mischievous or risque. Of course, none of the results are taken too seriously, and the scoring is frequently followed up with such suggestive remarks as, "Now I know what you and Allen do on Sunday afternoons when you say you're going over to study!"
A more modem variation on this theme involves a story line that few can recall correctly, which requires the subject to fill in information at intervals, and goes something like this:
... You are walking through a woods, and you come to a body of water. (What sort of body of water is it? Describe it. Do you go into it?) Then you leave and continue through the woods and the light grows dimmer and the trees grow thicker. As you walk, you notice something and stop. It is a key. (What kind of a key is it? Describe it. How big is it?) You stop and look at it. (Do you pick it up? If so, what do you do with it?) You continue walking and you grow very tired, and you start looking for a place to sleep. (What kind of place do you choose? Do you fall asleep right away? How long do you sleep? What does the forest look like when you wake up?)
All the answers are either remembered or recorded. Then when the tale is completed, the girl giving the test goes back over it, and interprets all of the replies according to Freudian sexual symbolism, telling her friend what her responses are supposed to indicate about her sexual feelings. For example, water is supposed to be a primitive sexual symbol. If a girl sees a large clear body of water and goes into it, this is taken as evidence of a joyful, open, positive attitude about sexual matters. If one sees a murky pool, this indicates that one thinks that sex is a fairly dirty, unpleasant business. If one is afraid of going into the water, or of falling into the water, this is said to indicate a fear of sex, or latent frigidity.
The entire test is administered in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner, and considered reasonably valid by most who come in contact with it; occasionally long periods of introspection follow. More commonly, the subject or someone else present will ask for all the information possible about interpretation, and then run off to administer the test to another friend.
Most of the underground sexual material passed around among the girls is equally innocuous. One of the common cartoons a few years back was a drawing of Peanuts' Lucy van Pelt wearing a maternity dress over a very pregnant abdomen, and saying "Good grief, Charlie Brown!" Another common drawing passed around was of a small boy, and a little girl, undressed, looking down at their genital areas, the caption reading, "There is a difference!"
If anything more pornographic than these items ever shows up in a girl's dormitory, one can be certain that it came there by way of the well-spring of all such items on campus: from the boys. No one is suprised to find that the average male college student's room is littered with girlie magazines and sensationalistic drugstore novels. And it is becoming increasingly common to find, also, the more scholarly works on sex-marriage manuals, sexual studies such as the Kinsey reports, or the new Masters' report, serious volumes on sexual anatomy and technique, perhaps some of the classic manuals such as the Kama Sutra or The Perfumed Garden, classic erotic novels such as The Love Pagoda or Memoirs' of a Woman of Pleasure, and some of the more sexually-frank popular and literary volumes of our time, the scatological as well as the sexual. It is from some of these volumes that a curious college party game has evolved.
Strictly for mixed company of a somewhat modest nature, the game requires only a small group of friends and a copy of a suitable book; one volume, dealing with the history and "anatomy" of the so-called dirty words was once quite popular for this purpose. The people sit in a circle, and someone opens the book to a likely section and begins to read aloud. Each party must read at least one full paragraph before passing the book on, but may choose to read more than that. A bit of histrionic talent may be employed at random, or one may be assigned to read the selection in a particular style. The results are frequently hilarious.
Imagine the following passages from Peter Fryer's Mrs. Grundy; Studies in English Prudery read dramatically in mixed company:
"As might be expected, there are no euphemisms for the anus (1658), not itself normally a topic of polite conversation. Hole dates from the fourteenth century; other more or less plain terms have included port-hole, ... arse-hole, ... brown (hole) ... privy hole, hinder entrance ... and back passage....other dysphemisms were ... (brother) round mouth ... spice island ... dilberry creek, stink hole bay, wind-mill, and wrong door.
"The commonest demotic words for the male sex organ, prick (from Old English prica, 'point' or 'dot') and cock (from Old English cocc) date back in written sources to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively....
"In comparison with the plain words prick and cock, such expressions as member ... privey member ... genitals ... privy parts ... pudenda ... penis ... arbor vitae ... tree of life ... means of generation ... genitalia ... private parts ... (male) organ, and sex sound distinctly emasculate...."
Personal attitudes and prejudices enter into the readings; in such an instance, one girl endeavored to hide her basic modesty about pronouncing such words by over-playing them, and the result was a room full of hysterical laughter. The culprit, from a passage in the book on "dirty words," was the word "balls." This young lady pronounced it as though a synonym for "Damn!" and other terms of intense irritation or frustration, the a sounding like the aw in "awful"-Balls! After her blushing cleared away, she was voted a special award for interpretative reading by her delighted friends.
In the men's dormitories, fraternities, and other residences, where there is no "mixed company" to cause inhibitions, anything goes. Pornography of the most blatant sort of freely circulated among male students. Pin-up or nudist photos are common on bedroom walls, and occasionally downright indecent ones appear there as well. More frequently, they are circulated from hand to hand as soon as someone has managed to obtain them. At least one student has virtually worked his way through school selling packets of obscene photographs to his classmates; he obtained them cheaply and in quantity from a single source, selling them at slight discount to a few close friends, who then resold them at a profit. This way, he avoided undue notoriety as the campus pornographer, and only his few trusted friends actually knew who was the source.
His merchandise was of fairly good quality, and the subject matter varied to meet the demand. His original wares consisted mostly of men and women engaged in acts of coitus, in various positions and from various angles. Occasionally a third party would appear in the photograph.
The following season, there was a demand for oral acts: women fellating men, and men performing cunnilingus on women. The student, a good businessman, contacted his source and shortly had packets of the type photos desired. Another semester it was group shots, as much varied action as could be arranged in single photographs; the dealer had some of this variety, and soon sets of them were in circulation; in some cases, there were so many persons in a photo that it was hard to count them, much less tell what they were supposed to be doing to each other.
Yet another semester, the rage was for lesbian activity, and again the student managed to produce sets of the desired subject matter. In fairly old and obviously imported photographic reprints, girls were shown fondling each other's breasts, fingering each other, or actually simulating intercourse by means of strapped-on penis-reproductions or substitutes; girls were shown satisfying each other using bananas, squashes, flashlights, lengths of hose, candles, cobs of com, and other articles that simply defied identification; in other shots, girls were shown performing mutual cunnilingus, engaging in ribald stimulation, or simply fingering each other.
By the time this student was in his senior year, he was making more money than he needed to cover his college expenses, and the students were demanding photographs of lone women engaging in masturbatory or exhibitionistic behavior; photos showing women using their fingers to spread their outer lips thus totally exposing the inner genitalia were particularly popular, and the supplier found the new requests. As an additional novelty, freak and faked and medical-oddity photographs were imported, showing women holding the nipples of their own breasts between their lips or teeth, women with oversized breasts that hung down well below their waists, women with three or four
) breasts '(these, of course, faked), and women wrestlers, circus fat ladies, overly tattooed women, and other freaks.
This student's college career turned into a laboratory experiment in sexual desires; through his middlemen, this young man was asked at one time or another to supply photographs of male homosexuals engaged in sexual acts (as well as the usual "muscle" and male pin-up photos, featuring erect photographs of white women engaging in sexual acts with negro men ... and the reverse; photographs of girls being spanked, bound, whipped, or actually tortured: photographs of men and women engaging in sexual acts with animals; photographs of men dressed in feminine attire; photographs of women in leather costumes and high laced highheeled boots; nude and action photographs involving very young girls ... and boys; photographs of models who had shaved their pubic hair; and just about every other type of photographed sexual activity the human mind could conceive.
Then the requests began for other things: did this student dealer have access to action films? (He did not.) Aphrodisiacs and creams to retard ejaculation? (He did not.)' He was asked to locate a source of supply for penis-reproductions which might be used by girls as dildos ... and six dozen startled coeds received them as gifts one Christmas! He was also asked to locate "French ticklers," and had sold several gross by the time his supplier in another city was arrested for something else and forced out of business; in the meanwhile, use of the stimulating devices had become the latest fad on campus, and many students were sending the ticklers to their friends at home or on other campuses as well.
Upon graduation, this student immediately went out of business, handing it over to a friend of his two classes behind him. However lucrative it had been, he decided that it would be too risky to continue "on the outside." For all anyone knows, the operation is still running at that school.
In at least one instance, the pornographic photographs circulating were not of commercial origin; the subjects were two drunken coeds and three town girls who had attended a wild party, in the course of which someone decided to record the memorable occasion for posterity. At the time these photographs went into circulation, the two coeds were still undergraduates, and whatever may have been left of their reputations was irrevocably shattered. One transferred to another school as soon as she became aware that the photographs of her had been taken and were circulating. The other student was 'sexually blackmailed" by several boys with copies of the photos who threatened to show them to the Dean of Women unless the unfortunate girl submitted to their sexual demands.
A similar story with a quite different twist, however, concerned a young man who has posed for male pin-up photographs in the nude. These photographs somehow slipped into circulation in his dormitory (no one seemed to know the source) and hints of the student's alleged homosexual orientation grew until he finally took an apartment off campus, being tired of associating with a house full of suspicious, distrusting very heterosexual males....
Likewise, another student received a copy of a homosexual publication from a friend; when he finished reading it, he deposited it in the trash basket in the broom closet. Another student noticed it while dumping his trash, and soon the magazine had circulated throughout the entire large dormitory, with everyone wondering who had been the original recipient and discarder of it.
Occasionally, school administrations have been appalled to learn that somehow the school's entire male student populace has been placed on the mailing lists of dealers in suggestive and downright obscene books, photos, movies, and so on.
And here is another story, one of several similar incidents reported:
"Someone in our house showed up with a batch of typescript stories, the kind that are often circulated in typed form, but have probably never been printed. One guy had a batch of them-! don't know where he got them-and after several guys had borrowed them and several more were waiting for them, he got the idea that he could sell copies. The guy-his name was Bob-went out and bought a batch of mimeograph stencils, and cleaned up the typescripts ... editorially, anyhow; they were much too far gone the other way! But the spelling and grammar had been pretty bad, so he fixed that up a little. He typed a few of the better stories onto stencils, and then bought a few reams of duplicating paper, and one night we went down to the student activities office and ran off about fifty copies each of everything, and then collated and stapled everything. We finished everything there, and didn't get home to bed until almost four a.m.; I don't know how we made it to class the next day, but we did.
That afternoon, Bob started peddling copies of the stories in the dorm, and we ran out that evening; he was getting a dollar for the shorter ones, and I think five dollars for a very long story, maybe twenty pages or more. We got some more paper, and the next night we ran about 200 more copies of everything; we had a few guys help us with the work or we would have been up all night. Then the next day Bob started in on some of the other dorms, and the fraternities. He just about sold out the next week when sales practically stopped; everyone had been reading the copies in circulation, and those who wanted their own copies had them. The rest had been content to merely read them; and some people were reading them and then reselling them at the price they paid for them ... or more, in some cases!
"Bob was all set to consider the game up; he had made a batch of money, and given some of it to the guys who'd been helping him. But then some of the guys began to ask if he didn't have anything else. He didn't, and so he ordered some more in from wherever he was getting them, but it took a while, and in the meanwhile everybody had begun clamoring for new material. This was the real stuff; everyone was tired of the drugstore novels that pussyfoot around the real issue, and these were real action stories.
"That was when Bob decided to try his hand at writing some new ones. He did a great job, every bit as good as the others we'd had, and probably better; and the ones he wrote even had a decent literary style. He didn't want anyone to know that he was writing the new ones, but word got out. We kept running them off in the school activities room at night, and they sold pretty well, a few hundred of each; some kids started to take them home for friends, or send them to friends at other schools. Somebody at another college ordered 100 copies each of everything at reduced rates to sell there.
"Finals were coming around when there was finally a slip-up; Bob didn't really have time to keep writing anyhow, but one of the janitors found some of the barely legible rejects in the trash basket in the activity room, and they sort of kept a watch on who went in there and for what from then on. No one ever really tried to find out who was behind it all, or there would have been trouble, a real scandal, so it was kept quiet and Bob sort of went out of business quietly without incident. He sold all his stencils to the guy at the other college.
"By the time things came to that, he'd really had a wild thing going. Kids were coming to him and telling him what they wanted the next stories to be about, and suggesting plot lines and action they'd like. Some would tell him about erotic novels or stories they'd read elsewhere, and he'd redo the same things from their memories. Others were at least pretending to tell him their own personal adventures, and he'd use their first names in the stories, and they went around pointing out to friends that they were the 'stars" of the latest story.
Then some of the others started writing their own stories, and Bob would usually buy them in exchange for a number of printed copies that they could sell for their own profit, and it was really getting ridiculous.
"It's a good thing we had to stop when we did, because we were screwing around with these things so much that no one was really getting any studying done; if that janitor hadn't queered things for us just then, I think we might have all flunked finals and gotten kicked out of school. It was really about that bad in our dorm."
Pictures and stories are one thing; actual direct means of sexual satisfaction are quite another. Yet those too can be found in the college dormitory, fraternity residence, or student apartment. One school with an agricultural college of highest repute yielded this story from a member of the local chapter of a national agricultural fraternity:
"Have you ever heard of a semen-collector? They're used to get semen from breeding animals which can't mount naturally, or if you can't be bothered bringing the two animals together. You just freeze the semen and use it for artificial insemination. Anyhow, one of my brothers got hold of one; it's called a bovine artificial vagina, and what you do is you hook it up (with electricity) over the bull's organ and it masturbates and collects the semen.
"Now what most people probably don't know is that bulls really have pretty small organs, not like horses; they're about the same size as a man's. You hook this thing onto them, and you adjust the temperature and it gets warm and vibrates. He brought it back to the house, this guy did, and I guess he hooked it up and used it on himself a couple times. Maybe someone found him with it, or maybe he let it out himself, but eventually word got around the house that we had one of these things and that it worked very good. Jim showed some of the guys how to use it, and they showed some of the others, and I don't think there's a single one in the whole house that hasn't tried it at least once.
"... What it does, you see, is you put it over your penis and you adjust the temperature for you-not the same as for a bull, which wouldn't be comfortable. Then you set the vibrator the way you want it. It helps if you have some of an erection before you begin. It's better for a man than for a bull because the animals finish very quickly, but a man can enjoy it much longer. It vibrates all over you. It's very stimulating ... some of the guys say that it feels a lot better than being with a girl..
For the non-agricultural set, there are other devices. Some are sold by mail order; no one is sure where the others come from. A typical device works on the vacuum pump system, and is sold at an exorbitant price ostensibly to help a man attain a suitable erection in preparation for marital intercourse. The male organ is placed inside a fairly large cylinder, and a squeeze-bulb is employed to pump air-out, creating a partial vacuum. This causes the penis to enlarge from the increased pressure within, often creating an enormous erection. The mythical husband to whom the circular's instructions are addressed is cautioned to remove the gadget and proceed with normal intercourse well before orgasm is attained. Few seem to heed this advice, for obvious reasons.
Unfortunately, such implements can be dangerous, and when it came to the attention of one of the doctors in the student health service at a large university that such a device was being used by some of the male students, a very euphemistically worded bulletin was sent out to the men's dormitories warning that intensive use of the device could cause painful injury to the delicate organ.
The most legendary device used as a sexual substitute by college men is the often-referred-to but infrequently-constructed liver box. The disadvantage of this device is that the mechanics of spoilage prevent this gadget from being used for more than about a day, although it can always be refilled. Classic lewd jokes circulate attesting to the similarity between this contraption and the genuine female vagina, an allegation to which girls invariably take high offense, should the matter ever be indelicately brought to their attention!
Essentially, a box or other container is constructed and covered with leather, velvet, or some other aesthetic covering; it is then filled, solidly, with raw animal liver. There is a hole or, preferably, a slit through which the penis can be inserted when erect; if possible the contents are heated to approximate body temperature, and then used quickly.
Any additional commentary on this device would be anticlimactic, and the less said about it the better....
One of the more bizarre devices, however, was almost comical, and was invented originally as a joke at a large Ivy League men's school, at which the manikin allegedly still exists somewhere. "The manikin," reports a student lore-master, "was said to have been stolen from a Boston department store, although this does not seem too likely. At any rate, it was obtained somehow, originally as a joke. The extant story tells us that the object of the joke was a self-proclaimed ladies' man who was beginning to bore people with stories of his sexual adventures and conquests. The manikin was smuggled into the house in the dead of night, and clothed in garments borrowed from the Drama Club's wardrobe. The chestnut wig was glued on, and the doll was placed in the Lothario's bed.
"There is no report of what happened when he discovered it, but no doubt he got the message. At any rate, the house kept the manikin as a mascot, naming her Mathilde. The theatre clothes went back, and for a while she was nude. They began buying her lingerie, or garbing her occasionally in underwear from pantie raids, or left from some wild week-end parties. She went from room to room, and was occasionally on display in the hall, if decently dressed. There emerged a tradition that having her in your room the night before an exam, or some other ordeal, would bring good luck. Athletes took her in before important games.
"Somewhere along the line, however, it was discovered that some wag had done surgery on the plaster maiden, placing a penis-sized hole at the bottom of her accessible groin, and lined the aperture with soft flesh-colored fabric of some sort. There were immediately many stories about the use to which the manikin had been put, and for a while no one wanted Mathilde in his room overnight. But then she gradually came back into popularity. In the meanwhile, someone had some reward posters printed up and posted around campus offering a substantial sum for information leading to the arrest and extermination of the foul fiend who had dishonored the sweetheart of House....
"Probably curiosity got the best of some people, and they tried her out. Others lost bets and were thus obliged to perform with her ... I wish I'd been around in those days-just to have been able to find out what really went on! It wasn't that long ago, really ... I hear they still have her somewhere...."
Many more stories of this nature are available, as many more as you are willing to ask for and sit and listen to. Some are variations on the same old theme, and others are strikingly clever, easily enough so to lend them credulity. They are enough to dispel any doubts one might have had as to the ingenuity of modem college students ... particularly in the realm of sex!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SEX IN THE COLLEGE HUMOR MAGAZINE
On July 14, 1966, The New York Times ran this article trader the heading CAMPUS MAGAZINE CALLED OFFENSIVE:
"Gov. John A. Volpe and the Massachusetts Senate have ordered separate investigations of student publications at the University of Massachusetts.
"Meanwhile, a group of students at the state university today announced the organization of a Free Press Committee designed to protect what they described as 'the students' right to a free press."
"The actions centered on the February issue of a campus humor magazine, The Yahoo, published six weeks ago, which was seen yesterday by the Senate's majority leader, Kevin H. Harrington, a Democrat from Salem.
"Mr. Harrington called for a (line missing) said he took 'personal offense' as a Roman Catholic at four cartoons that depicted a priest preparing the consecration of the wine for communion. The last panel showed the priest pulling a rabbit from the chalice.
"The Senate voted 35 to 3 last night to create a special five-man commission to investigate all student publications at the university.
"The Governor ordered one of his legal aides today to investigate to see if any of the state's laws against obscenity had been violated.
"A spokesman for the students said that several cartoons in the magazine had been intended as a satire on bigotry but had 'unfortunately been construed by some as a piece of the same bigotry which in actuality it was intended to satirize.' "
It is significant that this news item, local to Massachusetts, was considered sufficiently newsworthy to run in a New York paper with a national circulation.
Although the controversy was news to some, it certainly is not new. Not a single scholastic year goes by without a similar incident at, at least one of the schools that still retains the grand old tradition of the campus humor magazine.
In the scholastic year 1962-3, the Yahoo was also a subject of controversy at the University of Massachusetts, and the coeditors were invited to the office of the Dean of Students for a command performance; the charge then was that some of the bawdy jokes were a bit rough. An unfortunate chance element of spacing happened to locate several of the racier jokes together on the last page of the magazine, and that last page became a classic.
A few years earlier, at the time of the Kennedy/Nixon election, two full pages were deleted from the magazine. A Newman Club member had a chance to see the proposed pages, and quickly reported the matter to the Catholic chaplain, who was instrumental in having the offensive pages removed. What were they? A photograph of the Pope wearing a VOTE FOR KENNEDY button, and a photograph of Norman Vincent Peale wearing a VOTE FOR NIXON button. A description of the deleted material was given on the censored pages, and students were invited to send in a small sum of money and received glossies of the photos in question.
One could spend pages and pages going into similar incidents, not only in this magazine, but in others. Of course, the situation on this "conservative New England" campus was more severe than most; being a predominantly Catholic state, most of the protests related to "anti-religious" or "anticlerical!" material rather than sexual boldness. (One cartoon, showing a pious-looking orthodox Jewish character telling the Pope "Call off Easter! We found the Body!" had the dubious distinction of drawing loud protests from both the Catholic and Jewish chaplains, who were respectively attacking the cartoon as Anti-Catholic and Anti-Jewish.) Students engaged in the production of these popular campus magazines have had to resort to many tactics to avoid the inevitable criticism.
On one campus, for example, issues of the humor magazine were alternately attacked as "insipid" and "lewd" as the editors bounced from one end of the spectrum to the other in a vain effort to placate their critics. And there was always the hopeless quality trap: if the magazine was not very good, according to the students, it was rarely carried off campus; students grumbled, and the student council considered withdrawing the "wasted" funds.
If, on the other hand, the magazine was well-received and popular, it was also likely to be racy, given the tastes of the average college student. And such magazines quite quickly found their way off campus and into the hands of irate citizens from one end of the state to the other.
Using a favorite element of good college humor, two magazine editors decided it would be safest to rely heavily on double-entendre; obviously, any "evil" would be in the mind of the beholder, and what administrator or legislator or proper citizen would admit to having a "dirty mind"? The editorial page carried the banner "Honi Soit Qui Mai y Pense"-freely translated as "Evil unto him who evil thinks," or "To the evil mind, are all things therefore evil." (The Holy Bible-Titus 1:15 makes this similar statement: "Unto the pure all things are pure, but unto them that are defiled is nothing pure, but even their mind and conscience is defiled.")
The editors prepared an issue that was greatly enjoyed by the student body; within 48 hours of the distribution of the magazine, they were called on the carpet by the Dean of Students for publishing "dirty jokes." It was a dark day in the history of college humor....
What sort of obscenities bring forth such outrage? Sometimes it is hard to tell; students are very careful, as a rule, to avoid offensive language. One editor, shown some material by a staff member, made the perennial comment of editors everywhere, "It's great ... but we can't print it...."
Even if the overwhelming majority of an issue is innocuous, someone is bound to be offended by something. And bitter experience shows that a man hath no worse enemy than the man who tried to be funny and failed.
Printed below is, in its entirety, the joke section of that infamous last page of the Winter, 1963, issue of the Yahoo. Ironically, the top of that page contained a six-panel cartoon of a Dean of Students receiving a copy of the campus humor magazine, reading it and chuckling, laughing hysterically at the material, then reconsidering with a sober frown, pounding his fist with an officious snarl on his face, and finally phoning someone and loudly berating him about the contents.
Doctor: "Say! You have the faint outline of the letter 'M' on your tummy. How come?"
Coed: "My steady is a college man-and he never removes his sweater."
Doctor: "Oh, where does he go? Michigan, Minnesota? Maryland, Massachusetts?"
Coed: "Oh, no; he goes to Wisconsin."
* * *
Smith girl, as she rode her bicycle along the bumpy pavement: "This is the last time I'll come this way."
* * *
We have a cousin that is so thin that when she swallowed an olive eight guys left town.
* * *
Did you know that you have to pass a stiff exam to become a coroner?
* * *
Sign on a cathouse:
OUT TO LUNCH BEAT IT
* * *
"How do you kill a stork?"
"Shoot it in the air."
* * *
Have you ever heard of queer termites? They eat nothing but mail boxes.
* * *
Fisherman: "Abe, I think I got me a haddock."
Abe: "Vy don't you take an aspirin?"
* * *
Salesman: "Could I sell you some pajamas?"
Coed: "No; I don't wear them."
Salesman: "My name is Hardwicke, Bob Hardwicke."
* * *
"Hey, Mrs. Noah! Your husband wants to know how long is a cubit."
* * *
The farmer's daughter ran to tell her father, "Pa, here comes Kurt Sturdley."
"Quick, daughter! Get into the house!"
"But Pa, he's a Stockbridge man!"
"I said get into the house. And take the cow with you."
* * *
A Seattle undertaker signs all his letters "Eventually yours."
* * *
The question is often raised as to where college humor magazines get their material. From a perusal of a cross-section of these publications, it becomes obvious that most of it is reprinted from other college humor magazines, major items or art work being given a credit line. It is not uncommon for these magazines to state at the bottom of the masthead some variation on this theme: "Material from this magazine may be reproduced with proper credits by any bona-fide college-affiliated humor magazine-copies of which should be sent to us, please." As a result, it is possible to find jokes, cartoons, and other items which have been circulating for years; very few humor magazine editors could get along without a good-sized supply of magazines from other campuses.
Sex is a fact of life for the college set, and for many it is their favorite topic of conversation. Thus it is not surprising that it should be the subject matter of much of their humor and satire. Nor is it surprising that another generation is prone to attack this material with a long-popular invective: "Smutty!" In an attempt to parry this thrust, one magazine put out a 'smut issue," the cover of which was a photograph of the most vile filth imaginable; the contents were as usual. And the Adelphi Snarf had the last word on the subject in these terms:
"In Paris, it's frankness;
In Panama, it's life;
In a professor, it's clever;
But in a college magazine, it's smutty."
The following is a sampling of college sex humor from many campuses:
Two men and a young lady on the pullman going to New York decided they ought to get acquainted.
One man said: My name is Peter, but I'm not a saint."
The other man said: ''My name is Paul, but I'm not an apostle."
The girl muttered: "My name is Mary, and I don't know what to say."
She: "I'm perfect."
He: "I'm practice ..
Did you hear about the new college game? It's called Button, Button, Here Comes the Housemother....
Arriving home unexpectedly, a man found his wife in bed with a strange man.
"See here!" exclaimed the husband. "Just what do you two think you're doing?"
"See?" said the wife to her lover, "Didn't I tell you he was stupid?"
"Look at the torn fly on my trousers!" screamed the irate husband. "I ought to wear them that way so all the fellows can see what I have to put up with!"
"Go ahead!" taunted his wife. "Maybe it'll give all the women an idea what I have to put up with!"
"Who was that lady I saw you with last night?"
"That was no lady. That was my roommate. He just walks that way."
The Dean of Women was addressing the freshmen girls: "Remember girls, your good reputation and future are not worth wrecking for the sake of a half hour of pleasure-"
"Please, Ma'am," asked one freshman girl, raising her hand, "how do you make it last a half hour!"
"Last night I finally got my girl to say yes."
"Congratulations! When's the wedding?"
"What wedding?"
He: "Do you know what virgins dream about?"
She: "No."
He: "I suspected as much."
"I hear the administration is trying to stop necking."
"Is that so? Next thing you know, they'll be trying to make the students stop too."
He: "Wait a minute! I think I heard something break."
She: "Oh, that was just a promise I made to my mother.. "
The wife was always antagonized by her husband's going out every night. To make matters worse, he'd always depart with the cheery words, "Goodnight, mother of three!" One night she could stand it no longer, and as he grabbed his hat she called, "Good night, father of one!"
Now he stays home.
Did you know that lots of college girls refuse to neck in parked cars? Yeah, the woods are full of them....
A farm girl returned from her first semester at college. Her father met her and they drove home in the family station wagon.
On the way back, the girl snuggled up to Papa and confessed, "I ain't as pure as I used to be, Papa. I ain't even a virgin no more."
The father's face fell and there was a prolonged silence. Finally the father turned to his wayward daughter and said, "After all your mother and I have done for you: scrimp and save and work our fingers to the bone to send you to college-and still you say 'ain't'!"
She doesn't drink, she doesn't pet:
She doesn't go to college yet.
The trouble with Harry
Harry Harry quite contrary
Where does your passion lie (lay?)
Harry Harry quite contrary
Perhaps with another guy.
Teacher: "Stand up, Johnny. Now tell me how much is three plus three."
Counting on his fingers, he finally replied, "Six."
Teacher: "How many times have I told you not to count on your fingers? Now put your hands in your pockets and tell me how much six and four are."
With his hands in his pockets, the boy stood silent a long moment, and then replied, "Eleven."
The young man made a rather hasty purchase at a drug store and answered the druggist's knowing smile with the short glowing description of the date he had for that evening.
That night, the young man rang the bell at the girl's home and was invited in to meet her parents.
After a discussion of the weather and other important topics, the young man said, "It's about time for us to get started if we are going to church. Won't you come with us?" he asked the parents.
At first they refused, but the young man was so insistent that they finally agreed and the four of them went to church together.
About halfway through the service, the girl leaned over to the young man. "I didn't know you were so religious," she whispered. "No," the young man replied. "No, and I didn't know your dad was a druggist either."
One day two soldiers were arguing over a dead animal. One of them said it was a mule, and the other insisted it was a donkey. Shortly an officer came by, and they asked his opinion. "It's an ass," he said curtly. "Bury the damned thing!"
While they were digging a grave for the animal, a WAC came by. She asked, "Oh! What are you digging? A fox hole?"-to which they wryly answered, "No."
Writing a campus joke column is rough. If a story is funny enough to tell, it's been told; if it hasn't been told, it's too clean; and if it's risque enough to interest a student at this university, the editor will get kicked out of school if we print it....
CHAPTER TWELVE
HOUSE RULES AND HOW TO GET AROUND THEM
At most residential colleges, women undergraduate students live in university-run dormitories, thus allowing the administration to set down a wide variety of rules governing behavior. Most of these rules are defended on grounds of expediency as well as morality. A dormitory counselor at a state university explains the situation to students in these terms:
We've got to have some rules. Everyone wants to know why we can't just leave the doors unlocked and let the girls come and go as they please. There are a lot of reasons. For one thing, it's not safe to leave the doors unlocked; anyone could walk in; there's been a lot of prowlers lately.
Women students at this school that year had an almost morbid preoccupation with "prowlers." They reported strange noises and shadows in the bushes near ground-level windows, and the attitude toward such intruders-if they did indeed exist-was akin to the stereotyped fascination--horror of the old maid that, a man might be hiding under her bed.
"We also have to know where everyone is in case we have to get hold of them in an emergency; that's why we tell people to sign out to wherever they're going. Then when they sign back in, the counselor on duty knows that everyone is in safely, and can lock the front door for the night. Letting people come in at all hours means that someone would have to stay up at all hours to answer the door, and it's just not fair to expect the counselors to take turns doing that. I've heard of school experimenting with giving keys to the dorm to the seniors, but that can be dangerous because then keys can be lost or duplicated and just anyone might be coming into the dorm, and some awful things could happen.
"What are we to do if some woman calls the dorm at 12:30 and asks to speak to her daughter, and we had to tell her that we could not locate her in the dorm and had no idea where she was? There would be a big stink if that ever happened.
"The present hours are quite reasonable, and there is simply nothing to do on campus or in town after the curfew hours, so anyone out later than that would surely be up to no good....
"Anything that can be done after curfew can be done just as readily before it ... Students enter this school voluntarily, and their matriculation implies a consent to abide by the rules of this institution ... Keeping girls in the dorm some eight hours each day may also help them stay in and study ... There are just some sacrifices to personal freedom or for the sake of conformity that must be made when you come to college.
The rules are frequently picayune, and invariably stringently enforced. The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, which has conducted surveys of such rules at a wide variety of schools, makes these comments (Report Number 60: Sex and the College Student):
"Published rules vary between the extreme of detailed specifications covering every foreseeable situation and a simple formulation of general guidelines. Regulations that are specified in great detail exhibit a concern for the minutiae of behavior and frequently deal only with superficial aspects of behavior. For instance, a coeducational college defines a date in its handbook as 'being in the presence of a boy for fifteen minutes.' Detailed systems of discipline for lateness in returning to dormitories are characteristic of such colleges. A state university counts infractions by the minute and metes out punishment by the accumulation of minutes:
For every minute that a student is late she will come in five minutes early on the Saturday following her infraction ... If a student should accumulate over 30 minutes throughout the semester, she will automatically receive a weekend campus consisting of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights on the week-end following the infraction which gave her 31 minutes or over. A student observing a room campus must be in her place of residence by 7:30 p.m. on the day of her campus. At no time after 7:30 may she receive callers, visit in her room or in other rooms, receive local telephone calls, or go to the lounge. If out of her room she must leave a note saying where she may be found in her residence. Her roommate may not entertain callers in their room on the night of the campus. A campus lasts until the following morning.
Examples of additions to cover newly arising or purely local situations are found among the rules of a small Midwestern denominational college:
No person is to be carried bodily from the building (dormitory).
Coeducation while sunbathing is not permitted.
It has been suggested that a detailed set of rules is almost mandatory in state universities because citizens and citizen-parents demand such assurance and have some power to influence the operation of the university.
At the other extreme are colleges that limit themselves to a minimum of specific rules and rely on general statements, such as those of a private university in the East:
All students are expected to conduct themselves in a manner becoming scholars and gentlemen.
Any undergraduate may be placed under discipline when, in the opinion of the Dean of the College or of the Dean of Students, his attitude toward his university obligation has been unsatisfactory.
This approach avoids defining 'university obligations' and 'conduct becoming or unbecoming a gentleman' by assuming that students are aware of conventional standards of acceptable behavior. However, if students are aware that standards of the past are no longer realistic, the standards may well need to be restated by appropriate authority in terms of present reality.
Some colleges employ both a general statement and an elaborate set of rules, thereby attempting to establish community morale through understanding while strictly guarding against misunderstanding. For example, the handbook of a Southern state university warns in bold face type against, "Behavior unbecoming a University of----------------woman,' but it also outlines offenses and punishments in great detail.
The existence of rules necessarily implies enforcement mechanisms. In colleges, the enforcement agents are usually of four types: (1) house mothers and proctors who have a direct obligation to enforce rules and report violations; (2) campus police and watchmen who have the same kind of obligation in more public areas; (3) Deans and faculty, who are less involved in the reporting of violations but usually have direct responsibility for taking disciplinary actions when violations come to light; (4) student officers whose duties may include an obligation to report rules violations and who also may be represented on a committee that determines disciplinary action. The degree to which one of these groups will be central in the enforcement process varies from college to college."
Despite the way the rules may read or be enforced, it is evident to most students that the only real reason for them all is simply to prevent or punish sexual activity that may be considered "immoral!" by the more conservative elements of the community. Seen in this light, the rules are virtual failures ... or virtuous failures, as one student expressed it. According to a perky coed:
"Any rules that fall short of providing around-the-clock personal chaperonage can not be effective in preventing sexual activity between students; it's just not possible. Students who were really determined to get laid, for example, could manage it during a twenty-minute between-classes break, or instead of eating lunch. Where? In a closet, off in the bushes, in a parked car, an empty office-anywhere. So the rules do not deter the really determined students; they just make things more difficult for everyone, and the less-determined hopefully won't make the effort.
"All the rules really do is inconvenience everyone without even doing what they were intended for. I've seen girls who were really hysterical neurotics about curfews to the point that they just about lived by the clock. They couldn't relax but always kept checking their watches, as though getting in late was the worst thing in the world. But they make such a big thing over coming in late that the girls are made to feel that it is the most important thing in the world to get in on time. That's no way to live. Most of them, when they are late, are no later than ten or fifteen minutes at most, and the difference isn't going to impair anyone's morals.
"And the so-called punishment is pretty stupid too, unless the girl is someone who lives for going out all the time. Otherwise having to be in a little early or stay in all evening is no great hardship; most of the girls probably weren't planning to go anywhere anyhow. Having to report to the office every half-hour until you go to sleep, to reaffirm your presence, can be a bit of a nuisance. But if you want, you can simply spend the evening studying in the office instead, and then go to bed early. Lots of girls use a campus as a handy excuse to getting down to some studying they should have been doing.
"In order to maintain my sanity here, I just go out when I want and come back whenever it's handy; above all, I don't get upset if it looks as though I'm going to be late, the way most girls do. So if I'm ever late (I am occasionally), I just stay in on a night I was probably planning to do so anyhow.
"Usually, though, on a date night a group of us who don't have dates will go out later in the evening for something to eat. If someone is campused, her friends are usually pretty sympathetic, and they'll bring her back something to eat, or make her campus the occasion for going out or phoning out for a delivery, and having a pizza party in someone's room.
"I really don't know why some girls get so hung up over these rules. The very fact that they are ridiculous is one good reason not to pay much attention to them."
Such attitudes towards rules are the result of attitudes towards other matters, not the least of which is sexual involvement. John T. Rule, writing in the April 1964 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, made the matter quite clear by beginning, "A growing number of college students do not consider premarital sexual intercourse immoral. On the contrary, they view it, or claim to, not only as a quite natural expression of affection but as a valuable experience in personal growth ... The arguments for and against greater permissiveness take many forms-a discussion of the right to freedom and privacy on the part of students, and of the duty to prevent immorality, limit temptation, and protect the college's reputation on the part of administrators. Nonetheless, the psychic, moral, and physical consequences of intercourse are the real issue."
He then went on to make some of the following perceptive points:
"Many adolescents consciously seek critical life experiences that they believe will test out and confirm their adulthood. The college years are a period of reaching for sexual maturity for a personal identity which includes sexuality. In general, this is a period of advance and retreat, of tentative testing forays and frightened escape. Some seek security by trying to establish a permanent relationship. Going steady appeals for this reason. Intercourse appeals because it seems to be an instrument for achieving the haven of permanence.
For some students, too much freedom leads to indulgence; for others who doubt their capacity for control, it can lead to complete retreat as the only means to protect themselves from unknown consequences. For still others, a prolonging of more juvenile outlooks serves as protection against more intimate relations. Panty raids are a juvenile sex outlet.
"... the easiest procedure in handling non classroom conduct on the residential campus is to institute strict regulations for dormitory and fraternity living which are purely preventative in nature and which protect the college from external criticism. Such regulations in their extreme form generally forbid the presence of one sex in any living unit of the other except "on the first floor" and in strictly controlled and chaperoned groups....
"A great majority of American universities and colleges fit this pattern. It is the norm. They officially exhibit the viewpoint that the problem of sex on the campus is simply one of control. Students are good or bad, moral or immoral, but all must be treated as too immature to have good judgment. A college first prevents by limiting opportunity, then weeds out the bad to protect the good. The facade of the rules and the apparatus of punishment make the university and its counselors of students trusted."
Such pronouncements, however, as considered by most to be by administrators, for administrators. Most students regard the rules as something to be ignored, lived with, and gotten around wherever possible. If not possible, they are obeyed as strictly as possible for no other reason than the severity of the punishment involved. One coed interviewed had amassed a great deal of information and experience at rule-circumventing by the time she reached authoritarian figures not to be confided in or, for that her senior year. She obviously enjoyed displaying her cleverness over the years, and went on and on about the things she and her friends had done, including such comments as these:
"This school isn't such a bad place once you learn to ignore the rules and get away with it. Some people never learn, either because they don't care, or because they're not smart enough ... you've really got to learn the ropes, and it helps to get in with a crowd who's been through it; they can teach you a lot.
"... One of the first thing to learn is about the sign-out rules. They expect you to sign out if you leave the dorm in the evening ... but if you do that and you don't get in by curfew to sign back in, you're dead. That's where friends are helpful. If you realize that you can't make it back on time, and you've decided that it would be better all around to stay out all night than come in late, you just tell a girlfriend to sign in for you. You just have to initial it, and no one checks the handwriting. At the end of the evening, they just go down the page looking for blank spaces, which would indicate that someone had failed to sign in. The first thing they do is call up, and see if maybe she came back on time and forgot to sign in. If so, someone is likely to have seen her, and they'll locate her. If not, they can get pretty bitchy. The proctor is responsible for staying up until everyone who signed out is accounted for, so if you come in late she's quite likely to take it out on you.
"So you get someone to sign in for you, and that's that. Unless you get an urgent phone call (and no one is supposed to answer the phones that late anyhow), or someone accidentally decides to look for you, and it's a proctor, or a goody-goody, rather than a friend, then maybe you can get into trouble. But the chances are pretty good; I've only seen it happen once. Usually, no one cares, and you just show up the next day as usual. Especially in a dorm this size (over 200 girls) they can't keep tabs on everybody ... some of us have DO NOT DISTURB signs that we hang on the door when we lock it to go to sleep or to study, and maybe a friend will put that up for you, and everyone will be so used to seeing it that they'll just assume you're in there.
"Roommates are especially good for covering for you. Like you'll get a phone call after curfew, and your roommate says to tell whoever's calling that you've gone to bed. If the caller sends up the message that it's important, you say okay, and tell them to wait a while, and she'll be down. Then you go down and take the call and get rid of the caller; usually it's nothing that can't wait, or it's a friend you also know and you can explain that she didn't come back that night ... The phone was probably answered at that hour by anyone who happened to be in the lobby, passing through, studying, or on another phone; most of the time they don't know who you are: someone asks for a name, so they look up the corridor and page that name. And even if they did realize that you were taking the call for someone else, they either wouldn't be suspicious, or they just wouldn't care. The proctors are the only ones you have to worry about, and they generally go to bed as soon as their jobs are done.
"... the best thing to do is simply not sign out at all. Around curfew hour, there may be someone watching, so you go over to the sign-in desk and pretend to write your initials somewhere; unless they have a reason to be suspicious, they never notice. So you don't sign out, and if possible you get in well before curfew, and no one will notice. If you get a call while you're out, you have a girlfriend take it for you and take a message; it might be risky to tell the girl on phone duty that you're out because then the caller may ask where you've gone and when you are expected back, so the girl will check the sign-outs and see you're not there.
"Even then, only the bitchy types would report you; anyone else would assume you just forgot, and they'll tell the caller they don't know where you've gone, and take a message. Even if you do get reported for not signing out, you can always claim you forgot, especially since you came in in plenty of time. No one can prove you didn't forget, so there's not much they're likely to do to you unless they catch you at "forgetting" repeatedly.
"... If you're not sure of your plans, it's just safer not to sign out; you reduce the risk, though, by signing out every time you are sure you'll be back in time, like when you're just going over to the library to check out a book you need and then coming right back.
"... Week-ends are different; if you are going away for the weekend, you have to fill out a weekend card. Theoretically you are not supposed to go anywhere but home or to the home of another woman student, but no one pays much attention to that. If you are going anywhere else, you have to get the housemother to sign the card first, and they pretty much have to sign for anything. Let's say you're going away for a college weekend somewhere; you can't even give an address or phone number of where you can be reached in an emergency, other than care of the boy who had invited you up. They don't like such things, but there simply isn't much they can do about it; not everyone has concrete plans when going away for a weekend.
"The best thing to do on the week-ends, every week-end, is to sign out to somewhere ... anywhere. You just fill out the card and place it in the file box. Sign out to a friend's home somewhere. Then come and go as you please. Stay out overnight if you prefer, but try to come in a bit early if you want to sleep in the dorm; they are less likely to notice you then than if you came in just before curfew. The week-end sign-out card is perfect insurance; you can always claim you decided to come back early, or that your plans were unexpectedly changed after you left. Let's say you came in on time Friday night, stayed out Saturday night, and came in for the evening early on Sunday night. You just reach into the box of weekend cards, and instead of signing in on your card, you just take it and tear it up and throw it away ... once you check with friends that no one was looking for you all weekend.
"If someone was looking for you, checked your card and concluded you were away, it might be best to sign in and pretend you were away. It's not likely that anyone who might rat on you will have noticed otherwise ... that's one of the nice things about living in a big dorm: you can get lost in the shuffle.
"That's the way I did it all the time, and I never had any trouble; they never check the weekend sign-out box unless they are specifically looking for you....
"There are plenty of other things you can do in a big dorm too. For instance, no one really sorts the mail; it's all volunteers, whoever is in the mail room at the time and feels like sorting a few things. Otherwise, they just dump the mail there, and everyone goes through it all, pulling out the stuff for herself and her friends, and maybe some of the girls on her corridor. The packages just get dumped and you paw through everything to see if you got one.
"Because of that, I joined one of these record clubs under an assumed name; I picked something perfectly blah like "Susan Taylor" because it's the sort of name that you assume exists and which will sound vaguely familiar. Any girl in the house would probably have to check the residence list to be sure there wasn't someone by that name in the dorm ... So I began ordering records under that name; these clubs solicit all the students with floods of junk mail, so I really didn't have much sympathy for them if they got cheated ... I wasn't the only one doing this either; I knew others. Anyhow, I'd order the records from the order forms, and pick up the shipments, and throw away the bills. Then I got free bonus records for signing up three fictitious classmates, and I got all the 'three for a dollar' new-member specials that they (I) ordered. And' I got some others on the monthly orders too, and picked up all the shipments when the mail came in for any of those names. No one but my closest friends knew that I was doing it; the mailroom is a mess-you just pick up what you want and walk out. It's surprising no one ever has anything stolen, but I guess college girls are basically honest; like, I wouldn't take records addressed to someone else because she'd be billed for them, and besides, that's mail theft.
"The next semester I had to stop with the records; I had a class the hour the mail was delivered, and my roommate would pick up the things for me, or else they'd just sit around until I got there later in the day. But she couldn't keep track of all the names I was using, and repeat billings had started to come in, and I was marking them 'NOT HERE
-RETURN TO SENDER' and putting them back in the mail. It was getting too complicated, so I didn't order any more records, and I'd only pick up the monthly selections if they sent them because they'd not received the dated card telling them not to send them, and finally even those stopped. Eventually, there was an investigation, and the credit investigator found out that there was no one named Susan Taylor in our dorm, nor any of the others I had used, and we got a stem lecture about the morality of the whole thing at the next dorm meeting, but of course there wasn't much they could do about it.
"Obviously students all over the country were doing the same sort of thing, because I understand you can't join one of those clubs any more with a dorm address without getting the school to validate that you are a student who lives there ... it was a great year, though. I gave everyone I knew records for gifts, relatives at home and everything ... I didn't really want them all....
"But back to the rules. If you missed curfew, and you still wanted to come back into the dorm for the night, you could do it. We figured out when the campus police prowl cars hit the quadrangle, and arranged to be dropped off there-or drive if we had our own cars-after they had just left. You had to be careful, because anyone walking around in that vicinity, or even driving, after curfew was considered suspicious ... although for other reasons, I imagine. What you'd do was to call your roommate or a friend, and tell them when you would be coming in. Our dorm backed on the quad, where it was fairly dark, and one back door led into the bicycle storage room; that was the best. Another one that led into the hallway wasn't as good. Your friend would go to one of the doors-there were others, but these were the best-and leave it ajar when you were expected.
"The bicycle room was best because there were no lights on in there at night, and because hardly anyone would have a reason to be there late at night. So you'd leave the door open, maybe with a piece of cardboard holding it unlocked instead, and then you'd either wait there, or just go away, or sit by a window to watch or signal when it was clear. When it was, she could walk quickly and deliberately to the door and slip inside. Then she'd wait there a while, take off her outside clothing if it was winter, and slip into the basement. The food machines were near the bike room door, so there was usually someone around.
"It was a good idea to go in and turn on the light after she was in, and stay there a while, and then the two of you come out later, so that anyone getting food would just assume the two of you had gone in to check a bicycle or something, especially if you made your entry while there was no one around. Then you'd collect your over clothing later; maybe you'd leave it in a sack until then, if possible.
"It was pretty safe. We did this lots of times, and no one ever got caught. We even came in the side or side-front doors at times, and once I even let someone in the front door about 4 a.m. without any trouble. Except when the campus cops come by, there's no one around, but you still feel as though there's bound to be someone to see you. But the odds are pretty good against anyone looking out a window in your direction at that hour of night. Or being the sort of person to say something even if they did.
"... From what I know of most of the girls at this school, most of them wouldn't be caught dead doing some of these things. Stupid New England morality, I guess. But the people I know, well, they just don't think anything of it. My friends are mostly more mature than most of the girls here, who are scared silly. And we're too intelligent and determined to be hemmed in by stupid regulations the way the others are . .
According to this young woman, curfews are just one of the many regulations that can be ignored. She even admitted to having stayed overnight once in a men's dormitory with her boyfriend ... who was a proctor there! She explained how she had left early the next morning, via the back door, wrapped in his heavy overcoat. On the question of morality, she had only this to add:
"I think we're perfectly moral ... it's not as though we were stealing anything or even cheating on tests ... it doesn't hurt anyone if we get around the rules, least of all the people who make and enforce the rules ... we're free adults, and if we consider a regulation tyrannical, the most moral thing to do is simply refuse to abide by it...."
There were other girls who admitted to staying overnight in a men's dormitory or fraternity house. At one school, there was the frequently-reported incident of a girl who stayed in the basement corridor of a men's dorm for several days, while all of the students who lived there took turns bringing her food, and having her sleep in their rooms with them. Not only did she eagerly allow sexual intercourse with all of these students, but she occasionally slept with several of them within the space of several hours, occasionally took on more than one at a time, would perform any act desired, and one night was the star of an orgy that involved every boy on the corridor, with the exception of three who were studying for exams.
No one knows how long this happy state of affairs might have gone on; the girl walked the hall openly, used the shower room and bathroom at will-whether other residents were there or not-and was very much a part of the basement household, occasionally mending clothing or performing other tasks as needed. Unfortunately, a student who lived upstairs came down and discovered her one day; an agreement was made, and his silence-at least as far as the proctors and housemother was concerned-was purchased in exchange for a night in the basement with her.
However, he told his roommate where he would be that night and why, and the next day the roommate appeared demanding to be allowed to sleep with the girl or else he'd expose the situation In this case, however, the girl refused. She simply didn't like the boy, and refused to let him near her. The student insisted that his threat would be carried out, and gave them all a few hours to think the matter over-during which time the girl, who was fairly petite, was smuggled out in a laundry bag slung over someone's shoulder, and her possessions and every trace of her past residence there followed. When the upstairs student returned for the verdict, he was simply told that she had left, that he had spoiled a good thing for everyone-if pot himself-and that if he tried to cause trouble everyone in the basement would deny his charges and there would be no evidence to back them up.
Consequently, there was no official report ever made of the episode, but it became well-known to the student body there, if merely because almost two dozen persons had been involved directly. Two of these were quite willing to vouch for the truth of the reports, and clarify the occasionally garbled versions of the story making the rounds.
There was also a curious report of a perfectly innocent occasion that a coed found herself in trouble getting out of a men's dormitory. In her own words:
"My friend Pablito was going to go to Chile to study for over a year, so I went over to say goodbye. It was a beautiful platonic friendship, and of course it never occurred to me that going to his room might be considered scandalous. I'd done it once or twice before. He went to a small private men's school not far from where the school I attended, so I went over on the morning of the day of his departure and met him in front of his residence hall. Since it was winter, we went up to his room; it was early in the morning and there was hardly anyone around.
"We spent two or three hours saying good-bye, exchanging addresses, swearing we'd write regularly, and just talking in general. It was late morning when I had to leave to get back for a class, and that was when he told me that I really was not supposed to be in his room. (I had assumed that the rules at his schools permitted such visits; apparently, they did not, but they were not vigorously enforced.)
He stuck his head out the door, and then walked down the hall, and came back and reported that there were a fair number of people about, including cleaning women, and that it was not likely that I could leave without being observed. And of course we didn't want any trouble, not on his last day there!
"We waited a little while, but things did not get any better, and I simply had to get back for that class. So we decided to sneak me out in disguise. Fortunately I was wearing simple slacks that might have been taken for trousers, and I had on a ski parka that could have belonged to a man or a woman. Pablito got out a little knapsack and placed my shoes, headscarf, and handbag in it. Then he gave me a pair of his galoshes to wear-they were pretty big, and I sloshed around in them-and he next plopped a hunting cap on my head and pulled the ear flaps down. Then he wrapped his scarf around my neck, covering my face up to my nose. As a finishing touch, he plopped a pair of his glasses on my nose; they were rather large, and rather strong.
"I looked in the mirror, and nearly broke up laughing. 'Ye gods, Pablo!' I said. 'It's a damned good thing I wasn't born a boy; I'd make a frightfully ugly boy!' It was true; the picture in the mirror was hilarious. I only wish I had a photo of myself all bundled up that way....
"Well, Pablito looked flown the hall and decided that the coast looked about as clear as it was going to, and I slipped out the door and skulked down the hall, down the stairs, and out of the building, meeting no one who paid much attention to me. Once away from the building, I ran most of the way to where my car was parked. Unfortunately, it was parked almost in front of the nearby administration building, and I kept stumbling on those damned oversized goulashes.
"I got into the car, and was satisfied that I had not attracted undue attention. A few minutes later, Pablito arrived at the car with his knapsack, and he got in and we exchanged clothing ... it was one of the silliest things I've ever done, and also one of the most fun."
One student jestingly suggested, of such a situation, "I think one of the reasons they have such rules is so we can have all that fun getting around them!" Although a minority expression, such a sentiment is quite understandable in light of such incidents as the above. Most students have too much spirit to be held down by even the most restrictive of rules; the occasional expulsions and other severe disciplinary measures taken against a few offenders are the price to be paid by those few careless unfortunate enough to be caught.
"Getting caught" seems to be the one transgression that college students recognize; on every campus, there runs an undercurrent of thought that anything you want to do is quite all right as long as no one discovers it. "Discretion" is too sophisticated a word for most students, yet that is the trait they seem to value most highly. There was a time when students used to take leave of each other with such overused expressions as "Don't do anything I wouldn't do!" or "Be good!" But now there is a new twist.
It's "Don't do anything I wouldn't do ... and while you're doing it, be sure to enjoy it!"
Or it's "Be good ... or if you're not going to be good, be careful. At any rate, DON'T GET CAUGHT!"
If there is a new morality, that is it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VARIOUS TALES FROM VARIOUS PLACES
The following diverse episodes were reported by students recalling some of the more curious incidents from their recent college days; all are presently students, or recent graduates. These accounts are presented here to give some idea of the wide variety of things that go on among the college set.
"Myself and fifteen other guys got a girl in the back seat of a car; the car was parked on a back road near campus, and I don't recall how we all got there, but it was a bright sunny day, and we started about noon and didn't break it up until the sun was setting. The girl was some nympho one of the boys had found somewhere-I think she was a coed-and she wouldn't do anything but screw. So all sixteen of us took turns with her, and we had probably done it several times each before it broke up. There was never anything else like that...."
* * *
"We used to have this great thing going at the radio station my first year. We had a good studio with three big broadcasting studios, an observation room with several couches in it, and an office, a record library, and a workshop, all off to one side. Every Saturday night from 7 p.m. until about midnight we broadcast nothing but quiet 'make-out' music-'Music for Dreamy Dancers' or 'Songs for Lovers Only' is the way the jackets would read, but we used to call it 'Music to Get Laid By' or 'Seduction Songs."
"Someone had to stay at the station to play all this, and give station breaks every half hour or so ... and the records had to be flipped or changed about every twenty minutes. Most people on the station had dates, and of course they didn't want to be stuck on the control board that night. But we always had a batch of regulars who didn't go out much, and they were always willing to do that spot. Quite a few of the guys at the station had girlfriends who were also on the station, so it worked out pretty well. You'd have one or two couples taking over that night.
"We'd turn off the lights everywhere except for a few small ones in the control room to operate by; when the observation room was dark, you couldn't see into it, but you could see from it into the control room. All night long, people would be making out on the couches in the observation room. If there were two or three couples, they might all take turns flipping records, doing station breaks, filling in the log, or answering occasional phone calls. Sometimes you could walk by and see people sitting making out right at the control board, a guy with a girl sitting on his lap. "Occasionally someone would be too engrossed to get back to the board on time, and then you'd hear these long silences before someone would go in and spin the next record. Then someone got the wise idea of taping a few hours of music in advance, which was quite an improvement, especially because you could see by just looking in how far the tape had run-but you still had to do the station breaks regularly or someone might complain if the FCC happened to be monitoring the station that night.
"Of course, we auditioned the material we were airing, to keep check on it, and also because it was perfectly suited for what we were doing....
"Eventually, someone heard about the goings-on there and they made us operate on Saturday nights with the lights on all over the station; it was too bad, because the radio people were very free and open about sex, and at our school there really wasn't much chance to make out anywhere in cold weather unless you had a car or an apartment off campus, which most of us didn't. The radio station was the only place I knew where everyone knew who was sleeping with whom and didn't try to hide it...."
* * *
"When I was still in college, I had a fairly prolonged affair with a 39-year-old woman from town. All of my friends had older women on the side. They'd see them after their girlfriends had to be back at the dorm. It was a really great set-up. I don't know where all these horny women came from, but there were lots of them."
* * *
"We had some pretty oversexed girls where I went to school last year ... it's different at the school I attend now. Last year we used to sneak girls into the boys' dorms and initiate the more bashful boys then we'd tease them about it for weeks afterward. There were some girls who liked boys who had never done it before; I remember at least two who wouldn't go down for anybody else, just the virgin-babies, as we called them; they were pretty good at telling who was and who wasn't, too...."
"I go to school in Florida, and the year before last a batch of us spent the afternoon on a crowded public beach and all got pretty drunk. We were out in the water, and I seduced this girl where the water was up to about our chests or necks. I took oft the bottom of her bathing suit underwater, and I took off my trunks, and slipped it to her standing up, just like that, with everyone around, although not too close. Then some of my friends got her like that out in the water; she was so drunk she didn't even remember it after. It's almost hard to believe we really did it..
* * *
"I went to a state college in New England; I just got out this June. It's a good thing; the place was really getting me down. Someone reported me for walking down the hall to the showers in the nude, as though I were committing an act of public indecency. But it was a private girls' dorm! And it wasn't in the morning either, when the janitors are likely to be around; I usually showered late at night before I went to bed....
"One day, one evening to be exact, I was working in my room in just my panties and slip half-slip-and slippers, and someone knocked on the door, and I said, 'Come in,' and she opened the door and walked in. She took one look at me and her face got all red and she got flustered and she stammered something about OH!-I'm sorry-Excuse me-I'll come back later, and it was really silly. You'd think she had never seen a girl undressed before....
"Some of the girls at that place reminded me of an Argentine movie I once saw where these teenaged girls are raised to believe that anything sexual is nasty and dirty and sinful and to be avoided, and to keep them from even seeing their own bodies they had to wear these gowns when they went into the bathtub, and they washed under them ... The way some of these girls acted, I'm surprised they did not also do things like that...."
* * *
"We do lots of crazy things. One night we went skinny-dipping (swimming in the nude) down at the beach and I got arrested with six others for public indecency, even though there was no one there at the time except the police car that came by. We were thinking of arguing that it was dark and no one was there so it wasn't public, but we finally just decided to pay the fines and let it go.
"Two of us drove out into the country one night with this girl, and we stripped her and locked her out. We went away and finally came back for her later. All she had on for two horns were her socks.
"Once we got caught in bed with two other couples by one of the girls' mother, and we didn't have time to get dressed so everyone ran out of the house nude, and we hid in the bushes until someone brought us out our stuff. That was silly, really....
"But things are pretty free. Lots of times we spend week-ends in a motel room, and we register under Mr. and Mrs.-only we use the names of our friends...."
* * *
"This story has been going around the school for years, and every agriculture student swears that it's true, including the girls I spoke to. They've got a big agricultural college here, and we tease them and they might be trying to get back at us with such stories. I don't know, but they always wear a complete earnest deadpan when they tell it. It has to do with requirements for the Animal Husbandry 101 class ... I guess someone could try to verify it with one of the men who teaches the course, but it's such a gross thing that it would be very embarrassing if it were not true. I'm not sure whether or not I believe it ... they make it so hard to decide one way or the other....
"They say that one of the things you have to be able to do before you can pass the course is show that you are able to castrate a sheep the old way, the way the shepherds used to do it originally, they say,-with their teeth! It sounds highly un-likely, but all the aggie students say the same thing, more or less, who have taken this course....
"And with the things they really do, you never know what to believe. I know they really do have an annual coed milking contest. What they do is to qualify a girl has to have never tried to milk a cow before. Then they give each girl a cow and a test tube, and the one who gets a full test-tube of milk first is the winner. I know this really happens because they have pictures of it each year in the school paper, and they announce the winners."
* * *
"Some girl here was having her monthly period, and her boyfriend wanted her to satisfy him, so she performed fellation on him. This traveled around campus like wildfire, and now all the boys are trying to get their girlfriends to do the same thing."
* * *
"College kids don't think much about stealing things if it's not much and there's plenty. Last year some guys got arrested for stealing a pumpkin from some farmer's field, and every year we go over to some of the local apple orchards and go home with baskets of apples for the whole dorm. Some of them are the ones that have fallen off and are still good, and some of the others we pick. We figure that by the time we get to school in the fall they must have already harvested everything they want anyhow.
"There was also this stupid thing about the flowers. The university runs an experimental thing where they buy commercial packages of seeds and plant them to make sure that they are what they are advertised as-germination rates, colors, and whatever. They just plant them, check them, and let them sit there. Some of the boys found out about this, and they went down to the fields and picked flowers for their girlfriends, and some vegetables too, because they lived off-campus and did their own cooking. It never occurred to them that anyone would mind, and the administration even admitted that the stuff doesn't do anything but sit there and rot. But after a few times someone reported the boys for taking things from there, and they got put on probation for stealing. After that happened, lots of the kids began referring to the school as Dog-in-Manger U...."
* * *
"Our group has started playing strip poker at someone's home on the week-ends. It always leads to an all-out orgy, and everybody knows that, but they always start out playing cards anyhow."
* * *
"We smoke pot (marijuana)' pretty often, or we'll take aspirin and Coke, which is supposed to be a good cheap high ... Before and during sex, some of the kids chew inhalers. The latest thing is poppers ... amyl nitrate capsules that you get in the drug store. I think it's for heart patients. You break one and you both inhale it just before you're ready to come. It really speeds up your heart for about a minute, and it's really wild!"
* * *
"My roommate moved out in the middle of the year, leaving me in a double-sized room by myself. I don't think much of lots of the girls at my school, so when the housemother wanted to give me another roommate I wasn't too happy about it. Besides, I had an honors thesis to finish that year, and I liked being able to stay up and work in my room until very late at night without disturbing anyone. Also, I had a lot of junk, and the place was pretty crowded already after I had spread out. Anyhow, the housemother tried to talk me into rooming with this social-minded sophomore girl with whom I had absolutely nothing in common. We could have managed to co-exist I guess, but I just didn't want her there; I was enjoying my privacy. I'm sure that she didn't especially like me either, but she was willing to move to make the housemother happy. (The housemother had a daughter in college somewhere else, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that she was trying to get an empty room for her daughter to sleep in when she came to visit.)
"Anyhow, this girl came to my room to talk the matter over, and I had decided that although I'd try to seem nice about it, I simply wasn't going to have her move in on me. So I was very nice to her. I was too nice to her, in fact. I got physically chummy with her, and I eyed her up and down appreciatively-she wasn't bad-looking-and I really did a magnificent job; it was very subtle. She left, and confided to some of her friends that she was sure I was a lesbian and had a crush on her-word got back to me of this, of course-and of course she told the housemother that she wouldn't room with me, and that was that. I'm sure she didn't tell the housemother why, though; she'd have been much too embarrassed. I was counting on that.
"My boyfriend just laughed and laughed when he heard about that....
* * *
"The girls here sometimes use alum for effect, especially if they're experienced; sometimes their boyfriends get it for them....
* * *
"We have a student government picnic every spring, and things get pretty wild. Couples go off in the woods and make out, and people get drunk and get thrown in the stream. We go to this big hunk of property we pay to use, and it's quite private. It's pretty big too, and very beautiful. Everything goes on at the spring picnics."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BIRTH CONTROL: THE BIG PROBLEM
A few generations ago, the matter of chastity was a very serious one. It was not merely a matter of preservation of reputation, or maintaining a boyfriend's respect. There could be rather serious consequences, meaning, in most cases, pregnancy. Presently, this is a relatively minor concern; contraceptive devices are reasonably available, so the decision of whether or not to engage in sexual activity can be based on other factors, with much less concern over the risk involved.
It may sound simple, but it's not quite that simple. There is still the matter of choice of contraceptives, which party is to use them, and-especially for the girls-where and how to obtain them. The university health services have gotten caught up in a furor over their role in all this, and the debate is still going on.
This report, from several years ago, is typical of the times.
"At my school, nice girls wouldn't have anything to do with contraception. If a boy is putting the make on them, and they are willing to go ahead, they ask him if he is prepared, and then he damned well had better say yes and pull out a rubber and use it. Otherwise that's just the end of it. This way, it always looks as though no one was really expecting anything, and it was just an impulsive thing. If the girl had taken any precautions, it would look as though she were intending to do it all along, and her reputation would be shot; besides, every boy on campus would want to get her if they knew she used a diaphragm. Boys don't like to use anything, but the girls make them do it to be safe.
"I've known a few girls who did use diaphragms, just to be very safe. They'd put them in before they went out, whether they really expected to make out or not, just in case. But they'd never let the guys know they were wearing it, and most of them can't tell the difference anyhow, or wouldn't be looking. They'd expect the guy to use a condom anyhow. Or if they felt it was pretty safe, that time of the month, they just might tell him that they were sine it was the safe period and it was okay to do it without, this if they didn't want to have to wait while the guy took the time to put the rubber on. But they'd never let on that they were prepared; it would look just awful."
In the few years since that statement applied, there have been a lot of changes. One mother, more recently, heard from her daughter that girls at her school frequently carried prophylactics in their handbags in case their dates didn't have them; she told this to her friends, and then they began nervously asking their daughters if they did such things or knew of them happening. For the most part, it seemed a minority report, but it was indicative of the increased willingness of girls to accept the responsibility for taking contraceptive measures if they are sleeping with boys ... with any boys they happen to like, or with just one steady to whom they may be engaged. The main reason given for this is the simple recognition that girls have more to lose, and they are simply looking after their own interests.
There are a number of products on the market for women. There are foams, creams, and jellies to be inserted just prior to intercourse; they are not too popular among the college set because they are considered blatant, and must be used at what the girls especially tend to consider a psychologically unaesthetic time. There is admittedly something distinctly unromantic about interrupting a hot necking session to run off and insert some contraceptive foam.
There are permanent intrauterine devices, usually coils or loops of flexible plastic, but these must be inserted in place by specially trained doctors, and besides are generally unsuitable for girls who have not had children.
There is the diaphragm, which is in pretty common use, but again this requires an initial trip to the doctor's for sizing and fitting ... and prescription, in many cases.
Contraceptive pills that also regulate the menstrual cycle are increasingly popular, but again they must be prescribed by a doctor, a doctor who is likely to be one or two generations older, and who is likely to have ethical and moral qualms about prescribing the pills for an unmarried girl. One coed delightedly reported that she had been placed on the pills by her family doctor to correct the difficulties of heavy and irregular menstrual flow; she added that it was rather a shame that she had recently broken up with her boyfriend and was not on intimate terms with anyone, but suggested that it might be handy next time around.
Andrew Hacker, writing in The New York Times Magazine of Nov. 21, 1965, describes the campus pill situation in great detail, in an article which seems more designed to provide reassurance to concerned moralistic parents than anything else, despite the excellent analysis of the problem and the great amount of solid factual material included:
"...The question of whether college health clinics should give prescriptions for pills to unmarried female students is creating a stir on many campuses. The controversy ... has been highly overrated and certainly over reported. The reason, quite simply, is that the clinics, far from giving out such prescriptions to all comers, have no intention of doing so now or in the near future.
A physician at one Ivy League college recently hit the headlines because he did write prescriptions for several coeds who were not only just about to be married but who brought notes attesting to this fact from their ministers. In other words, the college doctor in these cases was simply performing a service that physicians generally carry out for brides-to-be. Neither her nor any of the other university physicians I spoke with will write prescriptions for girls who do not have marriage firmly scheduled and announced.
'If we did,' one clinic staff member said, 'word would get around the dorms like wildfire and we'd be writing out prescriptions several times a day.' There may be some truth to his view, for students are likely to take advantage of the free medical service they get while at college, but far more critical for the university physician is the tacit approval that would be involved. 'In giving the pills,' this doctor went on, 'we would be implicitly condoning the use they would subsequently make of them.'....
For years, college girls have been taking their sex-related concerns into the 'town.' Private practitioners, in fact, have a far greater awareness of the sexual activities of undergraduates than do the university physicians. And for good reason. Either the 'town' doctor is the girl's family physician or, just as likely, a coed approaches him anonymously and on a one-visit basis. Far better to see a local gynecologist and to wait in a room filled with unknown townies than to sit among your classmates at the college clinic.
Local physicians are far more tolerant about the pills (and other birth-control devices-L.S.D.), and the cause of their leniency emerges early in any interview. They, unlike their-university colleagues, have to deal with what happens when conception has not been prevented. 'I see the tragic results all the time' one doctor remarked. 'Don't think for a moment that all of my patients are married women. Unmarried girls are in my office along with the others every day. In a few cases I eventually deliver their babies. In other instances they disappear after I tell them I won't abort them."
Physicians know that illegitimacy is a reality and that a child who is born unwanted and out of wedlock may have a difficult time in this world. 'If I refuse a girl's request for the pills,' another local physician said, 'then the consequence may be the creation of a life in the wrong place and at the wrong time.' He went on: 'It is that I have it in my power to prevent that eventually. If you had seen as much grief as I have, you wouldn't hesitate to exercise that power.' "
The author goes on to discuss the question of promiscuity, without reaching any conclusions he may care to state, confessing only that there is a distinct increase in the number of middle-class girls having sexual experience prior to marriage, that there is "more" premarital sex now than there was 30 or 60 years ago. He then reports on his survey of 200 Cornell freshmen. Via questionnaire, all were asked to indicate whether they thought the university clinic should be willing to prescribe birth-control pills for undergraduate girls who request them. He anticipated the male consensus that this would be a splendid idea, but was quite surprised that most of the girls also agreed with this proposal.
His discussion of the results of his survey conclude with these guarded remarks:
"Does all this, to raise the specter once again, augur more promiscuity? I think not. For one thing, as a college physician pointed out, 'Much of the pressing for more sexual freedom is in the nature of talk which might not be followed by action.' The endless discussions that are taking place on and off the campuses, admittedly more public than private in recent years, serve as a safety valve which drains off some of the pressure to break with convention."
The freethinker and the free talker, in other words, are not necessarily free lovers. Indeed, one is now permitted to sow verbal wild oats and in that way satisfy the urge to startle one's elders and defy authority."
This view that sexual activity is engaged in merely or even predominantly to shock one's elders, to rebel, or to assert individuality is considered hopelessly naive and uninformed by most of the students who were asked to comment on these remarks. "That's what they say, and maybe that's what they believe because that's what they want to believe," said one young man. "If they didn't accept that nonsense, they might have to face the actual fact that young people are making love because it's fun; and that is extremely difficult to accept if you were raised in a generation where sex was regarded as inherently sinful, or improper." His girlfriend concurred:
"We happen to live together off campus because we happen to like to do so. We sleep together because we enjoy it, simply that, and because there's really no good reason that's ever been given why we shouldn't. Is that so hard to comprehend? All this talk is rebellion is absurd; we'd sleep together even if my parents encouraged us to do so!"
Another student assures us, "We know what we want, and we do what we wish to do because we have decided that it is desirable, reasonable, and harmless ... if not actually beneficial in many ways. We just happen to be in disagreement with most of our parents because they just happen to be wrong. They were never allowed to think things out for themselves, so you can't blame them for holding these views. But we do think for ourselves, and this is what we have decided is good, right, moral, and desirable ... who's to say who is right and who's wrong?
They talk about morality as though it were defined by their own behavior. Most college kids are too open-minded and intelligent to buy that. They want to make up their own minds about things. And some of their conclusions are pretty severe ... Is it more moral to continue living with a partner you've come to detest, and raise kids in an atmosphere of hate and resentment than to sleep with someone you're not married to simply because you love each other?
"They think it's moral to kill people in a senseless war, and maim little kids, and make life miserable for millions of innocent people but if my girlfriend and I decide to live together because we love each other and want to be together, they scream that we are immoral. How can we respect them as intelligent people and pay any attention to anything they say when they think like that? ... Kids today have simply decided that they are right and their parents are wrong, that they are honest and their parents are dishonest when it comes to matters of morality, and you just can't tell them anything; they won't listen."
Having evidently had little contact with young persons with this viewpoint, or preferring to ignore it if so, Mr. Hacker continues:
"To understand what is happening it is also necessary to appreciate the unwantonness of today's young people, to recognize their basic monogamy. (Although this may be true of some students, sexually, it is most certainly not true of many others.-L.S.D.) They are pairing off, going steady, getting pinned, and entering into semi-formal alliances at earlier and earlier ages. The age at which young Americans get married is also declining year by year, and this goes for middle-class college students as well as others in the population.
"Thus, when a majority of girls state they would like to have the pills available, it does not mean that they are about to embark on a nymphomaniacal orgy. Quite the contrary, it suggests that they wish to catch themselves a husband and simply desire to have both a sexual relationship and contraceptive protection during the period of engagement.
"If there is a good deal of premarital sex among college students, most of the activists are those who are in fact-if not by official announcement-engaged to be married. There is further reason to believe that most girls who have had sexual experience prior to marriage had only one partner, and he was the boy who is now their husband.
"To be sure, there are engagements that are broken off or which do not last. Perhaps, for this reason, young couples should be criticized for not waiting until they are safely married. On the other hand, there are more than enough instances in which two people, after a serious and well-intentioned affair, discover that they were not in fact made for each other. Suppose they had 'waited' and then come to this unhappy realization after a few months or years of marriage; it seems strange to assert that such an outcome would have been preferable on moral or prudential grounds.
"At all events, there is very little promiscuity on the part of college girls. Most, as has been said, are one-boy girls, and all but an insignificant handful are one-boy-at-a-time girls. Even if some do have more than a single premarital affair, how many of those does it take for 'promiscuity?' Three? Four? Six? Considering that many girls go from 19 to 23 before being married, is intimacy with five men in five years a sign of easy virtue? The line between discretion and promiscuity becomes extremely difficult to draw. (And why, it should be asked further, is the term itself never applied to the conduct of unmarried men?)"
This last paragraph echoes some of the more significant questions that the students themselves are asking. And their conduct, more than anything else, is based on the answers they have found, answers from experience, the experiences and conclusions of friends, and so on. In the words of one West Coast coed, "The first time, you try sleeping with a boy, and you find it enjoyable. You've used the best kind of contraception available, and you find that there were no disastrous consequences, especially if you slept with one of the 'modem' boys who actually respects a girl more if she's willing to sleep with him than if she isn't-and there are an increasing number of them around among the more intelligent, intellectual students-and, well, after all this, you find that you had a pleasant experience and there were no harmful consequences; then, why shouldn't you do it again the next time you're going with a boy you like?
"People like to talk about promiscuity. Promiscuous means simply indiscriminate; I don't know any girls who are indiscriminate; we all have our standards. I'm sure that there are some boys I'd sleep with that my girlfriend wouldn't, and vice versa. What does that mean? ... There are ten thousand men on this campus, and I wouldn't consider sleeping with more than maybe one percent of them; that's hardly indiscriminate ... but it's still 100 men, isn't it? Sort of makes the whole concept ridiculous ... It's not who, or how many, or how often, but simply why that constitutes morality. Most of the people I know consider any non-exploitive relationship perfectly moral ... As to contraception, she adds:
"I use a diaphragm; some of my friends are on the pills, and I know one girl who prefers foam, and another who had a coil fitted. I think any girl who considers herself sexually liberated takes care of her own contraception; it's a woman's problem if anything goes wrong; why leave it up to the boy to take the precautions? Besides, most men don't like to use prophylactics, and most girls don't like to be bothered with their doing so either. Of course, it is still a last resort in a pinch...."
Let's see what others have to say about contraceptive methods. One male student reports that several girls at his campus carry diaphragms around in their handbags, to be always prepared, and some of them even brag about how many boys they have had in a single semester; he admitted that his was hardly typical or representative subculture.
A male student elsewhere had these remarks: "Most of us still use prophylactics, even though we don't really like them. We all seem to be dating younger girls this year ... and younger girls are less likely to have taken other measures. We used to leave a used prophylactic on someone's desk or dresser as a joke, and some of us used to collect girls' left-behind panties as sort of trophies. We hung them from car antennas, or kept them in the room and used them to polish our shoes.
One coed, a junior, tell this story:
"When I was in college, I got pregnant, and my girlfriend took me to (the nearest big city) and arranged for an abortion; it was expensive. She made me promise that when everything was over I'd get a diaphragm and use it. Well, everything was okay, and a few weeks later she told me that she was making an appointment for me. I said that I didn't want to go alone, and she said she'd come and sit with me. I wanted her to get fitted for one too, so finally she agreed and made an appointment for both of us. She introduced herself as married and I said that I was engaged to be married in June. We made a little bet that whoever got fitted with a larger size had to buy the other an ice-cream sundae. (I lost; mine was 85 and hers was 80.)
"You see, we were a little nervous about it. She got a referral to a few gynecologists by writing to the nearest chapter of Planned Parenthood under a married name and receiving the letter at the home of some student friends. There was one doctor right in town, and two in the next town, and another in a larger city almost 30 or 40 miles away. We decided that it would be most discreet to go that far away and made an appointment for one afternoon when neither of us had any classes, and she drove us down.
"The doctor was pretty nice; all we had to do was remember a few things we had made up about my marital plans and her husband, who was supposed to be a student at the university. The doctor asked me very politely if I were a virgin, because they can't fit you if you are ... so I admitted that I'd been sleeping with my fiance. You were able to say things like that to him without being embarrassed, the way he did it. He gave us little zipperkits with everything we needed, and plenty of instruction books and sample creams and things, and we paid the nurse on the way out to make things simpler. Then we went out and had ice cream sundaes to celebrate.
"The next year, though, I was sleeping with a boy who frequented one of the local coffee houses, and after we broke up I started to go with another one, and I later began to see a third guy I also met there. It was then that I found out that the first one had told his friends that I used a diaphragm, and that is why I was suddenly so popular down there. I really wasn't too happy about that..
But let's go back a bit; that was a rather casual manner in which she referred to abortion, wasn't it?
Let's take a look at what happens when contraception efforts-or lack of efforts-fail.
No time can be more strenuous for a coed than the period between the time her menstrual flow is due, and the time it actually commences. Girls have been observed to be tense at this time of the month even when they haven't had sexual intercourse with anyone in over a month, just out of habit! It has been postulated by others that this concern as the time approaches may be one of the factors that causes the delay-a horrible thing for any girl to have to live with!
According to one university health service psychiatrist, a substantial proportion of girls seeking his help who complain that they can't concentrate on their studies are in fact troubled by pregnancy anxieties. That this can happen despite the ready availability of proper protection to the determined coed is evidence that most girls are too careless, romantic, or otherwise unrealistic about the consequences of sexual relations to have taken proper precautions in every instance.
There is also a fair amount of misinformation about the reliability of certain methods of birth control, and a variety of curious situations where the technical distinction between heavy petting and actual intra-vaginal sexual intercourse may be quite tenuous. Nor do most coeds feel too secure about "rhythm" controls or pre-ejaculatory withdrawal. Add to that the simple truth that even the best of contraceptive methods may suffer reduced efficiency if not employed exactly as prescribed (e.g., removing a diaphragm sooner than recommended), and that all of them do show a negligible-except to the victims!-proportion of failure ... and the result is a great number of very concerned coeds each month.
For the girl with irregular menses, things are even worse, for it takes much longer for her to assume that she must indeed be pregnant, and thus her period of anxiety is much longer.
One well-experienced coed uses this approach:
"I've had to sweat it out with most of my girlfriends at one time or another-with some, just about every month. You get used to it after a while. You have to keep checking to be sure that things are the same; it makes them feel that everything is in control because there is someone who cares, and it also makes you feel better to know that it was a false alarm as soon as they find out. You ever notice that in high school girls will tell you they've got 'the curse' while at college a girl is more likely to say that she's got 'her friend come to visit'; I think that's pretty indicative!
"When you have gone over the monthly charts and a girl is very definitely over-due, the best thing to do is to get her tested as soon as possible, and put an end to that awful anxiety of not-knowing-for-sure; I've actually seen girls relieved to learn that they were pregnant; at least they knew for sure, and that stage of it was over.
"Pregnancy tests are simpler than ever; all you have to do is collect a sample of the first urine in the morning and take it to a lab. It doesn't cost much. I have gotten pretty gutsy about it; I've done it enough. I just walk in and tell them I want the test run on the specimen I've brought in ... they must think by now I run a whorehouse or something, I come in that often! That's because most of the girls are too scared to go in and run the specimen down themselves; and some of them are so afraid of what the truth might be that they almost don't want to find out, as though it'd go away if they ignored it. Besides, I have a car. They can phone me with the reports, but since I live in a dorm that's not too cool. So I call them for results that afternoon.
"If the results are negative, you just wait, and maybe run another test in two weeks if nothing's happened. If they are positive, then we end up having these long soul sessions about what to do. In fact, very few get married. Most of them decide to have abortions. A few run home and tell a parent or a friend of the family, and it's taken care of very quickly. The others ask me for help. I've had to ask around for the connections we need, but now it's pretty neat. If they simply can't come up with much money, I send them to one girl who knows a nurse in (city) and she'll do the operations that are simply mechanical-insert a small tube or a solution and it induces premature labor. But it's fairly painful, and it's not medical, and I really don't trust anyone but a doctor.
"I know of one, and I know a boy whose uncle will do them for people we know. Their prices are $300 and $400, and it's perfectly safe ... except of course for the legal angle, but no one worries about that. I imagine the doctors pay off the police.
"Most girls don't have that kind of money, but they manage to get it somewhere. Some get student loans, or borrow from friends, or sell something they have, or take up a collection among friends to help. Sometimes their boyfriends have money. A few girls I know have an abortion fund; they play cards for money, and place all the losings in a kitty, and they use that the next time anyone needs an abortion. They say they'll give the balance to charity if anything's left when they graduate. I once heard of a girl taking a one-night job at a stag party with a bunch of professional party-girls and making the entire sum she needed, but most people simply wouldn't do anything like that.
"Once you have the contact, and once you have the money, it's no problem at all. You just set up the appointment and have it done. With the doctor I know, it's like something out of an undercover spy movie. You have to call within five minutes of half-past the hour, any hour, and use passwords and all that, and sort of decode the response, and show up there.
"We've never had any trouble. With the doctors, that is. I read somewhere that a medical abortion is statistically safer than having your tonsils out. Once a girl who went to the nurse wound up in the hospital, but she wasn't critical or anything. The thing was just incomplete and she kept bleeding; that's one of the risks and the girls know it. That's why I always tell them to go to a doctor if they can manage it.
"How do I know all this? I don't know ... I must be the mother-type or something, because everyone comes to you with problems and asks for help, and so you go out and find out the answers, and eventually you have them and everyone knows and keeps coming to you and sending people to you, and the thing just keeps up ... I really don't mind. If I were the one, someone would do the same for me, and I'd appreciate it."
Printed reports have indicated that many girls will have abortions on a week-end and return to school by Monday and never miss a class.
Another report, this one first-hand from a student, indicated that medical abortions in his area cost only $100-a fact almost every student knew, even if he did not know where to go-and it was not uncommon for girls to go for them early in the morning and attend classes the same afternoon. This same student also told this story:
"One girl who became pregnant had been having an affair with four boys, all over a long period of time; they were all good friends and of course knew about it. There was simply no way of determining who was the father, so they all chipped in and each one donated one-quarter of the cost toward the price of her abortion. When she got back to her dorm afterwards, she had a dozen red roses waiting for her, and the card was signed with love from all four boys."
Despite such flippant commentary, abortion is considered a serious matter, although in almost all cases the only practical recourse. Any adult who is concerned about the immaturity of college students would probably be relieved to learn how they conduct themselves when such crises arise. Fewer and fewer panic, threaten or attempt suicide, run home to their parents, impulsively elope, or beg a local physician for help. They simply inquire among their friends. It won't take too much inquiry. Increasingly, as sexual activity and sexual frankness increase on the campus, someone is sure to know.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE REST OF THE SCENE
There's a lot more to the college scene than the major topics already discussed. Almost any area of human experience you might name can be found to overlap somewhere with college life. In order to give a more accurate, rounded, overall view of college life, this section will deal briefly with topics of importance not covered elsewhere.
Prostitution
"They just don't come here like they used to," sighed the woman, recalling the Good Old Days. The speaker operates a house of prostitution in a large city in the Northwest. She was referring to the college students. "We had loads of 'em in here in those days, after they'd dropped off their dates. More'n we could handle. They'd sit in the front room and wait ... don't happen like that no more. We still see 'em, sure, but it's not the same. Now they'll come in small groups, looking for a bit of adventure. There are hardly any regulars any more. Occasionally you get some kid'd had a fight with his girlfriend ... they all got girlfriends now, it seems to me, and the girls take care of them ... 'course, things've changed in my business too."
The main things that have changed have been the attitudes of college students. The trend is away from the idea that there are "nice girls" and tramps, and that "Nice girls don't." The new attitude preaches Meaningful Personal Relationships to accompany sexual activity, and for the college set, the houses of prostitution are fast becoming the last resort for the frustrated, the unattractive, the jaded, or the merely curious. According to one nineteen-year-old:
"It's become uncool to go to a prostitute these days. The chicks are hip; they like sex. Buying sex is like admitting you can't get it on your own hook. Maybe they still do go, but you can be sure they won't care to tell you about it."
Surprisingly, the position of coeds in relation to prostitution has changed also. At one time, according to certain informed parties, it was possible to find girls working their way through school who were willing to accept assignments as "party girls" at places where they were unknown. "They're too good for us now," reported a man who has made such arrangements for years.
From all indications, the critics of prostitution should be pleased that college students are doing everything possible to discourage it....
Sexual Freedom, Anyone?
In the early 60's, a young man-hardly out of his teens-organized the League for Sexual Freedom in New York City. From the start, it was a college dominated organization. Jefferson Poland was the name of the founder and first Clerk (the only officer), and one of the earliest activities of the League was to picket the Women's House of Detention on lower Manhattan demanding the release of all prostitutes.
Since then, Jefferson Poland has moved to the San Francisco area, the New York group has lapsed, and San Francisco boasts two leagues--Poland's Berkeley-oriented Sexual Freedom League, and the non-student East Bay Sexual Freedom League. In addition, the city has seen the University of California Sexual Freedom Forum and the Committee for Free Beaches, which latter has succeeded in obtaining a free beach at San Gregorio. As opposed to a nudist beach, bathers at a free beach are not required to remove their clothing; nor are they obliged to abide by any other standards of what is normally termed "decency."
The Leagues' parties might have become notorious had it not been for the fact that they were frequently indistinguishable from the members' non-party activities, all of which are discreetly conducted on private premises.
The ideal of a sexual freedom group, whether or not a formal organization, is the maintenance of residences as large as possible, with from several to several dozen students of both sexes living together. As long as they do not impose upon anyone else, it is tacitly assumed that any members of such a household will engage in whatever sexual activity they choose, with whomever and as often as they wish. The main wonder of such households is how anyone ever manages to get any studying done. Said one girl who lived with such a unit, "It's easy when you're not tense and frustrated." The young man in bed with her at the time added that most of the sexual freedom adherents were extremely intelligent, and had never found school work very difficult anyhow.
P.D.A.
P.D.A. stands for Public Display of Affection, a euphemistic term for necking in public, and was once very much frowned upon by students. At some schools, however, it is now quite acceptable-nay, almost mandatory.
The favored location for P.D.A. is in front of the dormitory, usually blocking the entrance, and the favored hour is as close to curfew as one dares before dashing in the door before the clock strikes twelve and everyone outside turns into a pumpkin, according to college lore. One coed described the pre-curfew scene:
"The people are packed so tightly you really have to shove between them to get into the door. They're on the porch and all up and down the stairs, all making out like crazy, where everyone can see them. That's just the point; you are supposed to notice them. It's a way of saying 'Look at me! I'm popular! I had a date tonight, and he likes me enough to stand here in public and neck with me!'
"People you hardly even know to talk to otherwise will say hello to you when you walk in past them. Maybe they also want to show their dates how many people they know.
"But the funny thing is that people in the know realize that people who really have any sexual action don't do that thing. If you've spent all night in bed with your boyfriend, you hardly need to treasure a few mad moments kissing and grappling each other in front of the dorm; you just say good-night and go in. I'm beginning to think some people realize that everyone knows this, and some of them are insisting on making out in front of the dorm anyway so no one will suspect...!"
