My theory that the sexual revolution has mostly resulted in pressure on women to have sex was borne out by this report in the Boston Herald today:
“Some 83 percent of college women and recent graduates polled last week say spring break means heavy drinking and 74 percent said it means more sex and outrageous behavior, according to an American Medical Association survey of 644 women.
“‘It’s dangerous to ‘drink like a man,’ said Dr. Henry Wechsler, director of the College of Alcohol Studies at Harvard School of Public Health. He said women’s bodies metabolize alcohol slower, so it stays in their bodies longer. It also takes less booze to get them drunk.
“According to the study, a ‘sizable’ number of college-aged women reported vomiting, blacking out and having risky sex on booze-fueled spring breaks.
“Nearly 75 percent of respondents said women use spring break’s anything-goes atmosphere and drinking as an excuse for ‘outrageous’ behavior, including public nudity and dancing on tables, the survey said.”
And here’s more on the study, from the Washington Times:
”
· More than 90 percent said it was ‘easy’ for underage students to drink on spring break…..
“• Eighty-three percent said they had friends who drank most nights while on spring break.
“• Fifty-nine percent said they knew people during spring break who had been sexually active with more than one partner.”
In all fairness, spring break was a collegiate bacchanale even before the Great Revolution in Sexual Freedom, as anyone who’s read “Where the Boys Are” (or seen the 1960 movie) can attest. There were a couple of differences. Back then (the early 1960s), it was not regarded as a fundamental right of every single college student to spend her break juicing at a beach town on her parents’ dime. And the heroine of “Where the Boys Are,” who finds herself pregnant by somebody or other when the break is over, uses that tough lesson to pull herself together and start taking college, adult life, and sex seriously. And finally, the offstage adults back then actually disapproved of what the kids were doing.
That doesn’t seem to happen these days–where casual rutting (and presumably the drinking required to pull it off) has its own adult cheerleading squad among the doctrinaire feminists. Here’s a snippet from the redoubtable Katha Pollit (courtesy of The Marriage Debate because the New York Times charges $$$ to read it), concerning Gail Sheehy’s casual-inimacy-proselytizing “Sex and the Seasoned Woman,” which, according to Pollitt and the Times is:
“. . . intended for a generation of women who were inculcated early on with the idea that sexual pleasure was their right. And those women are not about to go gentle into that good night, said Katha Pollitt, a poet who writes a column on politics and feminism for The Nation. ‘Feminism has taught women that your sexuality is something you should take charge of,’ Ms. Pollitt said. Moreover, she said: ‘We live in a very highly sexualized culture. Sex is how we understand happiness and why we are here.'”
Well, sex is certainly why we are here. But what, exactly, does vomiting, blacking out, dancing naked on the table, and doing it with multiple partners have to do with happiness?