Sex and the College Girl

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/195711/sex-college

After reading a post on DU the other day that initmated the 1970's were practically pre-historic, I ran across this rather interesting article from The Atlantic from 1957.

All you Post-Boomers out there, read and be....AMAZED!!!!


My Favorite Master Artist: Karen Parker GhostWoman Studios

:rofl:

My Favorite Master Artist: Karen Parker GhostWoman Studios

and i was born in 1989 :P

This was written pre-birth control pills, as well...!

Promiscuity, on the other hand, demands a certain amount of nerve. It might be misdirected nerve, or neurotic nerve, or a nerve born of defiance or ignorance or of an intellectual disregard of social mores, but that's what it takes. Sleeping around is a risky business, emotionally, physically, and morally, and this is no light undertaking. I have never really understood why it is considered to be so easy for girls to say yes, particularly to four different men over a period of two weeks. On the other hand, it is very easy to go steady. Everybody is doing it. During my first two weeks at Smith I felt rather like a display in a shop window. Boys from Amherst, Yale, Williams, and Dartmouth swarmed over the campus in groups, looking over the new freshmen for one girl that they could tie up for the next eight Saturday nights, the spring prom, and a house party in July. What a feeling of safety not to have to worry about a date for months ahead! A boy might even get around to falling in love at some point, and that would solve the problem of marriage too.

The depressing aspect of this perpetual twosome is that it is so often based on sex and convenience. It is so easy to become tied up with old Joe, even though he is rather a bore, and avoid those nightmarish Saturday nights home with the girls. But the trouble is, once the relationship with Joe has become an established thing, getting out of it again (when Joe's conversation begins to have the stimulating effect of a dose of Seconal) is about as easy as climbing out of a mud swamp. Joe objects; how about the spring prom? A friend of mine, trying to rid herself of such a relationship, told me she felt bad about "flushing" old Joe, since he was really such a nice person. She worried for a long time, then prepared the most understanding, sensitive, kind speech she could think of, taking into account his tender feelings and possible indignation. She delivered it to Joe, who listened her out with a rather stunned expression, and then waited for his reaction. "I understand your point of view," said Joe finally, "but you don't understand mine at all. Don't you realize that now I have to go out and find myself a new girl?" Joe might have been an exaggerated case, but there is an element of eternity about his feelings.

Joe is not a man to take chances. He might waste seven Saturday nights and two proms on hopeless blind dates before he finds one he likes. He does not enjoy spending the evening dredging up conversation with a complete stranger; he wants to relax. Beyond this, he does not want the bother of starting the whole sex cycle over again, with discussions and possibly arguments about how far he may go how soon. He wants it all understood, with the lady reasonably willing, if possible. (This depends on his and her notions of what constitutes a nice girl.) Now if Joe sounds abominably lazy, besides being a monster of self-indulgence (which, of course, he is), I do not mean to say that he is the living example of young American manhood. I simply use him to illustrate what I imagine to be some of the attitudes of young men who want to settle down early.

"Marriage is for girls," a young man told me recently, and I had no reason to take exception to this until he told me later that, when he said it, he had become engaged only an hour before. For no matter how much is said about the conniving ability of females to lay traps for men, the fact remains that men not only phone for the dates but ordinarily they do the proposing, too; if by chance a girl proposes to them, there is nothing to stop them from refusing. And when we look over the campuses today, it is obvious that they are accepting with alacrity.

....

One would hope so, given the whole freedom of choice concept.

nothing to stop a girl from refusing a guy's proposal.

make a girl hesitate to give a definite "no."

My folks had two kids -- so they musta done it twice, at least. And we were both born before 1960.

... the stork. Yup. O8)

Or ... was it the milkman? :dunce: Oh well. Same thing. :shrug:

I started college in 1961. There was no sex before that.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot after that, either.

:silly:

This was written in 1957...

"Ever since Gertrude Stein made her remark about the Lost Generation, every decade has wanted to find a tag, a concise explanation of its own behavior. In our complicated world, any simplification of the events around us is welcome and, in fact, almost necessary. We need to feel our place in history; it helps in our constant search for self-identity. But while the Beatniks travel about the country on the backs of trucks, the rest of us are going to college and then plunging—with puzzling eagerness—into marriage and parenthood. While the Beatniks are avoiding any signs of culture or intellect, we are struggling to adapt what we have to the essentially nonintellectual function of early parenthood. We are deadly serious in our pursuits and, I am afraid, non-adventurous in our actions. We have a compulsion to plan our lives, to take into account all possible adversities and to guard against them. We prefer not to consider the fact that human destinies are subject to amazingly ephemeral influences and that often our most rewarding experiences come about by pure chance. This sort of thinking seems risky to us, and we are not a generation to take risks. Perhaps history will prove that we are a buffer generation, standing by silently while our children, brought up by demand-feeding and demand-everything, kick over the traces and do startling things, with none of our predilection for playing it safe.

Or parents kicked over so many traces that there are practically none left for us. That is not to say, of course, that all of our parents were behaving like the Fitzgeralds. Undoubtedly most of them weren't. But the twenties have come down to us as the Jazz Age, the era described by Time as having "one abiding faith—that something would happen in the next twenty minutes that would utterly change one's life," and this is what will go on the record. The people living more quietly didn't make themselves so eloquent. And this gay irresponsibility is our heritage. There is very little that is positive beneath it, and there is one clearly negative result—so many of our parents are divorced. This is something many of us have felt and want to avoid ourselves (though we have not been very successful). But if we blame our parents for their way of life, I suspect we envy them even more. They seemed so free of our worries, our self-doubts, and our search for what is usually called security—a dreary goal. I think that we bewilder our parents with our sensible ideas, which look, on the surface, like maturity. Quite often they really are, but how did we get them so early? After all, we're young!

Since so many of us are going to college, a great many of our decisions about our lives have been and are being made on the campuses, and our behavior in college is inevitably in for some comment. Two criticisms rise above the rest: people in college are promiscuous, for one thing, and, for another, they are getting married and having children too early. These are interesting observations because they contradict each other. The phenomena of pinning, going steady, and being monogamous-minded do not suggest sexual promiscuity. Quite the contrary—they are symptoms of our inclination to play it safe."

"The New Yorker recently ran the following item, titled "Overheard on the Barnard Campus": "I can't decide whether to get married this Christmas or come back and face all my problems." If Susie becomes engaged, she can, in a way, stop trying so hard. She can let go. For college (though it may not sound it from this account) hasn't been easy. Her liberal education has had the definite effect of making her question herself and some of her lifelong ideas for the first time, sometimes shatteringly. She has learned to think, not in the proportions of genius, but intelligently, about herself and her place in the world. She realizes, disturbingly, that a great many things are required of her, and sometimes she can't help wondering about the years beyond the casserole and playpen. The beginnings of maturity are taking place in her.

The Eastern women's colleges (and I can speak with authority only about Smith) subtly emanate, over a period of four years, a concept of the ideal American woman, who is nothing short of fantastic. She must be a successful wife, mother, community contributor, and possibly career woman, all at once. Besides this, she must be attractive, charming, gracious, and good-humored; talk intelligently about her husband's job, but not try to horn in on it; keep her home looking like a page out of House Beautiful; and be efficient, but not intimidatingly so. While she is managing all this, she must be relaxed and happy, find time to read, paint, and listen to music, think philosophical thoughts, be the keeper of culture in the home, and raise her husband's sights above the television set. For it is part and parcel of the concept of liberal education to better human beings, to make them more thoughtful and understanding, to broaden their interests. Liberal education is a trust. It is not to be lightly thrown aside at graduation, but it is to be used every day, forever.

These are all the things that a liberally educated girl must do, and there has been in her background a curious lack of definition of the things she must not do. Parents who have lived in the Jazz Age can not very well forbid adventurousness, nor can they take a very stalwart attitude about sex. Even if they do, their daughters rarely listen. What or what not to do about sex is, these days, relative. It all depends. This is not to say that there are no longer any moral standards; certainly there are—the fact that sex still causes guilt and worry proves it. But moral generalizations seem remote and unreal, something our grandparents believed in."

"Even more complicated to deal with is the intellectual-amoral type of man, who has affairs as a matter of course and doesn't (or says he doesn't) think less of a girl for sleeping with him. He is full of highly complicated arguments on the subject, which have to do with empiricism, epicureanism, live today, for tomorrow will bring the mushroom cloud, learning about life, and the dangers of self-repression, all of which are whipped out with frightening speed and conviction while he is undoing the third button on his girl's blouse. And he may well need arguments at this point."

"A girl, then, by the end of college is saddled with enough theories, arguments pro and con, expectations, and conflicting opinions to keep her busy for years. She is in the habit of analyzing everything, wondering why she does things, and trying to lay a pattern for her life. Her education, which has laid such a glittering array of goals before her as an educated American woman, has also taught her to be extremely suspicious of the winds of chance. She has been told that she is a valuable commodity, that only efficiency will allow her to utilize all her possibilities, and that to get on in this risky and nerve-racking world she must keep what a disillusioned male friend of mine calls "the safety catch." There must always be something held in reserve, a part of her that she will give to no one, not even her husband. It is her belief in herself, modern version, and the determination to protect that belief. It is the vision of possibility which remains long after she is mature enough to accept the eventual, gradual limitation of the things that will happen to her in life. It is the dream of the things she never did."

Love and friendship are better things in life. I'm glad I concentrated on that as a college girl.

In the late 70s, sex was nothing. Romance died then. It's become even more mechanical and meaningless since then, but it was pretty cruel then. I recall a roomate who felt bad because she had this long period and couldn't have sex with a guy on the first date! It was like accepting a date meant you were consenting to friggin' sex! Talk about watering it down into nothing. May as well go bowling with a guy for all it means.