Editorial: ‘Let’s talk about sex, baby’

As students dance all around a dark basement, the thumping of the music grows louder. It reeks of spilled alcohol and the air is sticky with humidity, bodies clustering around each other in the confines. The awkward movements of intoxicated individuals fill the space and couples kiss in the dark corners, at some point leaving the party to go “hook up.”

But what does “hooking up” specifically entail?

It depends on who you ask.

The term is ambiguous at best, meaning everything from making out to having sex is encompassed into one word, making it hard to know what people are legitimately doing. Students say Lehigh has a hook-up culture, but with such an informally defined term, what does that really mean?

As freshmen, or even as upperclassmen, our friends tell us of their latest hook ups discussions about what this term means to the Lehigh community as a whole and the larger scheme of this hook-up culture don’t happen enough. Using this ambiguous language can put pressure on people to act a certain way, because they might feel they won’t be accepted if they aren’t engaging in the same behaviors as others. There are still double standards present in our culture. Women feel pressured to have sex to not be seen as prudes, but if they hook up with too many people, they might be considered sluts.

The fact that there’s a hook-up culture isn’t the problem. The problem lies in the lack of reflective conversations students have regarding the relationship atmosphere. Even though it’s considered normal to leave a party and have sex with someone afterward, there’s a lack of sex positivity on Lehigh’s campus.

Things like the “Lehigh look away” and how some women feel they owe something to men — or men expecting that sort of behavior — when they’re at parties hosted by a fraternity or a male athletic team, points to how we should be having these conversations more often. Men also feel the pressure to have sex because it’s socially expected for them to be sexually active, so these standards doesn’t just affect women.

Although there is programming available to students to discuss various aspects of sex, like sexual assault or sex positivity programming from Break the Silence and the Women’s Center, there’s not a wide variety of students who participate in them. Although, Lehigh is not necessarily responsible for providing sexual education to all students, and the differences in students’ previous high school sexual education could contribute to the general lack of sex positivity.

Although some high schools stress abstinence-only education, others focus on promoting safe sex — and depending on a student’s background, that could mean very different levels of sex education. Maybe Lehigh addressing the matter on a large scale could help even out the playing field and prevent risk in the long-run.

Despite not having widespread mandatory programming to address hook-up culture or sexual relationships, Lehigh’s dormitory policies point to a relaxed stance on the hook-up culture because of the unmonitored dorm visitation policies. Other universities require students to sign in guests at check-in desks at the entrance to their dorms and have stricter rules regarding opposite gender visitation. Although Lehigh does have a three-day limit visitor policy, there is no way for Gryphons to monitor and enforce this.

Since dormitory activities are less monitored, students are free to bring back whomever they want at whatever time they want. In that sense, Lehigh may be a more progressive campus compared to other schools that limit those behaviors, but we as a student body are still not widely sex positive and don’t promote enough conversation discussing our campus attitude on sex. Regardless of the personal opinions one holds on sexual interactions, sex positivity on Lehigh’s campus should encourage safe engagement in intercourse, which would prevent slut-shaming and lessen the double standard between men and women regarding sex.

Conversations discussing all these different aspects of the hook-up culture could help the campus atmosphere by taking off much of the pressure people feel to conform and instead help them make their own choice regardless of what their peers are doing. It could also help people be less judgmental of others’ actions and could even help prevent unsafe sexual encounters.

Having productive conversations on the widespread effects of our culture may be uncomfortable, but they could benefit all of our community.