Midway through my senior year of high school, my mom and aunt sat me down in the kitchen with a college sex–ed pop quiz.
“What do you do when you hit it off with a nice older dental student at a party, and all of your friends say they’re heading home so he offers you a ride?” Say no—go home with your friends instead. “How do you avoid being roofied?” Hold your own drink. “Norah, you shouldn’t be drinking!” Fine, fine—don’t drink. “Will you tell me when you have sex?” Mom!
My parents never sat me down and had a classic “birds and the bees” talk. In fact, at 18 years old, this was probably the most my mother and I had ever even touched upon the topic to that day.
My Texas education had prepared me well to solve differential equations, write essays in a matter of hours, and discuss UNCLOS with the passion of a seafarer. It gave me absolutely no tools to decipher what it meant when a girl offered to walk you home after DFMOing at a party. In fact, I had absolutely no clue what a DFMO was.
So, I arrived at college suddenly confronted by thousands of young people doped up on hormones and newfound freedom.
During freshman year, my friends and I would go to parties and awkwardly attempt to “hook up” with people—whatever that meant—just to say we had done it. I talked one of my guy friends through how to have sex with a woman, to which he responded, “You put what where?” (it wasn’t long before he came out). There was a phase where my female friends would go to frat parties and make out with each other for “fun.” It ended once they got boyfriends soon after.
The trial by error doesn’t end with freshman year. To this day, on each Sunday an assortment of Street members show up to our all–staff meeting covered in hickeys that they haven’t quite mastered covering. I have heard more than one horror story of people who decided to room with their partner, only to break things off weeks before moving in. Personally, as I enter senior year of college in my first long–term relationship, I’ve been forced to understand boundaries and codependency in entirely new ways.
No matter how comprehensive your public school sex–ed, how low your precollege Rice Purity score, or how many seasons of The Sex Lives of College Girls you’ve watched, I don’t think it’s possible to ever be fully prepared for the complexities of college sexuality.
“The Birds and the Bees” issue is the college version of those weird puberty books you got in middle school. Your big siblings at Street are fiending to answer the ever–present question that you never thought to ask, from “does oral count as a body?” to “Is Gen Z even having sex?” We’ll offer a snapshot of the vibrant queer community on campus and share our own embarrassing stories of awkward first dates and failed hook–ups. Our feature will dive into how Penn administrators and student groups seek to address the fragmented sex–ed experience of our student body.
Before you go any further, here’s the wisdom I can offer: You’ll probably forget half the things you’ll learn in CIS 1600 or your writing seminar. But you can’t shake the lessons that lead to you showing up to class in a turtleneck and sunglasses.
And make sure you own a turtleneck.
