'Girls just as bad as boys'

[hoosier]

'Girls just as bad as boys'

March 21, 2005

BY LORI RACKL AND ANDREW HERRMANN Staff Reporters
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CARBONDALE -- On the dance floor at Gatsby's II, a popular bar at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a tall brunette drinks beer from a plastic pitcher while she grinds her backside into a man's body.

A silver disco ball hangs overhead while a blond woman in a pink, pleated miniskirt writhes on her partner's leg.

A girl notices that her boyfriend's attention is wandering. With a manicured hand, she grabs his face and plants a Hollywood-worthy kiss on his mouth.

On this sticky dance floor, littered with plastic cups and packed with gyrating bodies, women are the hunters as much as the hunted.

Traditional stereotypes dictate that men want sex, and women crave love. But, on today's college campuses, students say those gender lines are blurrier than a pair of beer goggles.

When a University of Illinois sorority girl observed over lunch at a Champaign cafe that "guys aren't looking for love," her friend chimed in: "I don't think we can blame it on the guys. I'm not looking for love, either."

"Girls are just as bad as boys now," another woman said.

"To guys, [sex is] still like scoring," said author Tom Wolfe, who spent two years on college campuses researching his new novel. "The strange part is that it's become that for girls, too. They'll say, 'I scored Jack last night . . . finally!'''

A federal government survey of 4,600 college students found that slightly more male than female undergrads are virgins.

Columbia College student Becki Mielcarski, 22, of Westmont, and her roommate, Kelly Stinson, 21, of Palatine, said women have sexual needs, too, and there's nothing wrong with getting those needs met.

"It's kind of like when you get a chocolate fix," Stinson said.

"Women are so much more open now about their wants," added Mielcarski.

Before the '60s, the thinking was that sex drives were like prostates and chest hair: Men had them; women didn't.

Research on college campuses shows that the '60s sparked a sea change in the way society thought about women and sex.

"The big shift was that most young people came to believe that premarital sex became acceptable for women," said John DeLamater, sociology professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of the Journal of Sex Research. "That change in attitude led to changes in behavior."

Yet, decades after the last bra was burned during the sexual revolution, the playing field in the battle of the sexes is far from level. Men wield much of the clout in relationships, and age-old double standards still limit women's sexual freedom.

"We've made a lot of headway in sports with Title IX, with women in law, medicine and a lot of areas," said Stanford University sex educator Donnovan Somera Yisrael. "But, in terms of sex, the mores and the norms that have been around for millennia are still there."

Girls kissing girls -- for boys


In college campuses' hookup culture, where brief sexual encounters are the rule, research suggests that men call most of the shots when it comes to relationships.

After a hookup, it's often men who decide whether anything more will happen. The woman usually ends up initiating "the talk" to determine whether they're officially a couple. By having to ask the question, the woman assumes the risk of rejection. It's a risk historically taken on by men when asking women on dates -- a practice that's now the exception rather than the rule in the world of higher education.

"Although many people would say that women today have more power in relationships than women did in the 1950s -- and women indeed do have far more social power today -- in reality, they may not have nearly as much power in relationships with men as they appear to," says a 2001 dating report commissioned by the marriage-minded Independent Women's Forum.

Said Jessica Schuh, 22, a U. of I. senior from Edwardsville: "If a guy likes a girl and he calls her after a hookup, that's cool. But, if she calls him, she becomes 'the crazy girl.'"

Experts suspect a big reason college men often have the upper hand in relationships boils down to supply and demand. Female college students outnumber males -- a trend that started around 1980 -- and that translates into more competition for men's attention.

One popular way of getting that attention, at least at parties and on the dance floor, is for women to hit on each other.

"A lot of girls do it to get men going," said Jenny Sabella, 21, a junior at Columbia. "They'll be at a party and be drunk and start making out with another girl to get noticed."

"It works, too," said Columbia senior Andrew Greiner, 26.

Pressure to please


In the ongoing quest to attract men, some worry that women are selling themselves short and putting themselves in danger.

Stella Iwuagwu, a public health teacher at SIU, waves a condom during a campus meeting about sexually transmitted diseases and tells the mostly female audience that "AIDS is not a gay problem, it's all of our problem."

Iwuagwu said that many young women, lacking self-esteem and aiming to please, don't make men wear condoms.

"Nobody is going to treat you better than you treat yourself," Iwuagwu tells the crowd. "Have courage. Make demands."

College students -- male and female -- agree that there's a lot of pressure on women to have sex if they want to keep men.

"It's like, you meet a guy and start talking to him, and, if you don't go home with him that night, that's it," said Veronica Ruiz, 20, a student at Prairie State College in Chicago Heights.

The perceived need to go to bed with a guy just to start a relationship is something new, said Tom Wolfe, whose latest sex-spiced novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is set on a college campus.

"The constant demand is that the guy gets the dessert first and he'll work his way backwards to the soup, which is being introduced," Wolfe said.

That's because sex plays a huge role in relationships, Columbia's Greiner said. "A lot of times, I won't know if I really like a girl until after we have sex."

Double standards abound


While it's generally considered OK for today's college women to want sex, it's clearly not OK for them to want it too much. That would make them skanks, sluts, couches or ho's, while male libertines are called players. When a woman makes the morning trek back to the dorm after the previous night's hookup, it's dubbed the "walk of shame." For men, it's the "stride of pride."

The result is that college women often find themselves balancing their sexual liberation and their reputation.

Kenny Shogren, a 22-year-old U. of I. senior from Chicago, said his fraternity brothers have plenty of hookups, "and we don't think of [the guys] as whores." But "girls who hook up a lot don't have a good reputation," Shogren said, adding, "It's a double standard, but it's still true."

Fellow frat member Chuck Ochab, 21, of Chicago, put it this way: "If I go all the way with her on the first night, this isn't a girl I want to date."

It's a message that's sometimes lost on college women, especially freshmen, according to the Independent Women's Forum report. "A lot of freshman girls, especially when they first get here, think sex will lead to a relationship," a Colby College student said in the report. "And that's not true."

Women in college who have sex outside of a committed relationship often end up taking steps -- dangerous steps -- to avoid being labeled a slut: "You have to do two things: Get drunk first, and don't bring a condom," Stanford's Yisrael said. "You'll probably get an STD or get date-raped, but your reputation will be fine."

Experts who track alcohol consumption on college campuses say they're seeing an increase in heavy drinking among females -- a cause for concern, given that nearly three quarters of college rapes happened when the victim was so intoxicated she was unable to consent or refuse, according to a Harvard study released last year.

"Some women say they really want to have sex, but there is a religious prohibition or a parental voice in their head," said Cheryl Presley, director of the Core Institute, a federally funded project based at SIU that annually tracks undergraduates' drinking and drug use. "They'll say, 'I can blame the alcohol. I was wasted.' They'll go out with the guys and get as drunk as they do."

According to a 2003 Core survey of 36,000 college students, about 48 percent of women and 61.5 percent of men say drinking "facilitates sexual opportunity.'' About 13 percent of female college students say alcohol makes them feel sexier.

Alcohol also makes it difficult to get to know someone, lamented SIU sophomore Laura Teegarden, 19, of Batavia.

"You think you have this great conversation with someone at a bar or party," said Teegarden. "The next day, you see them sober, and they're totally different, and they don't remember anything."

No more MRS degree


Many college women today say they don't expect or want to find a spouse at college. Only 19 percent polled in the dating report "strongly agreed" that they'd like to meet their future husband at college.

"I don't plan on getting married until I'm 26 or so," said Johanna Borgsmiller, a 20-year-old junior at U. of I. "I still have time to get serious."

She does, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The age people get married has gone up considerably in the last quarter century. In 1970, the median age of women walking down the aisle for the first time was 20.8 years. In 2003, it was 25.3.

"You have this elongated period of adolescence and young adulthood that gives [students] a lot more time to experiment," said Patricia Koch, an associate professor at Penn State who has studied sexuality for more than 20 years.

Some women say that, if marriage looms on the distant horizon, there's no sense getting bogged down in serious relationships during college. Instead, they get their sexual needs met through a series of casual hookups, which can elicit a range of conflicting emotions. Sixty-one percent of women who said a hookup made them feel desirable also said it made them feel awkward, according to the college dating report.

"If it's a hookup where [I] actually stayed there ... I just want to get out of there as fast as possible the next day," said a University of Chicago woman cited in the report. "It's that 'walk of shame' thing. You've got front desk people you have to get by. You hope you don't see anybody else in the dorm. And you look like you had a rough night. It's just, like, awkward."

'It's like an orgy'


Wolfe believes hookups are "much harder on women than on men" because "there simply just isn't as much at stake for the guys.''

"Women tend to keep a record of their hookups,'' said Wolfe. "Guys couldn't care less -- 'That was last night; what's out there tonight?'"

Plenty is out there, said Vanessa Patterson, 21, an SIU senior from Chicago's South Side. Patterson said college guys don't want relationships. "They just want some booty."

And some women are happy to deliver.

"It's like an orgy," lamented Patterson, who is appalled at the "lack of morals" among some of her classmates.

University of Washington sociologist and sex educator Pepper Schwartz said she has noticed more bravado lately among college women boasting about their sexual conquests. She suspects a lot of it is just talk.

"Are they really happy? Sometimes, I think not," Schwartz said. "In the end, they're still looking for a boyfriend. They're still looking for respect. They ultimately want to pair up, not just hook up."