"Thou shalt not commit adultery"--Exodus 20:14
"There goes the good time that was had by all."--Bette Davis
In 2001, William Raspberry, a columnist with The Washington Post, wrote an opinion piece titled "What's Love Got to Do With It?" This editorial asserts that dating is dead, college students promiscuous, and the sexual revolution at fault for both. He bases these assertions on Elizabeth Marquard's small survey of college women.
Yes, the survey was flawed. It was too small, speaking personally with only a few dozen college women nationwide, and only another thousand over the phone. It was too narrow, only speaking with college women, not with college men. The definitions of the terms used were too broad--sexual contact could mean nothing more than kissing, for instance.
However. A few years later, novelist Tom Wolfe wrote a novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, illustrating exactly what Marquard found in her survey, and Raspberry discussed: the way the hookup culture affects young college women.
The sad thing that the survey, the essays, and the novel all assert is that young women--girls, really--are pressured by society to want sex, to pretend if they don't, and to pursue it as if they were men. Though the authors either explicitly or implicitly blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s, what they either don't touch on, or else touch on only lightly, is the role radical feminism played in that, and still plays in the pressure on the young women to go out and have encounter after encounter with no expectations.
They don't even consider other ramifications of the casual sex so prevalent on college campuses today: STDs and abortion used as nothing more than another method of birth control.
I am not going to discuss my opinions on the morality of these issues. Frankly, I don't care what people do, so long as it's not constantly shoved in my face, and nobody listens to anybody else on moral issues, anyway. What I care about is the effects, physical and emotional, that these issues have on the girls I teach.
A couple of years ago, I had a girl in one of my classes. She was always in class, and on time, and usually a lively participant in class discussion, but after a short absence, her behavior changed. She stopped participating, and her papers started showing the effects of less effort on her part. I pulled her aside after class, and learned that she'd had an abortion while she was absent, and was suffering from severe depression because of the guilt she felt. She told me that she'd done it because she wasn't sure what else to do, and she hadn't protected herself against pregnancy because she thought that the guy she was sleeping with did want a relationship was going to step up--until she heard about his girlfriend in another state.
She should have been on birth control. She should have also had protection against STDs, and made him use it, since he obviously hadn't been. She should have been told that she was responsible for her own well-being in the hook-up culture on campus. That she wasn't doesn't really excuse her, but it certainly explains how a girl from a small town could get caught up in something that hurt her so badly.
Some individuals handle casual, no expectations sex better than others, emotionally and mentally. Most of the time, those individuals have a higher degree of personal responsibility than those who don't handle the hook-up culture's expectations quite so well.
What I mean is simply this: the individual who is responsible with their bodies, male or female, protect themselves against disease, and against pregnancy. After all, God designed sex to create new life. Yes, he made it fun, but that wasn't the main point. Modern contraceptives are 98-99% effective, if used correctly, and used every time. Granted, that's not 100%, but that's the choice the participants in casual sex make: the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy or disease is to not participate.
Abortion is not a contraceptive, and shouldn't be used as such--there are too many risks to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being for it to be considered an "easy fix," as it sometimes is. The best way to prevent the damage is for girls to be taught that they're as responsible for their safety during those casual sexual encounters as the boys that they sleep with are supposed to be responsible for their own.
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