College Virgins - Tackling the Question: "To Do It, or Not to Do It?"

While walking through one of the local parks in the city where I currently attend school, I was stopped by a few college students who were conducting a survey on relationships and sexuality. They wanted to ask me a few questions about my own personal relationships. Eventually, one of the questions was "Have you ever had sex?" When I answered that I had not, the young woman's response was "Never?" I assured her that my no meant no, to which her response was: "This is confidential . . . you don't have to lie."

This experience seemed to raise some serious questions about the state of the common college aged young person. With constant messages being broadcast to twenty-something-year-olds concerning "safe sex," the risks of STDs, unexpected pregnancies, and so on, the focus has been predominantly on those who have made the decision to explore their sexuality through sexual intercourse during college. Yet very little attention is paid to those who have made the choice not to engage in sexual relations at this stage in life. Are college-aged virgins really so few? Are the token peer pressure lines of high school abstinence chats-"Everybody's doing it"-actually become facts? And moreover, if sex is really in, why are some choosing not to do it? In hopes of answering some of these questions, I conducted many weeks worth of interviews; these are the results.

Note: The names of respondents in this article have been changed to respect the privacy of those who have shared their personal stories.

Some on-sight interviews on a local university campus yielded some interesting viewpoints from college-aged students. For many, experimenting with and experiencing sex was indeed a very important issue. As one respondent stated, "I never had to deal with it much before now. Now it's always coming up in conversation. Everyone wants to know if I'm doing it." To others, sex is hardly an issue at all. "I don't really think about it," one female student replied. "If somebody wants to do it, fine. If not, fine. It's everybody's choice."