Generation

 Four friends casually sit in the living room, the space alive with discussion. Everyone’s engaged, with a seriousness that suggests politics or perhaps the economy.

 “You can’t use your teeth,” one of them says. Another says you have to tease a little.

 But academia doesn’t have the conversation flowing—they’re discussing the finer points of giving head.

 “One of my roommates is a virgin and she said, this guy she’s with, ‘I want to give him head, but I need some advice. What do guys like, what should I not
do?’ ” says UB student Roxanne, 21. “We’re just sitting there having a conversation like we’re talking about shoes or something.”

 College students talk about sex. But they might not be talking about it as much as they should. A 2007 study from Trojan Brand Condoms ranks UB as 86 out of 139 universities, based on polls from the universities’ student health centers. UB was ranked 52 in 2006. Trojan gave each university a GPA based on their ranking—UB got a 2.64 that academic year.

 The numbers reflect a familiar, persistent problem, one that may be spurned on by the ways we talk about sex—and the ways we don’t.

 “Sex is talked about in a covert way, in small groups, behind closed doors,” says Amanda Hibbard, supervising counselor for SBI Health Education, and a senior biomedical science major. “If [students] can’t talk about it, it’s doubtful they’re going to be doing it safely.”

THE ATTITUDE WITH WHICH we approach sex has a lot to do with our individual experiences, says Kayla Maryles, events coordinator for SBI Health Education. It depends on our age, background, maturity level—a person’s major could even play a part; art majors, nursing majors, psychology majors—everyone has a different perspective.

 “I used to talk [about sex] more before I wasn’t in a relationship,” Roxanne says. “But now I’m in a relationship and a lot of my friends are not in a relationship … so I don’t feel comfortable talking to them about sex. I don’t want them to feel like, ‘she has a boyfriend; she’s getting it all the time. I’m miserable, I just got broken up with.’ ”

 She has an easier time talking to her male friends, she says, and they can talk about anything—lubricants, condom options, health risks. “I find that the conversations are more mature than they were a few years ago.”

 Talking about sex hasn’t always been that easy—especially with her boyfriend. “With guys that I dated in the past … we’d do it, and then we wouldn’t talk about it. It would be a mystery. Did he really like what I did or was he pretending? We didn’t have that open line of communication,” she says. “But with the guy I’m with now, we’ll talk about sex before we have sex, we’ll do it, and then after we have sex, we’ll talk.”

BUT NOT EVERYONE HAS an easy time talking about it, says Jane Fischer, director of SBI Health Education. “They feel comfortable enough to get into a physical relationship with them but not to have the conversation about concerns or history or protecting themselves and protecting each other,” Fischer says. “There are million-dollar studies about why our culture addresses sexuality the way it does and why people do the things they do.”

 There are a lot of societal factors working against young people, and even more at stake. Our society functions on the basis of a split between what our parents want us to know about sex and what the media forces down our throats.

 “In one way we’re a puritanical culture in all of the abstinence-based education funding of the last decade or so,” says Fischer. There’s an attitude, particularly among parents and school administrators, that teaching students about sex, especially middle school and high school-aged students, is a green light for debauchery. On the other hand, Fischer says, our society’s media culture is extremely sexualized, sending a mixed message about the do’s and don’ts of sex.

 “Sex is talked about in popular culture but its talked about in a way that glorifies it without talking about the facts,” Hibbard says. She references Asher Roth’s once-popular frat party anthem, “I Love College.” In the song, he offers some not-so-sage advice; “when it comes to condoms put two on,” he sings. Hibbard rolls her eyes. “The friction will break both of them,” she says.

 “Just because the images are out there doesn’t mean it’s a conversation,” Fischer says. “You’re throwing something out there—there’s no discussion, there’s no analysis of what’s going on, there’s no exchange of information.”

A QUICK STROLL AROUND your typical college campus should clue you into the fact that college kids are talking about sex. But these conversations are often riddled with misinformation, holes filled with humor and secondhand stories. “It’s a very intimate thing, and I think anytime you’re dealing with a topic that involves intimacy and vulnerability, people don’t want to talk about it,” says Kristine Huber, assistant director of SBI Health Education. “With sex it becomes exacerbated by the fact that there’s a lot of negative messages out there.”

 Sex gets a bad rap in the public sphere—it’s immoral, it’s bad; one wrong step and you’ll have nine months until your 18-year jail sentence starts. “From a young age, we’re given a lot of different messages, that people who have sex are dirty or promiscuous; they have bad reputations,” Huber says. “Sex is taboo. We don’t talk about it, a lot of families don’t talk about it.” Parents don’t talk to their kids about sex enough, leaving them ill equipped to deal with the onslaught of college freedom outside the loving, abstinence-
only embrace of many high school health education programs.

 “I’m Dominican [and] in Latino culture, the girl is supposed to be pure and innocent … I remember when I told my mom I lost my virginity, she almost went ballistic on me,” Roxanne says. “There was that conflict in me—especially after I lost my virginity—it’s like I’m not pure anymore, it’s wrong that I’m like this … I would say that to myself, that this is wrong and I don’t know how to not be like this; it feels so natural.”

 She was eventually able to put aside her inner discord, deciding that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to have sex. But the conflict she talks about—and the sometimes-clumsy way families deal with sex—is familiar.

 “You didn’t hear anything about it and then one day in sixth grade you had to go to this movie which showed you what’s going to be happening to you … I remember it being more embarrassing than anything,” says UB student Adam, 22, adding that his parents never talked about sex with him much. “It was never a prevalent thing in my life, really, until I got to college and everyone was like, ‘you’re in college now, you have to lose your virginity,’ or, ‘you’re in college now, you have to…,’ certain peer pressures.”

 Some parents and schools think it better to shield their kids. “They explain all the results and things that can go wrong,” Adam says. “You get kind of intimidated by the people just bringing all this information at you at one time … but they sidestepped the actual act.” And in turn their kids—off at college and having sex despite their parents’ best efforts to keep them on the “not until marriage” path—don’t talk about it with their partners.

 “I don’t know much about sex from a girl’s standpoint. I’m not going to try to pretend like I do. But I know at least the experience I’ve had, people I’ve seen, it’s been… I’m generalizing, but most women don’t see it as something that’s just something to throw away,” Adam says. “It’s something that means something. So if one guy is sleeping with five different girls … it complicates itself. I have a problem with doing that and just being like, whatever, and then walking away.”

 He doesn’t boast with his male friends about sex, he says. They’ll talk about their problems, sometimes their experiences, but he has a certain level of respect for sex and the people he’s been involved with.

 “I think most guys view it as a contest,” Adam says. “It seems like too many people are too focused on trying to get as many people to sleep with as possible, and if that’s the way they want to look at it, that’s fine … It’s easy for people to talk about it but not really talk about it, because they’re just shallow relationships. They’re shallow connections they establish and then they’re gone.”

LOVE TAKES A BACKSEAT to sex more often than people might like. “What people want to believe is you have to have love for sex,” Maryles says. “I think it’s a misconception. It depends on your definition of sex, your definition of love, you definition of marriage, your definition of safe.”

 “I don’t find a problem with it if a girl has slept with I don’t know how many guys. They shouldn’t be judged on that because everyone should have the possibility of having sex with whoever they want, as long as they’re staying healthy and they’re being careful,” Roxanne says. “You don’t want to fuck up when you’re in your teens or in college and then have to live with it for the rest of your life.”

 Many organizations, SBI Health Education included, have had success passing on correct information through peer counseling programs, with peer educators spreading credible information in and out of the office. “I definitely get asked questions by friends all the time about everything under the sun,” Hibbard says of the open environment that’s evolved between her and her friends. “They’ll crack jokes to make themselves feel more comfortable with it. Then they’ll ask a question and it turns into an intense discussion.”

 But for every fact, there’s a fiction. “Apparently there are conversations going on with little incorrect threads, or not quite correct threads, or incomplete information, too,” Fischer says. “We just happen to know the people who are being able to intercede in those situations, which means there’s thousands of other conversations going on where they’re not.”

 Maryles, a senior health and human services major with a concentration in community mental health, organizes peer-to-peer education workshops. She stumbled across the job three years ago after applying for two other positions within SBI Health Education; she tries to reach out to others with different perspectives than her own, to help educate and fight ignorance.

 “People are very undereducated. A lot of people think they know it all,” she says. “Even with all the workshops we host, sometimes people are there physically but … they’re not taking it in, not absorbing it. How many times have we heard to use a condom, or the steps to putting on a condom? But people still do it wrong.”

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE HEALTH Association released a study in spring 2007 examining the health-related behaviors of 2,001 UB students between 2006 and 2007. The percentages seem slight. Out of those 2001 students, 2.9 percent reported having genital warts or HPV, .4 percent reported HIV infection, .5 percent reported Chlamydia, .3 percent reported gonorrhea, and .3 percent reported pelvic inflammatory disease.

 Do the math. For genital warts and HPV, that’s 60 out of 2001. For HIV infection, that’s eight; 10 for Chlamydia, six for gonorrhea and six for pelvic inflammatory disease—all out of 2001. Now consider that UB has around 19,000 undergraduate students.

 Of students who reported drinking regularly, 1.2 percent of males and 2.1 percent of females reported that while they were drinking, someone used force or threats to get them to have sex with them. And 12.9 percent of males and 11.6 percent of females who drank regularly reported having unprotected sex while they were drunk during that school year. Of those students who were sexually active, only 53.6 percent reported using a condom the last time they had sex—7.7 percent of males and 4.7 percent of females said that didn’t use any form of birth control to prevent pregnancy.

 “I think a lot of people our age feel invincible,” Maryles says. “All these statistics seem to be steady, or increasing because our age group, 18 to 24, people think, ‘nope, can’t happen to me,’ when in reality, you’re not an exception.”

 Roxanne has learned to make safety a top priority. “I really enjoy having sex, so I’ve always been very careful when it comes to those things,” she says, adding that she always gets tested for STIs before she gets into a new relationship. “Some people [say] ‘I know I don’t have anything,’ but nowadays there’s stuff that you can pretty much get doing anything … Sometimes I’ll be 100 percent sure, but I’m like, no, I’m going to get tested just to make sure; to have that solid proof that I’m fine.”

 Some of the problems stem from placing too much emphasis on experience over facts. “Just because one person said … ‘I don’t use condoms because this one broke or this one was uncomfortable,’ rather than having the conversation about using it correctly, try a different kind, things like that, the message becomes condoms are uncomfortable and break,” Fischer says. “So it’s bias of experience, too, and limited experience.”

CONFLICTING MESSAGES HAVE created a society full of people who think they have the right information, but don’t, and who aren’t sure how to ask questions.

 “I think talking to your friends [about sex] is productive in the sense that you’re talking about it. Where it’s not productive is that you just need one person to have incorrect information and then it spreads like wildfire,” Huber says. Sometimes the information passed among friends is accurate, but just as often, it’s not.

 “I think sometimes people get into a groove where they say, ‘I heard this five years ago… and it must be true, then you ask them, where did you hear that and they have no idea,” she says. “They could have read it in some wacky magazine or Yahoo! chat room, or they could have heard it from their sister’s best friend’s friend.”

 One of the most common misconceptions people have about sex, Huber says, involves birth control methods. Many people believe Plan B emergency contraception is an abortion pill. Abortions involve medications that cause the uterus to contract and expel a pregnancy, while Plan B prevents an egg from being released and implanting in the first place. It won’t harm an existing pregnancy, she says; “it’s not even close to being an abortion pill. They’re two totally, totally different things.” Those 18 years or older can buy it over the counter. Those younger than 18 need a prescription from a doctor, but they can get it, which she says is another misconception.

 But some misconceptions leave the purely medical realm, running a little deeper, hitting a little harder. SBI conducts panel testing for STIs. Many of the people who get tested, Huber says, do so because they’re getting into a new relationship and want to make sure they’re healthy before they sleep with someone new. But there are also a considerable amount of people getting tested because their partner cheated on them.

 “There were actually some people who came in to get tested because they were cheating on their partner and they didn’t really know the people they were cheating with … That was actually an eye opener for me and I’ve worked here for a while,” she says. “One of the biggest misconceptions is [thinking that] it can’t happen to me, that I’m not going to get an STI, that I’m not going to get pregnant, the condom’s not going to break, I’m not going to forget to use my pill.
 “You feel like you’re invincible, and nothing bad is ever going to happen to you. Nobody ever thinks they’re going to get raped or be sexually assaulted,” she says. “The biggest misconception is just not having the information and not being proactive about your own health and your own safety; arming yourself with the knowledge that it can happen to you and this is how you prevent it.”

EVERYONE FROM SBI STRESSES the same message: ask questions. Or, as Courtney Bauer, assistant supervising counselor for SBI and sophomore psychology major, puts it: “Better to know than to have herpes.”

 “What’s most important is asking a credible source. There’s no reason to feel ashamed to ask a question,” she says. “If somebody’s really into anal fisting, we say, ‘OK, here’s how to do it safely.’ We are open to any questions about anything.” Her tone is a little facetious but there’s no denying she’s serious. When they come into the office as peer counselors, they check their own moral standards at the door, she and Hibbard agree. No questions are off limits. They help students deal with “outcomes, consequences, risks—the multitude of factors that come with sex—pleasure, pregnancy, STIs, orgasms,” Maryles says.

 Sex is joked about, alluded to, desired, ignored. We want it, we’re scared of it, we seek it out, we brush it off. There’s a dichotomy that exists, between what we want and what we ask for, what we say and how we really feel.

 “People are desensitized [but] they’re not used to talking about their own sex lives,” Hibbard says. “You just have to get used to it. It’s not going to happen overnight. You don’t have to talk about it 24/7, but it’s important for people to have an outlet where they can ask questions without feeling judged.”