According to a survey by Playboy magazine, almost half of college students have had anal sex, and more than 40 percent know of someone who has slept with a professor or teaching assistant.
But not everyone is buying into the naughty magazine’s survey.
Playboy magazine polled 5,000 college students about their sex lives. The survey, conducted on the Web site, playboy.com, asked students questions about the number of partners they’ve had, how often they have sex and what time of day they like to do the deed. The survey said 43 percent of college students have weekly sex, with 15 percent having daily sex.
History senior Ashley Kline isn’t sure of the survey’s gender fairness. The accuracy of the survey might be skewed depending on who uses Playboy’s Web site, Kline said.
“I don’t know a lot of girls who subscribe to Playboy,” Kline said.
Abi O’Donnell, a publicist for Playboy Enterprises Inc., said of the survey participants, 80 percent were male while 20 percent were female. O’Donnell said the survey was held online because it would guarantee anonymity.
“We felt that approach would yield the most honest results,” O’Donnell said.
Some myths Playboy hoped to debunk by conducting the survey, such as that college is all about “hooking-up,” were disproved by the results, O’Donnell said.
“According to our poll, 73 percent of respondents have gone on a ‘dinner-and-a-movie date,’” O’Donnell said. “While we did inquire about specific habits like waxing and ‘sexting,’ the only real goal of the survey was finding out what actually goes on in the dorms.”
In addition to the gender bias, Kline said each person’s definition of sex differs.
“Definitions change depending on what kind of relationship you’re in,” Kline said. “For instance, are these people married? Or are we talking about girls who are sleeping with five different guys?”
Stereotypes about the magazine can attract a certain type of person and therefore skew the results toward what readers believe the magazine wants to hear, Kline said.
Such surveys can feed into misconceptions about women and their objectification, said Susan Shoultz, director of End Violent Encounters, or EVE, a Lansing shelter for victims of domestic violence.
“This kind of thing encourages young people to think that’s normal behavior,” Shoultz said of the survey results.
“The more people you talk to and get to think that it’s normal and sensationalize it, it adds to this attempt to say that anything goes and anything is appropriate.”
When young people see abuse or disrespect at a young age and are not told it’s wrong, it causes abuse later on in relationships, Shoultz said.
The survey also asked college students how often they masturbate and whether they have faked an orgasm.
The survey was not to prove a certain point about college sex life, but rather to find out about a wide range of the sexual practices of college students, O’Donnell said.
But surveys such as Playboy’s play into the fact that nothing is sacred anymore, Shoultz said.
“It doesn’t need to be advertised all over God’s green earth,” she said.
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Regardless, such a survey is a reflection of today’s changing sexual and social culture, Kline said.
“Every generation has sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; it’s always been out there,” she said. “It’s just more out in the open now. History comes in waves, so we’ll see if it changes.”
