Author and pirate facial hair pattern aficionado Jeffrey Eugenides recently offered college students some off-to-school advice about all the sexy hijinks they think they’re about to get into. As someone who was once young and in college, Eugenides can offer some particularly keen insight into what it was like to be young and pretend that sex was no big deal when, really, it was a huge deal, something that neither he nor his friends (no matter what they said to each other) were prepared for.
After having a formative porn-watching experience with Debbie Does Dallas, Eugenides that he and his collegiate comrades “were all extremely uncomfortable” with the titular character’s sexual exploits:
College, we’d been told, was going to feature a lot of sex. But we weren’t quite ready for the rules to change so quickly. We had to pretend to be more seasoned and blasé about the whole thing than we actually were. I don’t remember a single thing about that movie. All I remember was how everyone was trying to pretend to be someone they weren’t yet and maybe never would be.
He goes on to say that, though college didn’t immediately live up to its reputation as a bacchanalian orgy, people eventually began tentatively having sex, which, in its real-life form, was nothing like the weird genital gymnastics in porn:
In my own case, the “college campus lifestyle” didn’t enhance the thrill of sexual experience, certainly not my first year. That was because I was having no sexual experience. As I say in “The Marriage Plot,” “In the sexual hierarchy of college, freshman males ranked at the very bottom.” The freedom was there, the dorm room was ready, but the opportunities were not forthcoming. As the years passed, things got better. The explorations, physical, emotional and intellectual began. It turned out to be nothing like “Debbie Does Dallas.” It was much better than that because the women were real.
Take heed, incoming freshman: college is nothing at all like the four-year sexual extravaganza that college comedies would have you believe. Mostly, it’s eating bad dining hall food in your sweatpants and figuring out that good roommates are a commodity more valuable than gold-plated ruby diamonds.
Best-selling author Jeffrey Eugenides reveals college experiences [State Press]