Ok, I’ll admit it: I’m a little jealous that the article written by Lexie Kelly Wainwright PO ’15 last week, “Athletes Should Reconsider Entitled Dialogue,” managed to rile up the student body more than my sex advice column did. Even if people are getting upset in the ensuing 5C athlete-versus-non-athlete-and-greater-sports-culture dialogue, shouldn’t the sex column be the article that’s getting people heated up? (Maybe I’m not provocative enough.)
My first impulse was to write this week’s column about my personal experience with 5C athletes and rank which team I would score highest in the bedroom. But then I decided that, in my very official Tippy Maple capacity, I should probably avoid objectifying male athletes because doing so would be a total frat move.
So, I’m dedicating this article to a much larger concern of mine, of which this so-called “athlete controversy” is just one example: the over-intellectual, under-sexed 5C community at large. Obviously, I wanted to come to these schools because of the intellectual stimulation and engaging dialogue they have to offer. I wanted to take advantage of the chance to spend four years with brilliant faculty and peers. And I’m thankful that I got the opportunity to be here; the intellectual energy surrounding me on these campuses has helped me grow as a thinker and as a human being.
But, every so often, I get scared that we spend too much time using only one of our heads. I think all the intellectual energy we pour into heated dialogue (this sports controversy is only the latest example of a long list of campus dialogues with which I’m sure you’re already all too familiar) comes at the cost of our sexual energy. People at these schools are often overworked and stressed out. We are largely a community of overachievers involved in various clubs and taking extra classes. And all this is great, except that when we get to the bedroom, we don’t have any energy left to spend! To be fair, I know a handful of people who go here who succeed in getting their mojo on quite frequently (to my next-door neighbors from my first year, even though I heard way too much: I applaud you). But based on my personal experience and from what I know of others’ experiences, I’m afraid the vast majority of us simply aren’t having enough sex.
I know of single people, people with casual hook-up buddies, and people in serious relationships, all of whom have very little sex. This is true not only for sex with partners, but also sex with yourself; masturbate, people! I’ve had several trysts here end prematurely precisely because we would talk too much and didn’t screw enough! It saddens me to see the amount of sexual frustration that goes on at these campuses. After spending a semester abroad in a country I’ll leave unspecified, but one where sexuality is embraced and displayed much more blatantly than would ever happen here, I realized just how repressed sexual desires are in mainstream American culture (thanks, Puritanical values), and in particular how much we have repressed them in the intellectual, politically correct space that is the 5Cs.
So how do we reconcile the intellectual and the sexual? I love the First Amendment as much as anyone, and think that the amount of dialogue that occurs on these campuses is a healthy sign that we are questioning the world around us. But sometimes I really wish the Founding Fathers had thrown in an amendment promising that “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of boning,” because we seem to all forget how important sex is. I don’t want our intellectual voracity to go by the wayside, but at the same time, I wonder how much the intensity we feel about campus issues might really just be misplaced libido.
Who knows—maybe even if we didn’t engage in these fiery dialogues, we would still be lackluster in the sack. But I think that all the passion that goes into debates around dining hall workers, divestment, etc. (which, don’t get me wrong, are debates worth having!) indicates, if anything, that Claremont has loads of energy that could be redirected to our lonely organs down south. We have the rest of our lives to argue and to engage in productive discourse as activists, as lobbyists, as lawyers, etc. But we don’t have that much time before body parts start sagging and we enter the Viagra era of life. Don’t forget that we only get to go to college once; let’s argue less and hook up more.
Carpe Ass-em.
Happily Horny,
Tippy Maple
Questions, concerns, positions to try? Submit input anonymously to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/372C298.