It’s Saturday night, and I’m at Green Beach. The party doesn’t matter — the location matters even less. The time is inching slowly but steadily towards 1 a.m., when the music will shut off and hordes of semi-drunk college students will stagger off to wait in the horrendous Jay’s Place or Hub lines, looking to absorb the last of the alcohol with greasy pizza and fiery chicken sandwiches. I’m bored, my friends are bored and once again, I’ve found myself alone.
Of course, one cannot proceed with this article without being brutally honest. That night, I was out on the prowl. I’m well versed in the complexities of college dating: the ups and downs of singlehood, of being taken, in complicated “situationships,” playing eye tag with the chosen one of the evening all night, only to see them wrapped up in someone else. And it’s not just me. Sunday brunches are breeding grounds for debriefs and re-hashing the events of the previous night. The common sensation seems to be disappointment. This begs the question: Does Claremont simply not get laid?
To get to the bottom of my inquiry, I consulted Fizz, our anonymous social networking app designed for college students to connect. I am no social scientist. I am well aware that the population of Fizz users is skewed, and that the most active Fizz users are pro less likely to be having sex than those not on it. But out of the whopping 1,125 who responded, I felt as though I got a fairly clear picture.
To my question, “What is your body count?” 445 users, or 39 percent, responded that it was zero. Only eight percent responded that it was 13 or higher. I was surprised by the second poll, where I asked how often users watched porn or consumed pornographic material. Out of 332 users, 48 percent said that they never had.
People watched, it seems, less porn than I expected. I had imagined that in this largely sexless population, with the majority of users having a body count that I would consider low, people would be trying to fill the void of a lack of physical intimacy with outlets for sexual frustration, namely pornography. But perhaps the idea of sex is so daunting now that people don’t want anything to do with it anymore.
In an age where it feels like everyone is on dating apps and casual hook-ups are a cheap, easy commodity, it seems as though we’ve lost the ability to actually interact with each other. Last semester, I was abroad at a party geared towards other international students. We were on a party boat, slicing through the black water under the illuminated bridges of the Seine River, the Eiffel Tower glittering above us, and no one was mingling. A young man stood alone, off to the side. When I clandestinely peeked over his shoulder to see what he was looking at, a girl’s profile blinked back at me. In the middle of a party filled with young, single, excitable — and drunk and horny — college-aged students off on an adventure of a lifetime, there was still a guy in the corner, too intimidated to interact with real life and instead busying himself with online dating. When I struck up a conversation with him, he seemed startled, as though he had truly forgotten how to interact with a woman who wasn’t a carefully curated profile and a textbox on a phone screen.
For the last two decades, according to the Los Angeles Times, there has been a decline in the amount of sex that Gen-Z is having. These numbers were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; when our worlds turned virtual, we became addicted to our online personas. In a world of quick dopamine releases and diminished real-life interactions, it sometimes seems as though we live our entire lives online.
“ The virtual world has superimposed itself onto our real life, and it’s an uphill battle to get back to the real world. This fact is as validating as it is saddening: We just don’t know how to talk to each other anymore.”
We’ve entered a time where hookups are a casual currency, the physical equivalent of empty calories. Rather than engage in meaningful relationships, we fill our time with quick likes and Tinder matches. Eyes swipe left and right through the crowd, hoping, hungering for the chance to pick or be picked next. Yet most of the time, we go home empty-handed. Are we not having sex anymore because we have developed a crippling fear of commitment, or a crippling fear of ourselves and our own desires? Is it necessarily our fault, or have we lost the ability to entirely connect with each other?
Well, by the time you read this, it might be a Saturday. There might happen to be a Green Beach party. Maybe I’ll drag myself out of my party retirement and survey the scene again for myself. Who knows? I might even get lucky.
Arianna Kaplan SC ’27 is very concerned with college social dynamics, our weird nightlife scene, creative nonfiction and philosophy. She will tell you, without fail, that she studied abroad in Paris. Please, please, please ask her about it.
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