Are more students abstaining from sex? Why?

sexThe New York Times Magazine fronted a piece on Sunday about an emerging abstinence movement at Harvard. The organization behind the movement, True Love Revolution, led by student Janie Fredell, seeks to discourage safe-sex education sponsored by the university and promote abstinence until marriage.

The article explains that in a nutshell, abstinence during college isn’t just for religious students anymore - it’s philosophical, researched, sexy, trendy, and fun?

Apparently, not having sex is now a trend. A Newsweek article reports that college students are having less sex, the IHT reports that these abstinence clubs are “springing up” (pun unintended, I think) at elite universities across the East Coast, and a study by the American College Health Association found in a study that the number of sexual partners a male student had had dropped from 2.1 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006. A CDC study in 2001 also found that “39 percent of freshman college women were virgins, and 31 percent of those women still hadn’t had sex by senior year.”

Why, exactly, are all these students not boning each other? I’ll let them explain.

Premarital abstinence, on the other hand, is held up by True Love Revolution as improving health, promoting better relationships and, best of all, enabling ?better sex in your future marriage.?

Those are good ideas, but all the same, we think putting sex on a pedestal might not be the best idea. Co-president Leo Keliher of True Love Revolution might have summed up why abstaining from a normal, post-pubescent can be a little creepy - from the NYT piece:

“He told me he struggles constantly against ?physical lustful temptation? ? that he can be aroused just by a woman?s touch, by even a look at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by ?thoughts that just come out of the blue ? basically pornography in my head.? They come to him when he?s merely walking around campus, or even when he?s alone in the library ? ?like a fly buzzing around.”

Dare I say it? This kid needs to get laid.

On the other end of the sexual spectrum are people like Lena Chen, Harvard’s sex blogger, who enjoys describing her numerous blowjobs in vivid detail on her notorious blog, sexandtheivy.com. In a recent debate with Fridell of True Love Revolution, however, she sought to find common ground, admitting that they were just students who were “both, in their own ways, advertising sex appeal.”

And in case you were wondering, CNN tells us why the few many college students who still have sex do it. The number one reason: because they were attracted to their partner. This, my friends, is stunning news.