http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-campus21.html

CARBONDALE -- On the dance floor at Gatsby's II, a popular bar at Southern
Illinois University in Carbondale, a tall brunette drinks beer from a
plastic pitcher while she grinds her backside into a man's body.

A silver disco ball hangs overhead while a blond woman in a pink, pleated
miniskirt writhes on her partner's leg.

A girl notices that her boyfriend's attention is wandering. With a manicured
hand, she grabs his face and plants a Hollywood-worthy kiss on his mouth.

On this sticky dance floor, littered with plastic cups and packed with
gyrating bodies, women are the hunters as much as the hunted.

Traditional stereotypes dictate that men want sex, and women crave love.
But, on today's college campuses, students say those gender lines are
blurrier than a pair of beer goggles.

When a University of Illinois sorority girl observed over lunch at a
Champaign cafe that "guys aren't looking for love," her friend
chimed in: "I
don't think we can blame it on the guys. I'm not looking for love, either."

"Girls are just as bad as boys now," another woman said.

"To guys, [sex is] still like scoring," said author Tom Wolfe,
who spent two
years on college campuses researching his new novel. "The strange part is
that it's become that for girls, too. They'll say, 'I scored Jack last night
.. . . finally!'''

A federal government survey of 4,600 college students found that slightly
more male than female undergrads are virgins.

Columbia College student Becki Mielcarski, 22, of Westmont, and her
roommate, Kelly Stinson, 21, of Palatine, said women have sexual needs, too,
and there's nothing wrong with getting those needs met.

"It's kind of like when you get a chocolate fix," Stinson said.

"Women are so much more open now about their wants," added Mielcarski.

Before the '60s, the thinking was that sex drives were like prostates and
chest hair: Men had them; women didn't.

Research on college campuses shows that the '60s sparked a sea change in the
way society thought about women and sex.

"The big shift was that most young people came to believe that premarital
sex became acceptable for women," said John DeLamater, sociology professor
at University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of the Journal of Sex
Research. "That change in attitude led to changes in behavior."

Yet, decades after the last bra was burned during the sexual revolution, the
playing field in the battle of the sexes is far from level. Men wield much
of the clout in relationships, and age-old double standards still limit
women's sexual freedom.

"We've made a lot of headway in sports with Title IX, with women in law,
medicine and a lot of areas," said Stanford University sex educator Donnovan
Somera Yisrael. "But, in terms of sex, the mores and the norms that have
been around for millennia are still there."

Girls kissing girls -- for boys



In college campuses' hookup culture, where brief sexual encounters are the
rule, research suggests that men call most of the shots when it comes to
relationships.

After a hookup, it's often men who decide whether anything more will happen.
The woman usually ends up initiating "the talk" to determine
whether they're
officially a couple. By having to ask the question, the woman assumes the
risk of rejection. It's a risk historically taken on by men when asking
women on dates -- a practice that's now the exception rather than the rule
in the world of higher education.

"Although many people would say that women today have more power in
relationships than women did in the 1950s -- and women indeed do have far
more social power today -- in reality, they may not have nearly as much
power in relationships with men as they appear to," says a 2001 dating
report commissioned by the marriage-minded Independent Women's Forum.

Said Jessica Schuh, 22, a U. of I. senior from Edwardsville: "If a guy likes
a girl and he calls her after a hookup, that's cool. But, if she calls him,
she becomes 'the crazy girl.'"

Experts suspect a big reason college men often have the upper hand in
relationships boils down to supply and demand. Female college students
outnumber males -- a trend that started around 1980 -- and that translates
into more competition for men's attention.

One popular way of getting that attention, at least at parties and on the
dance floor, is for women to hit on each other.

"A lot of girls do it to get men going," said Jenny Sabella, 21,
a junior at
Columbia. "They'll be at a party and be drunk and start making out with
another girl to get noticed."

"It works, too," said Columbia senior Andrew Greiner, 26.

Pressure to please



In the ongoing quest to attract men, some worry that women are selling
themselves short and putting themselves in danger.

Stella Iwuagwu, a public health teacher at SIU, waves a condom during a
campus meeting about sexually transmitted diseases and tells the mostly
female audience that "AIDS is not a gay problem, it's all of our problem."

Iwuagwu said that many young women, lacking self-esteem and aiming to
please, don't make men wear condoms.

"Nobody is going to treat you better than you treat yourself,"
Iwuagwu tells
the crowd. "Have courage. Make demands."

College students -- male and female -- agree that there's a lot of pressure
on women to have sex if they want to keep men.

"It's like, you meet a guy and start talking to him, and, if you don't go
home with him that night, that's it," said Veronica Ruiz, 20, a student at
Prairie State College in Chicago Heights.

The perceived need to go to bed with a guy just to start a relationship is
something new, said Tom Wolfe, whose latest sex-spiced novel, I Am Charlotte
Simmons, is set on a college campus.

"The constant demand is that the guy gets the dessert first and he'll work
his way backwards to the soup, which is being introduced," Wolfe said.

That's because sex plays a huge role in relationships, Columbia's Greiner
said. "A lot of times, I won't know if I really like a girl until after we
have sex."

Double standards abound



While it's generally considered OK for today's college women to want sex,
it's clearly not OK for them to want it too much. That would make them
skanks, sluts, couches or ho's, while male libertines are called players.
When a woman makes the morning trek back to the dorm after the previous
night's hookup, it's dubbed the "walk of shame." For men, it's
the "stride
of pride."

The result is that college women often find themselves balancing their
sexual liberation and their reputation.

Kenny Shogren, a 22-year-old U. of I. senior from Chicago, said his
fraternity brothers have plenty of hookups, "and we don't think of [the
guys] as whores." But "girls who hook up a lot don't have a good
reputation," Shogren said, adding, "It's a double standard, but it's still
true."

Fellow frat member Chuck Ochab, 21, of Chicago, put it this way: "If I go
all the way with her on the first night, this isn't a girl I want to date."

It's a message that's sometimes lost on college women, especially freshmen,
according to the Independent Women's Forum report. "A lot of freshman girls,
especially when they first get here, think sex will lead to a relationship,"
a Colby College student said in the report. "And that's not true."

Women in college who have sex outside of a committed relationship often end
up taking steps -- dangerous steps -- to avoid being labeled a slut: "You
have to do two things: Get drunk first, and don't bring a condom,"
Stanford's Yisrael said. "You'll probably get an STD or get date-raped, but
your reputation will be fine."

Experts who track alcohol consumption on college campuses say they're seeing
an increase in heavy drinking among females -- a cause for concern, given
that nearly three quarters of college rapes happened when the victim was so
intoxicated she was unable to consent or refuse, according to a Harvard
study released last year.

"Some women say they really want to have sex, but there is a religious
prohibition or a parental voice in their head," said Cheryl Presley,
director of the Core Institute, a federally funded project based at SIU that
annually tracks undergraduates' drinking and drug use. "They'll say, 'I can
blame the alcohol. I was wasted.' They'll go out with the guys and get as
drunk as they do."

According to a 2003 Core survey of 36,000 college students, about 48 percent
of women and 61.5 percent of men say drinking "facilitates sexual
opportunity.'' About 13 percent of female college students say alcohol makes
them feel sexier.

Alcohol also makes it difficult to get to know someone, lamented SIU
sophomore Laura Teegarden, 19, of Batavia.

"You think you have this great conversation with someone at a bar or
party,"
said Teegarden. "The next day, you see them sober, and they're totally
different, and they don't remember anything."

No more MRS degree



Many college women today say they don't expect or want to find a spouse at
college. Only 19 percent polled in the dating report "strongly agreed" that
they'd like to meet their future husband at college.

"I don't plan on getting married until I'm 26 or so," said Johanna
Borgsmiller, a 20-year-old junior at U. of I. "I still have time to get
serious."

She does, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The age people get married
has gone up considerably in the last quarter century. In 1970, the median
age of women walking down the aisle for the first time was 20.8 years. In
2003, it was 25.3.

"You have this elongated period of adolescence and young adulthood that
gives [students] a lot more time to experiment," said Patricia Koch, an
associate professor at Penn State who has studied sexuality for more than 20
years.

Some women say that, if marriage looms on the distant horizon, there's no
sense getting bogged down in serious relationships during college. Instead,
they get their sexual needs met through a series of casual hookups, which
can elicit a range of conflicting emotions. Sixty-one percent of women who
said a hookup made them feel desirable also said it made them feel awkward,
according to the college dating report.

"If it's a hookup where [I] actually stayed there ... I just want to get out
of there as fast as possible the next day," said a University of Chicago
woman cited in the report. "It's that 'walk of shame' thing. You've got
front desk people you have to get by. You hope you don't see anybody else in
the dorm. And you look like you had a rough night. It's just, like,
awkward."

'It's like an orgy'



Wolfe believes hookups are "much harder on women than on men"
because "there
simply just isn't as much at stake for the guys.''

"Women tend to keep a record of their hookups,'' said Wolfe. "Guys couldn't
care less -- 'That was last night; what's out there tonight?'"

Plenty is out there, said Vanessa Patterson, 21, an SIU senior from
Chicago's South Side. Patterson said college guys don't want relationships.
"They just want some booty."

And some women are happy to deliver.

"It's like an orgy," lamented Patterson, who is appalled at the
"lack of
morals" among some of her classmates.

University of Washington sociologist and sex educator Pepper Schwartz said
she has noticed more bravado lately among college women boasting about their
sexual conquests. She suspects a lot of it is just talk.

"Are they really happy? Sometimes, I think not," Schwartz said.
"In the end,
they're still looking for a boyfriend. They're still looking for respect.
They ultimately want to pair up, not just hook up."


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