“There’s a time and place for everything…”

Working for Residential Life this semester at a small liberal arts college in New England, you can imagine that I’ve come across some weird stuff. Let’s face it, there are always going to be strange people in life, but sometimes it seems as if college campuses are breeding grounds for the bizarre. As one of my high school teachers once told me, “There’s a time and place for everything, and that place is college.” And I totally agree. I believe there are things that are socially acceptable in the college setting that people would never dream of doing otherwise. There won’t be many other times in life when you can drink lots of beer, hard liquor, play drinking games, throw up, drink more beer, throw up again, play more games, pass out, and wake up the next morning and deem it as “kick-ass.” It just doesn’t happen (and if it does, never to the same extreme).

Sex is the same way. For most people, college is the first time they have had to share a room since they were young. It makes sense that sometimes people have certain sexual needs that they need to fulfill from time to time. I think sometimes this is what creates a situation when someone is subjected to witnessing their roommate perform sexual acts. But why not ask for some privacy? Many students just don’t. Sometimes, within a room, it can be perfectly acceptable to have one roommate studying with a friend, while the other performs sexual acts. Nowhere else in life, I would think, would this ever be acceptable.

Here’s an interesting question for people to respond to: why do you think these behaviors (any of them, it doesn’t necessarily have to relate to sex) are acceptable at college but not anywhere else?