I was sitting around talking with my guy friends the other night, and one of them voiced the all-too-typical string of complaints I hear from men on this campus: No one ever has sex here, ever, and ND girls are frigid, and all girls want is a relationship, and of course all my friends from high school are in fraternities having sex all the time—with girls much hotter than the ones here.
For some reason, hearing him complain this time stuck in my head and something just totally clicked. I felt SO bad for him! And so guilty. What is wrong with our culture that all these poor guys never have sex?! Why is the Notre Dame dating culture so awkward and horrible for these listless men?
I brought up this question next with a group of friends from my dorm and we discussed in-depth. We realized that the majority of our undergraduate sexual encounters have been less than stellar, less than smooth, and a whole lot less than non-regrettable. And then we thought, yes, the absence of regular sex occurring on this campus is a huge crisis and something we clearly have to solve right away. It’s definitely a bigger problem than our growing reputation for producing boring students incapable of carrying informed discussions for any length of time. Obviously it’s a bigger problem than our prominence as a professional school– something more like a trade school– than a university with a core in the humanities and the liberal arts. We need to lock down this issue of crappy hook-ups before we even consider the shrinking presence of artistry and intellectualism in our undergraduate population. This is HUGE people, a huge problem.
Oddly enough there are a lot of people who complain about Notre Dame’s icky and gross and “too liberal” hook-up culture, and yet there are also plenty of complaints about ND ladies’ repugnant chastity. Both are difficult to hear over and over again and to swallow for any Irish undergrad, especially when they are so seemingly contradictory. But upon long and careful reflection, I have come to the conclusion that they both stem from the same core issue that plagues our Notre Dame family: an overwhelmingly high rate of male virginity.
I know what you are thinking: this diagnosis is almost too obvious, too simple. But it’s true. Boys are always complaining about frigid girls because they are hyperactively concerned with sex and because they are struggling with their continued virginity. People complain about the hook-up culture and regrettable hook-ups because they have been improperly fondled by the cold hands of a clumsy virgin. And, obviously, there are way too many serious relationships on this campus because these male virgins resort to them as their only answer to relieving the deep, crushing burden that is their virginity. It all makes sense now.
So what are we going to do about it? I have thought and thought about possible solutions, and steps we can take as a student body to resolve this. I thought about installing fat mirrors in all the Women’s dorms, lowering feminine self esteem in one fell swoop. I considered increasing the number of hormones in the meat they’re feeding us in the dining halls. I even considered installing a system of space heaters along all the sidewalks on campus, enabling women to wear sluttier clothing year round. All of these are novel ideas, I know, but none of them will attack the core of this issue directly. We need to find the fastest way of deflowering our young men.
And then, as if in a dream, the idea came to me. What we need is a modern day, female Robinhood. A real life virgin-slayer, if you will. I am proposing that one generous woman student takes one for the team here. Preferably a freshman, so that she can have a maximum amount of years to complete her good works, this vixen would travel about to various men’s halls on campus and slay one virgin at a time, (sometimes maybe two at time, depending on the size of her charitable heart).
Little by little, virgin-by-virgin, we might gain a campus that has something better to talk about than our awkward sexual chemistry. We might have less guys complaining about women who just want to date. We might have to listen to fewer complaints from boys afraid that they are the only ones not having sex when all their friends who are in fraternities at other schools get lucky all the time. And maybe then we could move on to some other problems we have, like the continued sense of homophobia felt on campus, our general apathy about political and social issues, or really any of those other things we’ve got sitting on the backburner.
But don’t forget: