Sex and Man at Yale

I'll never forget the night in mid-September 1992, during my freshman year at Yale, when my roommate and I found ourselves talking with two girls, one an Andover graduate and one from the deepest South, in a wainscoted dorm room. The question on the table was: "What is the kinkiest thing you have ever done?" Three of us gave our lame answers, and then it was Miss Andover's turn.

"I go down on myself," she said.

So Yalies were not just the bright company I had been seeking: They were also strange, alien people with special gymnastic gifts. They could do multi-variable calculus and translate Cicero, but they could also give themselves oral sex. Not only that, I discovered. My sophomore year, a classmate became notorious for screaming her own name while masturbating alone in her room. My junior year, I learned about the female a cappella singing group whose members were known to pleasure their boyfriends with Astroglide lubricant. These were high times.

Swimming against this tide of sexual adventure is a frail, grasping cautionary note. Yalies have very little sex. They'll tell you so. "I'm not experiencing any indecency," said Jeff Kaplow, the roommate of Elisha Dov Hack, one of four orthodox Jews who sued Yale for the right to live off campus before junior year. (A federal judge dismissed the suit last summer.) Hack had claimed in The New York Times that the sexually charged dorm atmosphere interfered with his religious life. Kaplow disagreed: "It's not as much fun as Elisha makes it seem." A T-shirt from a few years back joked about the Yale Coed Naked Involuntary Abstinence Team. Yale is a culture in which sex toys, dirty talk, homosexuality and oral sex raise no eyebrows, but intercourse is a big, big deal. People will talk about sex all day; hundreds of students, male and female, attend the annual orgasm talk, a lecture by a professional sex educator, sponsored by the Yale Women's Center for the heightened pleasure of students everywhere. There are homosexuals and socialists and even one self-proclaimed campus dominatrix, but monogamy is the steady rule.

I asked some current Yale students to help me figure out the state of affairs. What they told me confirmed what I had observed: Relations between the sexes at Yale are at once conservative and liberal.

To understand how that can be, one must first accept that men and women can be just friends. "I think the women's movement has a lot to do with it," Blanca Fromm, a star of the 1997 women's soccer team, told me. "Women have become more comfortable with their bodies. And men are holding their tongues. We can say 'vagina' now, which we wouldn't have said in the Fifties. We've just grown up more comfortable with the opposite sex."

Coeducation, that ally of feminism, has also wrought change. When Yale first admitted women, in 1969, they were sequestered in their own residence hall. Soon they moved into men's buildings but had their own floors and bathrooms; that is still the situation for freshmen, who live on the Old Campus. Sophomore year things change. There are no coed rooms or suites, but the floors--and thus the bathrooms--are often coed. My senior year, the first person to see my matted hair and facial stubble every morning was the girl who lived across the hall.

Geography has changed the culture. A suite of four boys might become friendly with the four girls who live off the same stairwell, perhaps on the same floor; you all might study together and take your meals together in the dining hall. Friendships take root, and you become family. Except that you are not, of course, family, and maybe after a while one of the boys and one of the girls make a point of sitting next to each other during those study sessions. The other six shoot knowing looks at one another. In the privacy of their respective suites, the boys and girls each tease their own. Late one Wednesday night, you all head out to Yorkside Pizza for slices and pitchers of beer. And later, when all the others have retired to bed, the boy and girl, helped along by the beer, finally kiss. A relationship has begun.

So the fact of friendship has inevitably changed what comes next. It has not obviated dating, but has drawn some alternate routes on the map, without erasing the old ones. Men and women still party on weekends, mostly in the living rooms of their suites. Residents of a suite decide to throw a party, and they find a 21-year-old senior to buy a keg at Quality Wine. They mix a vodka and Kool-Aid punch, crank a mixed tape with some Eighties retro tunes and wait for the Saturday night crowd to funnel in. Alcohol does its work, and the dancing leads to making out. Maybe they find a bedroom, maybe just a dark corner.

Connor Martin, a junior from Middlebury, Vermont, says that these days few Yale relationships start with the traditional date. There is a new model, one she describes as "friendship and mutual interest leading to random hookup with drunkenness, developing into a relationship over time. That's a fairly common pattern. Twice for me the hookup led to a relationship, twice it didn't. But always there was a friendship beforehand." The hookup is the common currency of Yale bedrooms. As for what the hookup is, well, parents just don't understand. In a recent letter to the Yale Alumni Magazine, Richard Olsen, class of 1971, got it all wrong with this line: "The content and reader response bear ample testimony that casual sex ('hooking up') is fine with just about everybody." Hooking up, yes--but casual sex, no. "Hooking up is anything from touching to sex," says Jennie Han, a junior from southern California. "It's like California-speak; we use the term all the time and assume that people will know what we mean." Rafael Pardo, who graduated in May, was on the unlucky end of that spectrum. "Most random hookups I have are just kissing, touching of breasts," he told me. "But clothes do not come off."

Nobody I talked with could agree about dating. "I was never asked on a date, not in four years," one female recent graduate told me. Her male friend differed. "All three relationships I had started with a date," he said. Friendships can lead to more, parties can lead to hookups, but dating hasn't disappeared. Dances provide perfect opportunities to get to know someone. For the traditional Screw-Your-Roommate dance, roommates set each other up on blind dates. In theory, you don't know who your date is, and your roommate devises an idiotic scheme to bring the two of you together before the dance. If there is no dance any time soon, the "coffee date" is another easy first step.

The final wisdom on dating comes from a classmate: "Of course there's dating at Yale," she told me, "because whenever I'm lonely, it's because all my friends have been asked on dates."

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Even the lonely get some eye candy. Yalies have an unusual need to be nude, which I think is a vestigial WASP eccentricity--Princeton has the same tradition. "It's not like this at other schools," says Martin. "Yalies get naked for the most random reasons. Satan's Playhouse, put on by the Dramat Children's Theater to raise money, was just all naked people--naked people being carried on spits, naked people standing behind glass. A few years ago they had a naked macarena on the Old Campus. And then there are the Finals Fairies. During finals, the Pundits"--Yale's senior society of pranksters--"go naked through Cross Campus Library and give out candy."

"Nudity comes easily to people at Yale. Students like to be free," says Pardo, a star at the hip sport of ultimate Frisbee. "No inhibitions. It's a way of casting off what little order there is at Yale. The police won't bust you, though they might tell you to go inside--you know, 'You might catch a cold.'

"In the ultimate Frisbee community," Pardo says, "there is a tradition called the Land Shark." (For etymology, see Chevy Chase's classic Saturday Night Live skit.) "A person is carried around naked with a Frisbee stuck in his ass--to make him look like a land shark. This happened at Frisbee Nationals two years ago. People wanted a Land Shark, so one of the guys said he'd do it. He drops his pants right there, and four guys pick him up and parade him around with a Frisbee in his ass. The next year, I said if people wanted a Land Shark, I would do it. Then again this fall, at a coed party, people demanded a Land Shark, so I said OK."

Hardy souls, Yale students today. Yet I have been witness to courage of a rarer and truer sort. Future Freshmen Days is a rite of spring, the week when the high school seniors who have been accepted for the following year's freshman class come to visit, to hear Yale's sales pitch, to be talked out of ruining (continued on page 160)Yale(continued from page 104) their lives at Harvard or Stanford. Yale's most notorious traditional streak occurs every year at this time, when the most daring members of Berkeley College--one of the 12 residential colleges in which Yale students live--wait for a tour guide to bring the hundreds of high schoolers, often with their parents, through the Old Campus. Just as the tour passes in front of Vanderbilt Hall, the Berkeley gang emerge in all their jiggling, bushy splendor from an entryway. They run the length of the Old Campus, over a hundred yards, as the Future Freshmen of Yale glimpse their future. The students disappear through a gate at the far end of the Old Campus, to return to Berkeley College and their clothing. It all takes about 20 seconds.

Unless you are recent graduate Nir Goldman. In the spring of 1995, he had a broken foot, but he soldiered on. Wearing nothing save his crutches, he streaked. The pack of naked, charging men and women had disappeared from view when the audience--Yalies with cameras, high schoolers with parents--noticed Goldman coming into view. He hobbled down the path, taking five minutes' time, smiling to his public, a proud Yalie to the core.

If Yale students have few qualms about nudity and are so comfortable with the opposite sex, shouldn't there be an abundance of sex at Yale? If they're so liberal, why are they so conservative? AIDS is one answer. Today's freshmen were born in 1980, and had just learned to read when most Americans became aware of AIDS. For them, sex has always been dangerous.

And the young men and women who make it to Yale were generally extra responsible in high school. They were peer counselors and prefects and student body presidents. They don't take chances not with their grades and certainly not with their lives.

"I think there are a lot of people who come into their own at Yale," says Blanca Fromm. "They were nerdy in high school, into their work. It was hard to break out of that image. But here there's a lot of social mobility. You can do whatever you want--you can be an actor and a baseball player and do a lot of drugs."

Yet the high school baggage lingers. Yale men "were all dorks" in high school, says Connor Martin, "and here the dork bar is set so low." Tim Moffet, a junior from Tiburon, California, has equally kind words for the ladies. "My theory is this: The girls who get into Yale were the girls guys didn't talk to, so they got good grades. Some guys partied hard in high school, but you never hear of a girl here who did that." Rafael Pardo is more diplomatic, saying simply that "most people coming to Yale are people who are hard workers in academics, and academics aren't necessarily valued in high school."

If my sources are right, the vast majority of incoming Yale students are virgins. One senior guesses that about 70 percent of men and 85 percent of women enter Yale as virgins; another offers 80 percent and 65 percent. "Definitely over half for both sexes," says Fromm, "60 percent to 70 percent." While the news reports tell us that Americans are having sex at ever younger ages, in certain precincts intercourse is still something worth delaying. Perhaps the men and women who come to Yale as virgins are typical of people with their educated, middle-class backgrounds. Or maybe they had to tell themselves that intercourse is something worth waiting for, because they already had spent all of high school waiting.

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I was looking for the three raunchiest, most degenerate Yale students I could find. I was after people who could fill in the slow parts of my article, give me something prurient--something "illegal in Southern states," as a friend of mine used to say. I wanted dirt. From all directions, the answer came back the same: Ask the swim team. My friend Brian Hall was team captain two years back. I tracked him down in Seattle, where he works for Microsoft. "Two words," he said. 'John Barbie."

I called Barbie, told him that I had heard about his credentials and asked if he would put together a group of real deviants for me to interview. "A panel of perverts?" he asked. "Sure, I could do that."

We met on a Tuesday night at Mory's, the quintessential old-boy--"Old Blue," they say at Yale--members-only eating and drinking club. The traditional drinks are alcoholic punches gulped from large chalices called, with Ivy understatement, cups. You order a cup by its color: "We'll have a blue cup, and when we're done with that bring us a gold." Barbie had gathered two other swimmers and a hockey player. From his team were Tim Moffet, the junior from California, and Brendan Mulvey, a senior from Montclair, New Jersey. Keith Fitzpatrick, a junior from Long Island, skates for Yale's hockey team; he joined us after a late practice, when we were already on our third red cup.

The men did not disappoint. For two hours they talked of libidos run wild, enough to raise Yale's Puritan fathers from the dead. Fitzpatrick is master of "the deuce"--getting busy with one girl while another waits her turn, watching. Moffet, who lives in the residential college named for the preacher Timothy Dwight, has a ribald tale (much too long to go into here) that begins and ends with his staring at five pairs of breasts. He calls it the Tale of Ten Titties. Barbie, whose college is named for the Puritan John Davenport, is a connoisseur who likes to cue up Beethoven for bedroom ambience, preferably the Ninth Symphony, the one with the Ode to Joy. These were men who relished their women and relished their sex, and were blessed with the charisma and bodies to get what they wanted.

"One last question," I said. "How many women have you guys slept with? They paused to think, then answered: seven, three, four. None of them had been with more than seven women in all, and one of them had never slept with a Yale woman.

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I had tried to find people on the edge, and I had expected the edge to be crowded with their numerous sex partners. Instead, it was defined by the interesting quality of their erotic lives rather than the sheer number of notches in their belts. One student I spoke to, a sophomore from New England who is part of Yale's leftist politically active scene, seems to epitomize the curious Yale confection of monogamous perversity. Her hobby is scholarly erotica: She has scavenged the stacks and archives of Sterling Library for novels and letters, diaries and engravings and chapbooks--anything with prurient appeal. She speaks as frankly about sex as any sober 19-year-old I have ever met. "I have a tendency to be violent in hookups," she told me, "biting and slapping. And my experience with the Yale man is that he is turned on by this." But, in fact, only one of her partners has been a Yale student--and, for all her wildness in bed, she has never cheated on a boyfriend.

It may just be that where the culture of friendship thrives, sex will never be the same. Meanwhile, the willingness of Yale students to travel beyond the confines of the missionary position surely makes intercourse less of a holy grail. An article in The Yale Herald, a campus weekly, put it this way: "Dating in college does not necessarily mean you're having sex. Yalies understand that sexual intercourse isn't the be-all and end-all of sexual activity. People often sleep over well before they have sex, just to enjoy the intimacy of sharing the same bed. Many enjoy learning what gives them pleasure with someone they trust." Oral sex or mutual masturbation will often come first, it seems, and anal sex is not unheard of. One recent graduate even dated a girl who "was always walking in on her roommate tied to the bed with socks." Sleepovers, it seems, can take place for weeks before culminating in intercourse.

The slow pace does not make relationships any less serious. In fact, any Yalie will tell you that students are either "married" or alone. Relationships get serious fast, and people lament the loss of a middle ground. Couples go on "college time," which is like dog years in its heightened pace: They sleep together, usually have breakfast together but eat lunch and dinner apart, then study together for five hours before crashing into bed. Things happen quickly and heatedly, and the emotional intensity is only heightened by the overachiever's personality. If Yalies were "all dorks in high school," imagine them just a little older, even more analytical and verbal--and in heat. "Everything at Yale is an issue," says Esther Choo, a medical student who entered as an undergraduate in 1990 and has been observing Yale ways ever since. "People here don't just undergo change--they talk about it first."

The romantic relationships that flame out quickly rarely involve sex. And because love usually grows from friendship, to friendship it can easily return. Even when bitterness lingers, the Yale world is small and nobody can be avoided. At the very least, you make peace. Or better yet, the relationship lasts: I graduated from my residential college, Jonathan Edwards, with 100 classmates, two of them married (to each other) and four more engaged. Students can overanalyze and think too much, they can lose themselves in antiquity and the Renaissance, but when true love beckons, even the overachievers heed its call. It all can be exhausting and painful and hard, but like old age, it is probably better than the alternative: life outside the ivied walls. "People I know who graduate are terrified of losing these intimate groups," Connor Martin told me, "and having to date."

For two hours they talked of libidos run wild, enough to raise the Puritan fathers from the dead.