Sex and the Sample Size

This is the story of the time I set out to learn something about the sex lives of college students but ended up learning something about myself.

It was 1988, give-or-take. I was a freshman at La Salle University, a little Catholic college in North Philadelphia, majoring in secondary education/mathematics. Our Educational Psychology I teacher, a rotund Christian Brother with Friar Tuck energy, broke us into groups for a data collection/analysis/presentation project. Our group’s task: survey the sexual habits of our fellow underclasspersons, collate the results, do the whole colorful-chart-’n’-graph thing, then present our findings to the rest of the class.

Does that sound like a high school-level project to you? Not the sex part. Replace “sexual habits” with “gaming habits” or something, and it should totally sound like a high school-level project. Indeed, my sons undertook similar projects in various classes in 10th-11th grades. I mention this because folks my age, particularly teachers, often complain about how watered down high school and college curricula have become. Why, in our day, we translated Cicero! Into Sanskrit! In geology class! 

Perhaps others fiddled with supercolliders in freshman physics at august institutions like Rider. I ended up in several glorified percents-and-pie-charts classes, many of them designed to prepare future teachers.

Anyway, I didn’t want to participate in the sex survey project. I despised group work. Back then, I was an argumentative know-it-all with little respect for the opinions of others.

Professor Tuck would not let me work independently, no matter how hard I stomped my feet and tantrummed about my maturity and workplace readiness. Reluctantly, I helped my peers whip up a 100% anonymous scientific sex survey that we could distribute among our peers in a way that was certain to make us the most popular and desirable folks in the dorms.

The questions on the survey were generic and conservative to the point of being useless. I don’t think we asked if anyone was non-heterosexual, because it’s a verifiable fact that there were precisely zero openly gay students on Catholic college campuses in 1988. Heck, the dude who ran the drama club, wore scarves on warm days, listened to Laurie Anderson and was writing a Billy Joel jukebox musical that he hoped to star in and direct claimed that he had a steady girlfriend at a far-off campus. (St. Joes).

We did ask survey questions about masturbation, and got an unassailably accurate “yes” rate of around 27%. I remember the masturbation questions because several respondents, mostly female, took the time to editorialize on the surveys with remarks like: “That is gross and sinful and you are a pervert for even suggesting it,” sometimes in thick marker.

That’s what the college environment was like back then. Asking anything too zesty would have gotten us shunned and excommunicastrated.