A recently conducted Yale Daily News poll of more than 250 undergraduates provides new -- and in some cases unexpected -- information on the sexual activity and sexuality of Yale College students.
Seventy-eight percent of Yale students polled said they have been "sexually active" -- defined as having engaged in oral, anal or vaginal intercourse. Fifty-one percent of students said they are have engaged in sexual activity in the week prior to polling. Fifteen percent of students said they will not have sex before marriage, and 46 percent of students said they believe sexual activity should be exclusive to the context of a relationship. Eighty-nine percent of students self-identified as heterosexual, 6 percent as homosexual, 4 percent as bisexual, and less than 1 percent identified their sexuality as something other than the previous three categories.
The random, anonymous poll was administered in six dining halls during dinner hours throughout the past month.
Student and faculty reactions to the poll varied from surprise to skepticism. While some said they believe the poll results accurately reflected their experiences with sexual activity and sexual orientation at Yale, others said the poll caused them to rethink their views.
Dain Lewis '07, the director of Sex Week at Yale -- a series of workshops and talks on all aspects of sex and sexuality that begins Monday -- said he would not have predicted some of the poll results regarding the level of sexual activity at the University.
"If Yale's is that high, I would think other colleges' are higher," he said. "Clearly, there are misconceptions about this stuff."
Conservative or licentious?
The poll results support Lewis' belief that many Yalies are in the dark about the amount of sexual activity on campus. Although 78 percent of students polled said they personally have been sexually active, in the survey they estimated that only 68 percent of all Yalies would answer the same. Lewis attributed this underestimation to Yale's reputation as an institution focused on higher learning, not on what he called the typical "college good life." Yale, Lewis said, "is not an Arizona State," and is known for the intellectual activities of its students, not the sexual ones. But after looking at the results of the poll, Lewis said, his opinion of sex at Yale may be changing.
"Maybe Yale is more on par with other schools," he said.
The subject of whether Yale is sexually conservative or licentious is certainly still up for debate. While some students said it is quite possible that Yalies are as sexually active as any college kids across the country, many others said they doubted, for example, that over 50 percent of students polled had been sexually active in the past week.
Jack Vogelsang '08 said he thinks students at Yale are too busy to be having as much sex as the poll suggests.
"I think people don't have time to have sex here," he said. "I think relationships at Yale kind of get pushed by the wayside, which is too bad."
The fact that 15 percent of students polled said they did not believe in having sex before marriage was hardly a shock to many students and members of the University community. Professor William Summers, who teaches the popular course "Biology of Gender and Sexuality", said he attributes the number of students who do not condone pre-marital sex to religion.
"I'm not surprised," he said. "I think there's a fairly strong current of religious belief among Yale undergraduates."
But Yale Chaplain Frederick Streets said sexually conservative beliefs could be due to a host of reasons other than faith.
"I think it's multi-factoral," he said. "For some it's a clear decision not to [be sexually active] as a value. It's also a larger public health issue of sexually transmitted diseases, with AIDS being the largest and most prominent in our psyche."
Many students, Streets added, may be influenced by their past sexual experiences, or rather, the lack thereof. Students who arrive at Yale "totally virginal," Streets said, may hesitate to engage in sexual activity because they have no previous reference for it. Other students may have engaged in sexual activity in the past but have discovered a new religious identity that includes abstinence, and have modified their views and practices, Streets said.
The poll also asked students about their beliefs with regard to sex and non-marital relationships. Slightly fewer than half of the students polled said they believe sexual activity should be reserved for relationships. Rob Kerth '08 said he was surprised by this statistic.
"I would expect the number to be higher than 40 percent," he said. "I always got the feeling that sex outside of a relationship was prominent and fun to make jokes about but wasn't as large a part of what was actually going on."
In addition, the poll found that 68 percent of students believed in waiting more than a month to have sex after starting a new relationship. Thirty-five percent of students said they believed in waiting more than three months.
Laura Chandhok '08 said this is consistent with what she has witnessed of relationships and sexual practices at Yale, which she thinks are generally sexually conservative. Yale's size, she said, may be an additional factor in its conservatism.
"It seems like because Yale is smaller, if you do have a one-night stand, people are going to find out about it," she said. "Everyone knows that as soon as you hook up with someone, you're going to see them around all the time, and it's going to be awkward."
Sophomore slump?
When broken down by year, the poll results show differences in the amount of sexual activity in which each class engages. Only 63 percent of freshmen, for example, said they have been sexually active. For sophomores, this number jumps to the school-wide average of 78 percent, and remains the same for juniors. The number jumps again for seniors, 90 percent of whom said they had been sexually active.
Lewis said he believes these results make sense when he thinks about common experiences at Yale.
"Freshman year is definitely the big hook-up year," he said.
But since the poll's definition of sexual activity includes oral sex, Lewis said, a lot of the jump between freshman and sophomore year could be due to students engaging only in oral sex, not vaginal or anal intercourse.
Other students attributed the rise in sexual activity within the first year at Yale to the new social confidence many students find when they come to college.
"People come here being the smartest kid in their class and probably pretty insecure," Celeste Ballard '08 said. "Coming to Yale sort of levels their playing field."
Freshman counselor Matthew Vorsanger '06 said many freshmen are first exposed to adult responsibility, including sexuality, when they arrive at Yale. But in Vorsanger's experience, most freshmen seem capable of making the necessary adjustments on their own. Although he is trained to deal with questions relating to sex, he said he has received very few from his counselees.
"I would guess that they're either talking it out for themselves or they're taking advantage of the resources the Peer Health Educators offer," Vorsanger said.
Some students said they think the rise in sexual activity between junior and senior year is a result of the last-chance mentality that pervades their last semesters at Yale. Michelle Jose-Kampfner '08 said seniors who have not lost their virginity might just want to get it over with before they leave college.
"They probably feel like it's their last year where it's socially acceptable to get rip-roaring drunk and do something crazy," she said.
While Jose-Kampfner could be right about that senior desire, according to the poll, the junior class tops the school in terms of current sexual activity. Sixty percent of juniors polled said they had been sexually active in the past week.
One in four, maybe more?
The poll's results regarding sexual orientation do not quite match up to that ever-present half-joke: "one in four, maybe more." The rhyme originated from a 1987 Wall Street Journal article titled "Lipstick and Lords: Yale's New Look," an article that described a Yale Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Co-op dance, and calculated that its attendees, who she assumed were exclusively gay, made up a quarter of Yale's student body. Despite the dubious claim, many people within and outside of Yale have taken "one in four, maybe more" at least somewhat to heart, and Yale has become known as the "gay Ivy" in recent years.
In fact, far less than 25 percent of Yale undergraduates polled identified themselves as homosexual, a result that Summers said he could have guessed, despite the myth.
"The one-in-four issue was strictly red herring," Summers said.
The question of sexual orientation becomes more complicated when the poll results are broken down into gender categories. While 12 percent of male students identified as homosexual and 2 percent as bisexual, none of the female students polled identified as homosexual, and 6 percent identified as bisexual.
Summers said that while he thinks the results generally reflect the composition of the Yale student body, they are subject to the problem of labeling and categories that plagues sexual orientation in general.
"There's the issue of the activity and there's the issue of what you think you are," he said. "They're not always the same."
Other students said they do not think the poll results accurately describe the Yale population. Rebecca Czyrnik '09 said that although she is confused by why not a single woman polled identified herself as homosexual, she thinks there are definitely more homosexual men than women at Yale.
"It seems to me that at Yale you have a lot of homosexual guys because this is where they come, whereas girls are more likely to show up at all-girls schools," she said.
Patrick Ward '08, the coordinator of Yale's LGBT Co-op, said he thinks the men's poll results are consistent with his experience of the size of the gay population at Yale, but he was surprised that none of the women polled identified as homosexual.
Like Summers, Ward said he thought part of the problem might be with labeling.
"There's certainly the possibility of people rejecting these types of classifications," he said.
Ward also attributed the women's results to the differing willingness of men and women to identify as homosexual. In his anecdotal experience, Ward said, men who do not identify as heterosexual are more likely to identify as homosexual while women who do not identify as heterosexual are more likely to identify as bisexual.
In general, Ward said, Yale is open to a diversity of sexuality, though it still has some way to go.
"It's certainly my experience that students are pretty open to conversations that discuss gay things," he said. "At the same time, there's a much lower level of comfort with people who don't neatly fit into 'homosexual'."
Overall, Summers said he thinks it is normal for students to explore their sexuality in college.
"The transition between being 15 years old and being 25 years old is, besides being born, when the most things change in your life, and this is right where college comes," he said.