There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell\u2019s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, \u201cYou have to think all of these things that we think.\u201d\u009d They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already. At her public high school, everyone, \u201cliterally everyone,\u201d\u009d wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you\u2019re not doing something that nobody is doing?<\/p>\n
And then Fredell arrived at Harvard. Sitting in a Cambridge restaurant not long ago, she told me that people back home called it \u201cgodless, liberal Harvard.\u201d\u009d Some discouraged her from going, but Fredell went anyway, arriving in the fall of 2005. She wanted to study government, she said, maybe become a lawyer, and she knew that \u201cpeople take you more seriously as a Harvard student.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
From the start, she told me, she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas. There were so many different kinds of people at Harvard, most of them trying to change the world, and everyone trying to figure out what they thought of everyone else. \u201cHarvard really puts pressure on you to define who you are,\u201d\u009d Fredell said, and she loved everything about Harvard, except the sex.<\/p>\n
Sex, as she put it, was not even \u201canything I\u2019d ever thought about\u201d\u009d when, as a freshman, she was educated in safe-sex practices. What she was told was the sort of thing found in a Harvard pamphlet called \u201cEmpowering You\u201d\u009d: \u201cput the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus. . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Fredell began to understand she was in \u201ca culture that says sex is totally O.K.\u201d\u009d When a new boyfriend came to her, expressing desire, she managed to \u201cstick to my guns,\u201d\u009d she said, but there were \u201cuncouth and socially inept\u201d\u009d men, as she considered them, all around, and observing the rituals of her new classmates, Fredell couldn\u2019t help being alarmed. \u201cThe hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing,\u201d\u009d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s shocking! It\u2019s everywhere!\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n