BOO! You Whore!

By Lauren Roodt
I sit awkwardly at the Friar’s table, my shoulder half turned away from my friend and a stranger who looks as if he is trying to merge his body with hers. I don’t want to be rude and pull my inebriated side-kick away from her tonsil-hockey match yet I think I should. But, I am very obviously a third wheel and because I am such a good friend, I grit my teeth and bear the gross spectacle before me. All the while I keep a disgusted mommy’s eye on her as he flirts his way into her pants. Before I have finished my first drink she has left with the boy.

While trying to drown out the sloppy noises emanating from behind me I did some thinking. In this day and age people have an opinion about everything and we are allowed to say it. Sex used to be a definite ‘no-no’ but now everybody talks about it. Whether you like it or not we all have something to say about it. Call me prude, but I sit very safely on the side of the fence labelled “Premarital = Bad”. You get those who aren’t doing it but don’t think it’s such a big deal. Then you get those who will not even consider marriage without testing the “skills”. Time and time again you hear it- “but, like, what if you aren’t compatible in bed? Your relationship won’t work.” Open your eyes! Your relationship won’t work either if you can’t remember all of your “sex-scapades”. What is going to make you stand out if he has already had it all?

Now I’m not totally unrealistic about this. Sex is great! It wouldn’t be so popular if it didn’t give you instant feelings of euphoria. Ok yes, so the urge to have sex is natural. Right, it raises you relationship to a completely new level both physically and emotionally. Sex will change your relationship whether it’s good or bad. But sex is the very reason for why so many people are walking around emotionally damaged. It is why 40 million people are living with AIDS. It is the reason for so many abortions. The reason why 1 in 2 marriages end in divorce is because your spouse has given that special thing to someone else. So sex makes you feel good about yourself, but that is up until the point during which you creep out of his room and then feel mortified when he walks straight past you the next day. I agree, sex isn’t the root of all society’s problems but I do think we need to be more picky when it comes to who we do and when.

At Rhodes there is a huge amount of pressure to have sex and to have as much of it as possible. After all, away from the ties of home, university is the place to do it! It is not only guys who feel the pressure. I run out of fingers while trying to count how many girls I know who have lost their virginity to a “stranger” as a first year at Rhodes. What saddens me is this... nobody has the balls to questions their friend’s actions. At high school, if you were sleeping around you kept it hushed. Now at varsity, just because life is liberal, no one challenges the majority. When a girl loses her virginity her friends are more horrified about who the guy was than by the fact that he was a complete stranger. Sex is becoming more of a game and it is progressively losing its significance. So many people are turning sex into a detached and unimportant act without realising the implications.

I am not trying to condemn sex but I have cried with enough of my friends to know the hurt which can come from “that one time”. I like to hope that there are those out there who do stop to think before diving into “pleasuredom” and that people do still exist who follow my sentiments. If not we are on our way to becoming a bunch of licentious whores.