Editorial: Safety is no casual issue

You’d think a college campus would be a relatively easy place to find casual sex.

But… You’d think a college campus would be a relatively easy place to find casual sex.

But apparently students at the University of Chicago need a little help.

An undergraduate at the university recently launched UChicagoHookups.com — a social networking site that allows students on campus to find “casual encounters.”

“The site is similar to the ‘Casual Encounters’ section of Craigslist, but allows students to scan fellow students — rather than random people on the Internet,” The Huffington Post reported.

And according to the website, its owners are looking to expand to other universities.

Unfortunately, this website seems to provide the message that because the site is only open to students, it makes casual sex safer. We think that casual sex with other students is just as potentially dangerous as hooking up with strangers from the Internet. Just because someone has the same .edu e-mail provider as you doesn’t mean you can trust them.

Avert.org — an international HIV and AIDS charity — defines casual sex as “a sexual activity where those involved do not define it as romantic or their partner as boyfriend or girlfriend.” Although this sounds tempting in a college environment, it is still important to protect yourself by knowing your hook-up’s sexual history. And when you meet people on a website, they might fail to tell you of any sexually transmitted diseases they have. As always, when you sleep with someone, you are sleeping with everyone he or she has ever slept with.

Because the website specifically aims to help people find casual encounters, Chicago students might be feeling the itch instead of feeling the love. After all, the more partners you have, the more at-risk you are for HIV and other diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — even if you use a condom.

In addition, something important to consider is that campuses aren’t that big. If you use a website to find a “study buddy” from your university, the chance of you awkwardly bumping into that person again is pretty high. Casual gets a little more complicated when contained in a small campus environment. Sure that one-night stand was fun — until he or she ends up in your statistics class next semester.

Ultimately, we think UChicago’s website seems a little desperate and lazy. People casually hook up on college campuses all the time without a social networking tool. But more importantly, we’re worried about the health consequences of promoting random promiscuity. Who you hook up with and how you find them is, of course, your choice. But if the website causes hook-ups on campus to increase, the transmission of sexual diseases will likely also increase. Sex might be casual sometimes, but your safety shouldn’t be.