Sex isn’t that hot after all

So apparently college kids like having sex.

I’ll give you a moment to recover from that… So apparently college kids like having sex.

I’ll give you a moment to recover from that mind-blowing factoid.

Not only that, but they’re writing newspaper columns ’bout the big S-E-X. As The New York Times uncovered last Friday, the sex column is popping up in more and more college newspapers across the nation. Spreading, you might say. Like the hantavirus.

I know. You’re thinking I must have some sort of religious or moral beef with writing about sex. Why else would I care?

Good try, but no. Believe me, you’ll know when I’ve got a religious beef: I bring the Scripture, and I bring it hard.

I don’t stay up nights tying myself in knots at the thought of college students having sex. After all, isn’t that why we come to college – to experience new things? To meet new and different people, and to broaden our horizons by having sex with them?

But the sex column reflects an interesting contradiction in the American psyche: Sex is supposed to be the big taboo, not talked about in polite circles and certainly not printed in respectable journals. At the same time, sex is being used to sell everything from cars to pens to toaster ovens. This toaster is a chick magnet.

You can’t have it both ways, the taboo and the trivial. Sex columnists like to see themselves as relieving us of the taboo by getting sex out in the open. As though it were a new product we’d never heard of before.

It turns out people were talking about sex long before there were columnists to write about it. That’s why, when Ken Starr blew the doors off the President’s bedroom, you didn’t see crowds of confused Americans in the streets, asking, “He did what? With his WHAT?!”

Thank you, Monica Lewinsky.

This newfound, congressionally sponsored openness probably didn’t change what people were saying about sex. It just moved what they were saying about sex to the front page of USA Today.

So, BAM! Sex is big news again, and we’re gonna need people to write about it.

The taboo didn’t break, it just sort of bent. Sex is still supposed to be this weird, transcendent thing, kind of mysterious and kind of dirty. At the same time, the sex columnists assure us it’s okay to talk about what positions work best and hey, did you ever think of making a sexy videotape for her birthday?

In doing so, they’ve become victims of their own success. Sure, they’ve made us more open about our sex lives, more accepting of other people’s sexual habits. But sometimes too much knowledge spoils a thing, makes it trivial.

If you open everyone’s bedroom doors, you might be surprised to find, as Johnny Rotten would put it, nothing but “two and a half minutes of squelching noises.”

That’s what’s happened to the poor sex column writers. They were treading a fine line to begin with: Writing about sex is about as interesting as talking about sex, which is to say it’s not interesting at all compared to the real thing. But at least it can be a little naughty.

Naughtiness can only get you so far, though. It’ll get you the “Oh my god, I can’t believe they printed this!” effect, which lasts about … 2 1/2 minutes. The voyeuristic thrill of reading about someone else’s sex life wears off pretty quick, because it’s stuff just about all of us have heard before, and it wasn’t that fascinating the first time around. It’s like pornography: stimulating at first, but leaving you unfulfilled and wondering why you bothered.

Jesse Hicks is a columnist for The Pitt News. His paychecks go straight to Maxim, the most important magazine humankind has yet produced. He can be chatted up at jhicks@pittnews.com.