First, we, the writers of the column, would like to start out by admitting that we are imposters. The originators of “Pillow Talk” have passed on (they graduated in the spring) and they entrusted us with carrying out the duties of Dill and Doe. A little about us, we don’t do anything on this campus except write this column. We are actually both sex majors! In fact, we have sex with each other, for research purposes of course.
Now we actually are here to discuss how Dill and I were recently thinking about how weird hookups on college campuses can be, primarily when deciding whether to go back to Butts or Nics, Hewitt or Fountain, Olin stacks or the second floor of Sci Li. We came across a term coined by Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan in “Sexual Citizen: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power and Assault on Campus”—sexual geography.
“Sexual geographies refer to ‘geographies’ in the plural, to indicate both the range of spaces that shape sexual interactions and the ways in which the student’s resources and social position affect their experience at the same space,” the book reads.
In Hirsch and Khan’s understanding, college campuses constitute a distinctive ecosystem for sexuality and hookups due to the specificity of the physical spaces we inhabit within them. These geographies affect the power dynamics in the interaction and can lead to sexual coercion. One of the easiest ways to identify this dynamic is to notice how people’s bodies are being treated or portrayed; those that are treated/seen as powerful, dominant, pursuers or entitled often also have this power in their interactions. There are several challenging physical geographies on college campuses.
College students (usually underclassmen) have to battle the question of where to have sex when they have a roommate. If they are going to sexile their roommate, where in the room will they have sex? What common space is a violation? If you and your roommate have decided to not have sex in your own dorm, you are more likely to engage in sex in more public spaces (which puts you at risk for being seen, and putting others into a situation they did not consent to).
Spaces create and constrain sexual opportunities, and these opportunities are unequally allocated to the most powerful groups on college campuses. For example, upperclassmen tend to have the greatest control. They are more likely to have singles, apartments, or houses, so when underclassmen finds themselves in a space controlled by the upperclassmen, they feel more pressure to engage in sexual interaction. They typically don’t have a place to go to if they want to leave, and the underclassmen find themselves in a space where they do not feel comfortable navigating these tense situations.
If you want to sit in someone’s dorm, you will likely sit together on the bed. There is no option for putting space between yourself and the person you are with. This act can create an atmosphere where consent is implied due to proximity.
Say you’re a senior. You invite a cute first-year in your class to a party at your wood frame. You’re both flirting all night, and as the party is winding down you ask if they want to go upstairs. By having the interaction, in your home, however far it goes, you inherently hold more power. This does not mean that you are inherently coercing this first-year into a sexual interaction. But it does mean that you are responsible for asking for consent continuously, as always, and making sure they feel comfortable in your space. An example would be to offer to walk them home and not assume they are spending the night.
We encourage you to be conscious of sexual geographies in your future hookups and how they inform consent. Informed consent is always sexy.
Xoxo,
Dill and Doe (reincarnated)
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