College Sex—Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits

College is more than studying, football games, and the Classics club. College sex is the ultimate social rite of passage and obsession of many co-eds who are leaving their homes and families for a taste of freedom, sometimes for the first time. Coming from an era which used the term “going steady,” to an era of “hooking up,” parents consider college-age sex their worst nightmare come true, while many students consider it one of the best aspects of higher education, and a major identity forming event. College sex symbolizes and embodies the college student’s unquestionable independence and new stage of adulthood.

College Sex: Philosophers With Benefits  takes an insightful look at student sexual behavior, including the ethical issues of casual dating, sexting (“The Virtual Bra Clasp: Navigating Technology in College Courtship,”), cheating, “the walk of shame,” spring break (“Can Girls Go Wild With Self-Respect?), safety, homosexual experimentation, teacher-student relationships, and drug and alcohol use.

The essays, with a foreword from Heather Corrina (scarletteen.com), move through each year of maturity, Freshman (Hook-Up Culture), Sophomore (Friends with Benefits), Junior (Ethics of College Sex), to Senior (Sex and Self-Respect). The contributors contemplate how the college environment forms an ideal and acceptable space for sexual experimentation, ranging from the mutually respectful, to the inebriated, meaningless, and the degrading.  

The contributors (some of which are members of the Society of the Philosophy of Sex and Love) ask these types of questions: Do sexual acts require love in order to have value? Should college students avoid a “friends with benefits” type of relationship, to prevent hurt feelings down the road? And what about the muddy waters of student- teacher relationships (“A Horny Dilemma: Sex and Friendship between Students and Professors”)?

Working from the philosophical viewpoints of Nagel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir, Socrates, Epicureanism, Aristotle, and the highly compatible schools of thought such as feminist, aesthetic, metaphysical, absurdist, and existentialist philosophy, these essays address all the questions students have related to a sexually active life in the 21^st century college setting.