Good thread, Richard! We can look forward to your non-faculty readers--young Harvard grads and current students--commenting on the truth, or lies, of casual sex at Harvard; thereby instructing and titillating your other readers: FAS faculty who wonder what really goes on once those kids leave office hours, or the dining hall.
 

A recent grad's view:
Hook up culture based around bars, room parties, and clubs (both extracurricular and Final). Not much old fashioned dating -- but I don't know if that happens at campuses anywhere.

Lot of dormcest and entryway-cest, especially among freshman; lot of inter-club hooking up among the big activities: a cappela groups, Phillips Brooks, the Model whatevers, IOP, HRDC. I'd say it's mostly casual. Those who aren't hooking up are likely involuntarily abstaining for reasons of devotion to schoolwork or unattractiveness, though a small group of religious individuals are known to abstain for moral reasons. I've never seen these individuals pressured.

My experience is that Harvard students stagger into Sunday brunch and eat their "morning after chicken" willing to talk about particular hook-ups or national sexual politics in general without stopping to think about the nuances of their own behavior.
 

Dormcest. I love it.
 

I would love to see a broader explanation/discussion of the "hook up culture". A young high schooler I know is "hooking up" with a friend of the opposite sex for, well, sex, yet he hasn't ever -- to my knowledge -- even gone on a date. Is hooking up taking the place of romance? Are people going to hook up to have kids? Is this the equivalent of the gay bathhouse ethos moving into the mainstream? Please, I beseech you all, splain me.
 

Sorry O5er... but is "hook up" the same as sex?
 

I'm probably one of the worst people to explain this, but I'll try. "Hook up" is a deliberately vague term that covers the whole spectrum from making-out-while-dancing (kissing, fondling, general skeeziness) to full-fledged intercourse. It's intentionally meant to cover a range of behaviours; you go into increased detail describing the nature of a hook-up depending on the company you're with. It can mean anything from "we kissed" to "we made out on the dance floor" to "we fondled and fell asleep on each other" to more traditional intercourse. More public hookups are naturally less graphic than those in private.

Hook ups are by defintion "sexy," but most of the time not sex.

Sometimes hook-ups are deliberately planned to lead into relationships, sometimes they're planned to defuse sexual tension and deliberately avoid relationships. Most of the time they are unplanned and abetted by copious amounts of alcohol. It's not uncommon for students to "hook up" with friends and then carry on like nothing happened. For younger undergrads in extracurriculrs it's a game to figure out which of the upper class organizational leaders have hooked up.

Almost every H social circle has one or two "faux-married" couples; people who are in long term dating relationships while everyone else randomly hooks up, either inside the circle or with people they meet at parties.

The only time it hits home is when you've hooked up overnight with somebody in Mather and you have to trudge back to the Quad at 8AM on a Sunday wearing last night's party clothes.

Hope that helps. The one thing that holds true in every Crimson and Indy sex survey is that all Harvard undergrads lie about sex.
 

Try this reference to find out more about hooking up:
http://tinyurl.com/37ztsl
 

Richard, your headline is misleading. Harvard identity (and whatever else that entails, it certainly does entail whatever portion of 'nerdiness' goes along with students' academic superiority) has nothing to do with this group's mission. The headline should say "No sex please, we're Christians."

As to Crimson 05er's post -- first of all, don't be so modest ("I'm probably one of the worst people to explain this")! Everyone knows you're a hottie.

Secondly, notice, everyone, how in a recent Harvard student's natural talking mode, social identity (including romantic [sic] activities) is strongly intertwined with membership in extracurricular clubs and groups.

What does it say about the IOP, for example, if we conclude (I think not unfairly) that for its most committed members it is viewed in some significant measure as the place to maintain a campus nightlife? Much the same is true of all the most successful groups on campus, which not coincidentally are the ones that require and (socially) reward the biggest time commitments from their members.

This state of affairs is the result of a decade-long hypertrophy in campus activities as the main structure for students to develop socially. And that is the result of the College having abdicated on some of the more 'arbitrary' community-building work, of the sort that goes on during Freshman Orientation Week but does not much continue beyond that. As 05er hints with ihs mention of dormcest, things are somewhat better in the Yard, and for upperclassmen I would much prefer ongoing preponderances of dormcest -- at least in that case students are exploring romantic possibilities with people outside their 'hobbies and interests' demographic, and outside the circle of people who agree with them about what clubs are the best to spend time on. The dorms are a cross-section of Harvard's extraordinarily diverse student body; the clubs, activities, and teams are not.

But that's not the main reason the IOP encourages frail moral fiber. For that, you'll have to wait till midweek....

One might reasonably conclude from this post, by the way, that not all Harvard teaching faculty are clueless about how students spend their time outside of 'office hours' (wow, 8:51, students come to your office hours? who are YOU?).

Standing Eagle
 

This is excellent: The one subject, sex, on which I thought SE might be silent or ignorant... but he's not!
 

My headline, misleading? Never.
 

Apparently the sex is so casual in Harvard extracurricular groups that at the Crimson, on some Thursday evenings, the head lines extend out onto the sidewalk!

(But yes, Crimson head lines can be misleading too. Even a fifteen-person backlog can clear up in a matter of minutes.)

Or were we talking about something else?

Standing Eagle
 

Mr Bones: Mr Jones, what do you know, how do you gets the water in the watermelon?

Mr Jones: I don't know, how does you gets the water in the watermelon?

Mr Bones: You plants it in the spring!

Mr Jones: Did you hear about the junior Crimson editors who are desperate for oral sex?

Mr Bones: Why yes I did Mr Bones.

Mr Jones: Well what does a fellow like yourself know about a thing like that?

Mr Bones: Well Mr Jones, doesn't you read the newspapers? I understands those editors is making head lines.

...
clap clap

clap

...

And they say vaudeville is dead!

SE
 

sie idiotisch Kaiseradler. Sexuelle Aufklarung.
Geschlechtsverkehr mit Kondom.
 

Please folks, let's not massacre the German language (or any language, for that matter).
 

I'm a little puzzled by the idealization of the "date." For anyone who's known anyone in the Match.com world of online dating (post college), "the date" is more often than not a way to legitimate the inevitable "hook-up." I don't know how different that really is from seeing someone at dinner in the dining hall as a student, agreeing to meet at a party, and then "hooking up." Think we might be making a lot out of nothing here.

(and what's up with the bizarre pseudo-german?)
 

Ah the romance....it's touching.......I personally like idealizing "dates".

You can do whatever you want.
 

Not macht erfinderisch!