The Magazine

Campus Confidential

Loving to learn, and learning to love, in America.

Dec 29, 2008, Vol. 14, No. 15 • By EVE TUSHNET
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

Sex and the Soul

Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on
America's College Campuses

by Donna Freitas

Oxford, 328 pp., $24.95

Recently, Charles Murray and others have argued that too many people go to college. If enough parents read Donna Freitas's fascinating, flawed, and provocative new book, that problem will solve itself.

Freitas takes an in-depth look at the sexual and spiritual cultures of seven colleges-two Catholic, two evangelical, and three nonreligious-and paints a picture that should disturb even the most complacent chancellor or alumnus donor.

Freitas grouped the nonreligious and Catholic schools together as "spiritual" schools, because no religious ethos pervades or even chastens their students in the sexual realm. These are the schools of "hookup culture," where oral sex is less intimate than handholding and undergraduate women attend theme parties in which, no matter whether the men are "CEOs" or "Sports Pros," the coeds are always some variation of "ho." And interestingly, these are the schools where very bright students become incoherent or clichéd when asked to describe how their spirituality and their sexuality interact.

But Freitas doesn't spare the evangelical schools, either. She delineates the gossip culture common to both evangelical and "spiritual" schools-even though, for the evangelicals, such gossip ought to be as sinful as premarital sex. She gives poignant examples of the anxieties and confusion caused by the evangelical colleges' "senior scramble" for (in what's become a campus proverb) "ring by spring or your money back!"

To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

the rest of this article is available only to subscribers.

You have two options:

Subscribing today will provide you with immediate, complete access to the current issue, as well as to all back issues on the site. Each week you will be able to read articles from the newest issue even before print copies are mailed!

Privacy Policy