Abstinence and the College Girl

Contrary to the image in the popular press of college coeds as "ambulatory mattresses" (as a classmate of mine once described the members of a particular sorority), a sizable percent of women (nearly 1 in 3) are still virgins upon graduation. Those who are sexually active are reporting having 25% fewer partners in the previous year compared with students surveyed in 2000. A 2006 survey at Harvard found that nearly half the undergrads had never engaged in intercourse.

Pro-abstinence student organizations have been formed at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and even at the quintessential party school Arizona State.

Wendy Shalit has written an excellent book called Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good. on how more and more young women are rejecting the radical feminist notion that sexual promiscuity = empowerment. The trend towards greater abstinence among college women IMHO shows that today's coeds realize that one can be smart, independent, assertive, aspire to a career, etc. and still be modest, kind, and treat sex as a sacred gift between husband & wife.