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Virginity Rates, Divided By College Major
By Brian FairbanksJuly 20th, 2009, 12:13 pmComments (8)
Did you lose your virginity before, during, or after college? Are you in college now and are a virgin? Maybe your major is to blame...
Someone from Wellesley (who is, of course, so not a virgin) put together this helpful graph based on a scientific survey they did of their college campus. Of course, "scientific" should be in quotes because what college student is going to tell the truth about their virginity? Certainly not art students, apparently. See below:
ForwardOn has this to say:
1. 0% of students with 'studio arts' major are virgins
2. Virginity rates for Spanish major[s] (43%) [are] much lower than virginity rates for English and French majors (50%)
3. There is evidence that geeks get laid the least in college. Check out the rates for Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics.
In other words, nothing at all surprising, but charming nonetheless.
Via this blog.
Commentarium (8 Comments)
As a professional at this sort of thing, painfully not scientific. I mean come on, Wellesley students are certainly not representative of college students in general, and that's just for starters. But then I guess that way of thinking puts me squarely at the "geek" end of the continuum.
My take-home lesson: The computer science geeks shall inherit the earth.
The definition of virginity used was probably "penile-vaginal penetration". If oral, manual,anal etc. sex was included, I am sure the numbers would be much different.
Where's engineering at? I can speak from experience that women are acutely aware that math/computer/science/engineering nerds grow up to make a lot of money, so I'd bet their virginity rates are a lot lower than say philosophy majors.
Well, back in the day, I did my part -- deflowered two Wellesley English majors (one of whom doubled in French -- go ahead, write your own joke).
Oh, and BDJ, Wellesley doesn't have an engineering program -- you go to MIT for that.
Wellesley is an awful sample source for this kind of thing. Also, it's kind of useless without some sort of baseline for age or year. My friends who went to Wellesley (8 girls) were, as near as I can guess, more likely to be virgins upon arrival (pretty sure five of them were, at least). I don't think I'd believe any of them stayed that way past sophomore year, though I had nothing to do with any deflowering there.
As ever, the tacit claim that correlation equates to causation breaks my heart a little bit.
That's funny because there's so many lesbians/bisexuals at womens colleges, they should have counted lesbian sex, too. Maybe they dont stay lesbians, but if you've you've had a hand up your vag, you're not a virgin.
I went to Wellesley during the time period when this survey was conducted, and it is definitely not scientific, nor was it ever claimed to be. It's self-reported, and I (for better or worse) worked for the student magazine that conducted it. We also surveyed MIT students since the publication was jointly authored, and of course far fewer MIT students admitted to being virgins, with men reporting lower virginity rates (of course). Unfortunately, the original article is no longer online or I would link to it.
I can say that the topic was relevant at the time since Rolling Stone had just published an article about (supposedly) wild Wellesley women, and professors started speaking out about all the students they had shagged.
http://jaydixit.com/writing/wellesley.htm
I honestly can't remember how we defined sex, but I think we left it up to the respondent. At Wellesley, there is plenty of awareness that activities other than penis-vagina intercourse are considered sex, trust me! But admittedly the article did focus on heterosexual sex.
I find it completely hilarious that this survey is surfacing again, since I've seen it on one other blog, but it's always the Wellesley version from NINE years ago. Of course, it's probably fairly accurate even if the methods were terrible, but what do I know? I was a linguistics major who had already been pregnant before matriculating . . .
Now you say something