College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (11 page)

Her movements in the evening reinforce her sexuality, even as her movements in the morning attempt to deny it. The walk of shame itself would not be shameful without the observation of others. Gilles Deleuze observes, “A body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies.”
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This works both ways in the case of the walk of shame. The woman’s body is a body out of place, which causes a jarring effect on those who recognize her for what she performs (not necessarily what she is). They see her as a breach of feminine codes of conduct, and as such, other women are implicated in her transgression. Other bodies gaze at her, disciplining her through knowing looks and slurs muttered in her direc- tion. Her clothing and her own adoption of a shameful affect testify against her. At this point, her clothing acts as an index of
actualized
sexu- ality, while her recoiling away from the weight of observation functions as a signal of her shame.

You Can Walk, But You Can’t Hide (The Shame)

What seems, more than anything, to make the walk of shame shameful is its transparency. The walk of shame is a manifestation of feminine sexu- ality which is simultaneously required and forbidden. Such paradoxical norms are shaped early in our development and women are as likely as men to sanction other women.Yet the reason we know that such an act is worthy of shame is the semiotic codes displayed by the woman as she performs the walk of shame. Such codes take considerable effort to alter. Naomi Wolf observes that attitudes toward clothing are indicative of women’s position in society:

Clothing that highlights women’s sexuality will be casual wear when wom- en’s sexuality is under our own control. When female sexuality is fully affirmed as a legitimate passion that arises from within, to be directed without stigma to the chosen object of our desire, the sexually expressive clothes or manner we may assume can no longer be used to shame us, blame us, or target us for beauty myth harassment.
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Still, so long as a double standard concerning sexuality remains, college women all over the country will attempt to look sexy on Saturday nights, they will engage in sexual behavior, they will attempt to slink home unob- served, and the walk of shame will continue to be shameful.

NOTES

1. Laura Baron, “Sex on the First Date? Be Respectful: Talk About It,”
   Chicago Tribune
   , September 9, 2004.
   

2. See Brett Lunceford, “The Walk of Shame: A Normative Description,”
   ETC: A Review of General Semantics
   65, 4 (2008): 319–29. Despite its ubiquity, little scholarly attention has been paid to the walk of shame. The only other article I could find that discusses the walk of shame at all was Elizabeth L. Paul, “Beer Goggles, Catching Feelings, and the Walk of Shame: The Myths and Realities of the Hookup Experience,” in D. Charles Kirkpatrick, Steve Duck, and Megan K. Foley (eds.)
   Relating Difficulty: The Processes of Constructing and Managing Difficult Interaction
   (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), pp. 141–60. Even so, the main focus of Paul’s essay was not on the walk of shame, but rather on how college students described “hook-ups” or sex with random people; the walk of shame was a peripheral aspect.
   

3. Charles S. Peirce,
   Collected Papers
   , 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2, p. 248.
   

4 Ibid., p. 249.

5 For a concise explanation of the differences between system and syntagm, see Roland Barthes,
Elements of Semiology
, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 63.

6 Ibid., p. 27.

1. Sarah Morrison, “When I Did the Walk of Shame,”
   Cosmopolitan
   (February 2002), p. 128.
   

2. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
   The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
   (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 148.
   

3. Gina B., “Turn Walk of Shame into Walk of Pride,”
   Chicago Tribune
   , December 2, 2005.
   

4. Ibid.
   

5. Shannon K. Gilmartin, “Changes in College Women’s Attitudes toward Sexual Intimacy,”
   Journal of Research on Adolescence
   16, 3 (2006): 429–30. Here, Gilmartin quotes the following: E. L. Paul and K. A. Hayes, “The Casualties of Casual Sex: A Qualitative Exploration of the Phenomenology of College Students’ Hookups,”
   Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
   19 (2002): 639–61; Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt,
   Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Mating and Dating Today
   (New York: Institute for American Values, 2001).
   

6. Kenneth Burke,
   A Grammar of Motives
   (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 406–7.
   

7. John Santelli et al., “Trends in Sexual Risk Behaviors, by Nonsexual Risk Behavior Involvement, US High School Students, 1991–2007,”
   Journal of Adolescent Health
   44, 4 (2009): 372–9.
   

8. Susan Bordo,
   The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
   

   (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 190.
   

9. Alan Soble, “Sexuality and Sexual Ethics,” in Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (eds.)
   Encyclopedia of Ethics
   (NewYork: Garland, 1992), p. 1146.
   

10. Gilles Deleuze, “Ethology: Spinoza and Us,” in Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (eds.)
    The Body: A Reader
    (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 58.
    

11. Naomi Wolf,
    The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used againstWomen
    

(New York: W. Morrow, 1991), p. 273.

BILL PUKA
1

CHAPTER 5

RELATIONS AT A DISTANCE

Moving Apart

Two high school students, dating since tenth grade, get accepted to different colleges.They hear that college is a time to be free from entangle- ments, meeting all sorts of new and interesting people, but they want none of it. And so they lay complex plans on how to keep their relationship alive with frequent contact, train trips, and even flights, whether or not these break the bank.

A college student (you?) meets someone at a mixer. He’s the friend of a classmate there, just in for the weekend. It’s attraction at first sight, growing with second and third sightings. But just when she starts to feel involved, he’s gone – his far-away campus called, classes are back in session. She can think of little else until they next meet. He feels the same. But does she really want her attentions focused elsewhere, absenting herself from the life she chose and built on campus, compromising her studies?

One member of a college couple gets an amazing one-semester intern- ship in a foreign country. On campus, they are joined at the hip, doing everything together, but the internship is a once in a lifetime opportu- nity, a dream come true. “I want you to go,” says the partner being left behind. “Don’t worry, our love is too strong to let a semester separation part us.” (Anyone who has seen the film
Family Man
may doubt that.)

These are typical entry points to the infamous realm of distance relation- ships. Why infamous? I interviewed a host of college students to find out.

Their most common depictions were “very hard to pull off” and a “real challenge to couples” that “takes a constant toll on both members.”They added, “Only the strongest relationships can survive.” But while this overwhelming response marked normal interviews, “think-loud proto- cols” revealed some surprising information. (These stream-of-conscious- ness interviews elicit psychological associations that don’t come up in normal conversation.) More couples were
told
by others about the hell of distance love than actually experienced it that way. In fact, a major chal- lenge for distance couples was overcoming the dark expectations they’d been saddled with, and crediting their direct experience instead. Positive associations to distance were revealed as well, though rarely shared with distance partners. Emphasizing the benefits of not being with one’s lover doesn’t tend to enhance togetherness.

Philosophical exploration rarely begins with psychological interviews, but much in philosophy rises from common observation, and philoso- phy’s golden age of exploration included all the sciences. Why give these up when analyzing daily life? Our analysis of college sex and love focuses on philosophical process, the thought strategies of comparative interpre- tation, critical questioning, assessing a view’s pros and cons, and tracing out its implications in illustration and argument. (I don’t mean personally contentious argument, but the kind that draws inferences and good rea- sons to believe.) Philosophy is especially keen on seeing matters in new ways to reveal hidden realities. These suggest alternative paths for pene- trating matters, opening up on new grounds for mutual understanding. In distance relationships, this can be a saving grace for better communica- tion and meetings of minds. “Let’s look at what we’re doing as….”

I offer a supporting case for distance relations, built by first running them down in comparison with up-close relations, then reshaping our pic- ture of them to include recent media of communication. We consider the capacity of these media to become integral parts of relationships, shaping their actual conduct, and their promise for overcoming distance deficits.

On First Reinterpretation

Sacrifice, longing, and the frustrations of separation and miscommunica- tion compose the reality of distance relationships, but reality can be interpreted in many different ways. To start, we may ask whether viewing distance relations as stretched and mangled versions of “normal,”

up-close romances makes sense. Is it more useful and accurate for under- standing than seeing such relations in their own terms, as wholly different kinds of relationships? Isn’t it likely that we view and experience distance relationships as difficult because we judge them by the standards of close-up ones? Imagine if we afforded them their own standards of qual- ity and success the way we do marriages as opposed to dating relation- ships, for example.

Isn’t it true also that up-close relationships in college are typically dis- tanced by class schedules and study routines even for partners at the same college? Aren’t couples driven apart by too much togetherness, needing space? And doesn’t scheduling time together within class and study routines get as complicated and burdensome as commuting to a distant campus? The whole relationship can begin to seem like an exercise in logistics: “Every time we talk, the topic is basically planning when and where we next meet.” It is the up-close relationship that is traumatized by a traveling semester or foreign summer internship. The distance relation- ship can handle it in its stride, merely shifting geographical direction.The same trauma marks the normal up-close college routine of winter breaks apart and long summer breaks away. Such relationships are a figment of semesters, not a fixture of a couple’s real lives. Lovers at the same college likely have homes far apart, spelling long separations each year, and on key holidays. Long commutes are required to get together. By contrast, high school couples, separated by college, usually spend summers and other breaks in the same town – an advantage of the distance relation.

Couples joining the “real [work] world,” after college, spend more time at the office, and working weekends, than with each other. Commutes are a daily exhaustion causing a different, more permanent sort of distance to dominate. “We never see each other, and when we do, we’re half dead, needing space to recover for the next workweek.” Sex? What’s sex?

The Real: From the Mouths of Babes … and Dudes

Three college students bemoan (and praise) their distance relation- ships:

My girlfriend and I started dating at the very end of our high school careers.… After a mere two months together we were catapulted to college, her at a school two hours from mine. The relationship was strained at first

but with social utilities like AIM and Facebook … we soon realized that we could still communicate as though we lived close to each other. The jour- ney to visit each other was a taxing one. Besides the expense, three separate modes of transportation had to be employed in order to see one another. A taxi, train, and bus ride later we could be in each other’s arms. The inti- macy level was through the roof, being that we were young freshmen, and we hadn’t seen each other usually for a month at a time. After our fresh- man year, she decided to transfer to a nearby school. With the distance cut from hours to a few minutes, this was great. We could see each other much more often and even during the week. At the same time our experiences with the previous year allowed to not be upset when we couldn’t spend time together.… After that year, my girlfriend transferred again, this time to a school almost two hours away. With the distance increased our rela- tionship has become strained again. It seems now that we can no longer settle for the times we are apart. When we don’t see each other for a few weeks our phone conversations become shorter and our other interactions almost become non-existent. But when we get together the distance is erased, and we are instantly in love again.