2007 Sex Survey Results Show Busy, Insatiable Student Body

The Law Weekly has always known that students at UVA Law work hard and play even harder. But we had no idea just how hard everyone played until we checked out the results from this year’s Sex Survey.

According to our results, almost 64% of law students are currently involved in a sexual relationship, and most of us (52%) are having sex at least once a week. But even though a full 70% of students report that they are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their sex lives, apparently that’s not enough. Fifty-nine percent of respondents told us that they want to have sex more often. And these results were just the tip of the iceberg.

The Law Weekly conducted this survey online from February 6–11 and received an overwhelming response. Indeed, almost exactly half of the Law School—549 students to be exact—participated, showing that more law students care about sex than SBA. If we knew more about statistics and social science, then maybe we could claim this high response rate lends some validity to the results. But we’re not statisticians, we’re law students. Consequently, we’re sure there are plenty of inaccuracies, so please take these results with a grain of salt.

In order to compare our results with national averages, we borrowed many of our questions from a 2004 ABC News poll. Needless to say, we found that Law School students aren’t “average” Americans. For one thing, we’re more polygamous. Whereas 86% of sexually active Americans claimed to have had only one sex partner in the preceding 12 months, over one-third of all UVA Law students have slept with more than one person in the past year. Although the Law School’s relative youth (the average age of participants was 24.9) certainly accounts for many such discrepancies, there were still some surprising results.

For example, 30% of law students admit to having cheated on a partner while in a committed relationship. This number is roughly the same for both Law School males and females, and it contrasts clearly with the national average of 16% for all Americans and 8% for the 18–29 year-old age group. In an even starker contrast, the percentage of cheating UVA Law women (29.4%) towers above the national average for women of all age groups (11%). One anonymous second-year male wonders whether this results from “the dishonesty of the legal profession, or a sense of entitlement, or perhaps those long stressful nights in the library building up tension that no one man could possibly release.”

Along a similar vein, our survey found that Law School women also are comparatively more likely to fake an orgasm. Sixty-one percent of female law students admit to having done so, compared to just 48% of women nationally.

As one would expect from a survey that was aimed at a mostly youthful audience, we saw many generation-specific results. This was perhaps most notably evident in the Law School’s attitudes toward homosexuality and premarital sex. On the former question, 82.3% of Law School students (or 92% of females and 75.4% of males) say that they feel homosexuality is acceptable for some people, compared to 55% of all Americans. Similarly, 83% of law students (or 92.5% of females and 76.6% of males) believe that premarital sex is okay for some people, in contrast to just 61% of national respondents.

The survey also indicated that our generation has not yet refined how we conceive the terms that we use to describe intimate behavior. For example, the survey revealed strong disparities in how students define “hooking up.” A clear 68% of law students believe hooking up includes making out, and 64% believe that this term includes oral sex. A smaller percentage believe that the two are mutually exclusive: 19% of law students surveyed think oral sex is hooking up, but making out is not. But 23% believe making out is hooking up, and that anything beyond tonsil hockey is something altogether different.

Similarly, 65% of law students think oral sex is not “sex.” Inexplicably, this is up from 50% in the 2005 Law Weekly Sex Survey.

In addition to these results, we learned some things about law students that we probably wish we didn’t know. For example, Law School men admit to having an average total of 6.1 sex partners, while women have been with an average of 5.1 people. These figures are presumably lower than the real numbers, because nine men and two women each claim to have slept with “30+” partners in their time. Moreover, and because we never miss a chance to make a reference to American Pie 2, don’t forget the Rule of Three.

Also, according to the survey exactly 40% of females claim either that they never masturbate, or that they do so infrequently. In contrast, 70.8% of males responded that they masturbate more than once a week. Which also means that at least 29.2% of men are liars.

The following are just a few more of the (many) fascinating things we learned about law students:

• First-year women are mostly in relationships, engaged or married; only about 45% are single. In comparison, 38% of first-year males are single.

• Only 31% of third-year males are single, and on average they had 3.22 partners in the last 12 months.

• Just 10.5% of law students are virgins (half of these are first-year law students).

• Very few law students (2%) reported having an STD.

• Not all Southerners are gentlemen; over 10% reported that revenge sex was not beneath them, consistent with the larger sample.

Finally, a note on a question that we’re sure intrigued many of our survey’s participants. Specifically, we asked students to name the individuals about whom they fantasized at the Law School. Partly because about 88% of respondents skipped the question, and also because no real consensus candidates emerged from the pack, the Law Weekly is declining to publish the results of that question. We will say, however—and typical of the type of maturity and candor you’d expect from a Law School student—one of the leading vote-getters was “your mom.”

For a link to the full survey results, please go to www.LawWeekly.org.
SOURCE:www.lawweekly.org/
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