On a side note, I’ve never put much stock in those surveys you always see that come up with results like “40 Percent of American High School Students Can’t Find America on a Globe”. I think all they really tell us is that a lot of teenagers are sarcastic.

College students (even from MIT) are usually too callow to have figured this out, but I suppose after enough spectacular incidents anyone who’s predisposed to look for patterns will notice something.

Sheesh, just knock back a few pints and loudly proclaim it to your group of friends like everyone else, you dorks.

What, no mention of the Purity Test?

Floorcest is a good rule. I broke it myself and paid the price.

The article doesn’t mention orgies, which probably became much less popular in the era of AIDS. Before then, however…

Also, floorcest is a definite taboo. It’s just better to not cause drama on your floor, you know?

More seriously, you missed the point: Why would anyone consider vaginal sex not to be sex?

Since it’s the default method for mammalian sexual reproduction even an avid homosexual should recognize it as sex.

However, the question wasn’t what kind of sex the respondents had had. It was whether they considered vaginal sex to be “sex.” And I’m hard pressed to think of anyone in any situation–no matter what kind of sex they have–who could rationalize not thinking vaginal sex fits the definition of sex quite definitively.

The dormcest taboo was probably honored more often in the breach, though. Personally, I got together with a guy on my floor by second semester my freshman year. We’re getting married this summer, after 9 years together, so it worked out well for us. But both of us saw some really impressive crash-and-burn breakups of dorm couples, and equally impressive drama resulting from dorm hookups. It was definitely a risk.

And @20 — What on earth makes you think that only gay men have anal sex?

I don’t really know for sure since, as an avid homosexual, I’ve never been on the bus to ‘Gina Heights.

Alternatively, assume a heterosexual person who defines sex in terms of not only a physical act but a mental/emotional one as well. Some people categorize “sex” as being different from “hooking up”. The actual act of vaginal intercourse for this person would not necessarily imply “sex” then.

If not, I know young gay men who consider themselves virgins until they’ve had anal sex, no matter how much oral or frottage they’ve done. Some may consider themselves virgins even if they’ve had vaginal sex before coming out (I think they’re silly, but it’s possible).

So depending on exactly how they asked the questions, they could get that strange result. If they correlated what people said they’d done with whether they considered themselves virgins, rather than asking “does this count” about everything, they could come up with a result like that.

But would the survey have been structured that stupidly? I think not. More likely some of the students just thought “does penetrative penile/vaginal sex count as sex” was such a stupid question that it deserved a stupid answer.