Weekly Wednesday meetings — modeled loosely after fraternity meetings — where sisters roast each other and drink lots of beer, have just ended. Downstairs I find a pong game, in which players use handleless paddles to hit Ping-Pong balls into full cups of beer arranged on a large piece of plywood. If you sink a ball into the cup, your opponent drinks the whole beer. If you hit a cup with a ball, your opponent drinks half.
From the look of it, little has changed since I graduated ten years ago. The floor is grimy and covered with plastic cups. A girl is riding a pong table like a surfboard, and another is grinding to Fetty Wap. She was one of the 28 percent of undergraduate Dartmouth women who report being sexually assaulted during college. Hookups, for those who went to college before the term came into vogue, can range from kissing to sex.
Partners can be strangers, acquaintances, or best friends, but about half of them are getting together for the first time. On average, women have four drinks before a hookup and men have six. Often, nobody talks the next day.
It is freeing in some senses. But it also creates a lot of problems. There are, of course, plenty of reasons why students of all genders and all sexualities choose to hook up. You can try new things, discover preferences. And many students find it a mostly positive experience. One night, she outlined her terms. His roommate was passed out, literally unconscious from drinking, in the bed next to us. He kept continuing to enter me anyway. I kept saying no, and he kept going anyway.
Eventually I realized he was going to have sex with me whether I wanted it or not. After that he ignored me for a week. Molly says there are few conversations about consent happening during hookups. Maybe I could be clearer. According to Molly, the majority of her friends at other schools have been sexually assaulted during college, except for the ones who had boyfriends. Research from Bucknell psychologist William Flack puts statistics behind what can easily be concluded by anecdote.
