Leader: The return of our Sextigation

fun.

Meg Lintern Deputy Editor

So… the sex survey. It’s a controversial one. How can we make such bold statements with such small sample sizes? How dare we pass off our shabby google form as a ‘study’? How can we make claims about the sexual experiences of all Oxford students using the data submitted by people who spend their spare time reading Cherwell, so ‘surely aren’t getting any’? I’m awaiting the Oxfesses with bated breath.

Of course, I’m making no pretences that our 2023 Sextigation approaches anything close to science - far from it. The disparities between this year’s and last year’s results show us just how temperamental it is, and how much the responses of a few students can sway the averages of whole subjects and colleges. The sex survey is, as I believe more student journalism should be, just a bit of

The combination of college rankings and references to sex means that a lot of people will be intrigued enough to read our survey. This gives us a couple of options in how to approach it. On the one hand, we could keep it short and pithy, stick to sensationalised statistics, and make a very big deal about all the sex students are or are not having. On the other hand, we could draw from the deep pool of comments that students left us to try to get into the nitty-gritty of not just their sex lives, but their happiness with those sex lives. And, obviously, we could leave in the sensationalised stats for good measure. Whilst this might make for a longer article – potentially one that a small proportion will get to the end of – I think it tells a much richer story.

Sex is something that students talk about. In some cases, we talk about it a lot. However, the sex we discuss is smoothed around the edges, much glossier and more salacious than the reality. Usually, we leave out the awkward details that don’t make for a good story: the physical insecurities, the anxieties about getting ‘too little’ or ‘too much’ action, the fear that something associated with the ‘student experience’ is not fulflling us in the way that it ought to.

Sure, the mean average student has had

5 sexual partners since coming to Oxford. But the median has had 2. Sure, some students thrive off of one-night-stands. But others are just ‘relationship people’, craving that emotional intimacy as much as the physical. The one consistent factor between these students is the tendency to ‘measure up’ against whatever we’re not. At Oxford in particular, perfectionist tendencies and self-deprecating habits mean that many of us are constantly seeking to identify that ‘thing’ that everyone else is doing well that we should do well too. Are our peers scoring great internships, getting great collections results, or heading to Vinnie’s on the weekly? Who is sat in hall in a scholar’s gown? Who is having loads of great spontaneous sex through Tinder? Who has found a sickeningly adorable relationship? At the risk of attaching far greater signifcance to the sex survey than it deserves, I think that we can learn a lot from it outside of college bodycounts. It shows us that no matter what we think everyone else is doing, or what we think we ourselves should be doing, we are often looking at a very skewed set of data. If we approach it from a new direction, the picture becomes a lot more messy, complicated, and often simply boring. Ultimately, it becomes a lot more human.