Despite a major presence in the national psyche, the story of the comely college co-ed who goes "Lesbian Until Graduation" is probably just a myth, at least according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The same study from the Center [PDF] that told us that kids these days aren't having sex as much also indicates that women with bachelor’s degrees are actually less likely to have had a same-sex experience than those who did not finish high school.
Of the 6,210 women without a GED or high school dipolma 15.2 percent reported having had a sexual relationship with another woman while only 9.9 percent of the 15,543 women surveyed with the BA or higher reported having a lesbian relationship. Women with some college but no degree fell in between. The numbers flip when you look at men, where 3.6 percent of the 8,530 men surveyed without a GED admitted to having a sexual encounter with another male while 6.7 percent of the 13,112 men with a BA or higher said they'd gone gay.
The last time the study was conducted, in 2002, the difference in sexual activity between different education brackets was far less pronounced. All of those sampled in this case were between the ages of 15-44 and answered the survey questions directly into a computer (because people tend to lie when asked intimate questions by other people).
But what does this mean? Too early to say! “It may be that the commonly held wisdom was wrong, that people just liked to imagine women in college having sex together, or it may be that society has changed, and as more people come out publicly, in politics or on television, we are getting a clearer view of the breadth of sexuality,” the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the Times.
Facts, shmacts. One thing we are sure of is that this study will do nothing to slow the number of pornos hitting the Internets about innocent young flowers discovering the sensual pleasures of their freshman lit study partner's bosom. Georgia O'Keeffe's Dildo Party 7, anyone?
