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I am reminded of why I want to get around to reading "The Virgin Suicides" one of these days. Here is a nice passage by the author Jeffrey Eugenides on the awkwardness of going to college and first dealing with being in a more sexually open environment with one's expectations boiling over but still not over that delicate line oneself.
_ _ _
The signal event of my first-year orientation was the showing of an X-rated film called "Debbie Does Dallas." This was long before porn had gone mainstream on the Internet. Most of my fellow 18 year olds had never seen anything like it before, and if we had, we’d certainly never watched it with members of the opposite sex around. But now we were in college. We were, by universal agreement, all grown up.
And so we sat there watching the acts being performed on the screen, acting as though it was funny to us, or reason to cheer or holler. I remember one jock shouting, "Why doesn’t my girlfriend do it like that?" In actuality, we were all extremely uncomfortable. College, we’d been told, was going to feature a lot of sex. But we weren’t quite ready for the rules to change so quickly. We had to pretend to be more seasoned and blasé about the whole thing than we actually were. I don’t remember a single thing about that movie. All I remember was how everyone was trying to pretend to be someone they weren’t yet and maybe never would be.
-- Jeffrey Eugenides
_ _ _
The signal event of my first-year orientation was the showing of an X-rated film called "Debbie Does Dallas." This was long before porn had gone mainstream on the Internet. Most of my fellow 18 year olds had never seen anything like it before, and if we had, we’d certainly never watched it with members of the opposite sex around. But now we were in college. We were, by universal agreement, all grown up.
And so we sat there watching the acts being performed on the screen, acting as though it was funny to us, or reason to cheer or holler. I remember one jock shouting, "Why doesn’t my girlfriend do it like that?" In actuality, we were all extremely uncomfortable. College, we’d been told, was going to feature a lot of sex. But we weren’t quite ready for the rules to change so quickly. We had to pretend to be more seasoned and blasé about the whole thing than we actually were. I don’t remember a single thing about that movie. All I remember was how everyone was trying to pretend to be someone they weren’t yet and maybe never would be.
-- Jeffrey Eugenides
