Everything you can get, you can fix

Well, opening the student newspaper can be a pleasant surprise.

This week's topic: sex in fraternities.

Now, my uni is not known for it's fraternities - it's not a traditional university, being founded only in the twenties to meet demands for a catholic university in a country known for repression of the catholic South. Then, during the sixties, leftism hit badly: it was the first university to be occupied by sit-ins and was briefly renamed "Karl Marx University" by the student body. The days of catholic higher education were definitely over. This was followed by the loss of the predicate "catholic" in the nineties and the recent move of the Vatican-sanctioned theological faculty to bigger Utrecht.

But the guys in the fraternities apparently have a pretty raucous sex life.

The rules are simple: obviously, you are a member of a class. But not of the traditional type. To make class of 2007, you would have to be pretty busy... Seriously, your class number equals the number of girls you screwed.

If you don't get laid for a year, you have to walk around town wearing a chicken suit... and make sure you score wearing it. No opting out of that one.

The boys readily admit that high quantities mean loss of quality. Drink and drugs obviously play a big role here: 56% of students admit frequent cannabis use, and 10% use stronger stuff. Waking up, and seeing the girl often turns out to be a nasty shock. But they also admit that picking up pretty girls is too much hard work. These plain girls like it and are readily available. And they are promiscuous: some girls are known to keep Excel sheets with names, dates and final grades. This is something I recognise from the gay world.

Now comes the nasty shock: condoms are out of fashion. No-one uses them.

Apparently, the fraternities form a pretty much closed loop of sexual activity and not many STDs get in. Doctors apparently only test for chlamydia and common stuff like that. Not for HIV. "Everything you can get, you can fix", says one boy. But that's not quite true, is it?

This is highly dangerous, and it's beyond comprehension. Only one HIV+ person has to somehow get involved and the whole lot might readily be infected.

The conclusion is inescapable: this particular fraternity is a whole lot more immature and irresponsible about safe sex than the shallow, supposedly generally uneducated gay scene in my town.