For four years, Chaya Babu sat and listened to her sorority sisters share lurid details about weekend sexual escapades at the end of weekly chapter meetings. Often, she felt that she had little to contribute. But last semester, at the annual fall beach retreat, she stood up in a room crowded with sophomores, juniors and seniors, and spoke “for a different type of girl.” Pausing for a moment, she repeated, half-jokingly, a statement that had actually come to mean a great deal to her over the course of her Duke career: “The word prude comes from the word prudent, which means wise. And I stand by that.”
By turning the negative connotations of the word “prude” on their heads, Babu was challenging the structures of sexuality that many have come to accept as the norm—drunken hookups, brown-outs and, of course, sex. Babu was also stating that she had made a choice for her own life—abstinence. She was not alone.
Her story represents a decision to pursue a lifestyle that may fall outside the realm of what is expected of college students. Movies such as Old School and Animal House depict raging college parties followed by lusty romps in dormitory bedrooms. In I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe portrays animalistic sexual encounters and gossip flying to and fro at the supposedly fictional elite Dupont University in North Carolina. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, nine rape allegations have been filed against members of the football team.
And maybe that picture isn’t so startling, especially here at Duke, where casual sex often seems to dominate the hook-up culture and girls wrestle in baby oil instead of KY jelly. In this kind of environment, words like “prude” or “virgin” become slurs tossed at those who don’t participate.
But maybe virginity isn’t all that uncommon. What can be seen here in the decisions of four very different students is a logic that seems to get lost in a cloud of alcohol, drugs and hurt feelings. Their characters trump the perception of chastity as a medieval notion embodied in the Virgin Mary.
The town of Midland, N.C., has one stoplight and two restaurants. Social activities revolve around the local Methodist church. Jake Roberts, a senior, grew up there raising 40,000 turkeys a year on a farm with much of his father’s extended family.
“For me, it was always family first before social things,” he says with a slight Southern drawl. “My family was that large and that tight-knit, that it always played a large role.”
Standing a solid six-plus feet, the brawny former high school quarterback carries himself with a swagger, as one might if he had to wake up before school to feed thousands of farm animals. He doesn’t maintain any strict religious practices, but operates with a good-natured humility and kindness in interactions with friends and acquaintances—a result, no doubt, of what he describes as “growing up in an old-fashioned setting.”
Now a senior in an all-male selective living group, Roberts has maintained his virginity throughout his college experience. He says that it wasn’t so much a personal decision as it was a factor of his emotional immaturity.
“I was kind of sheltered, because of my family partially, but partially just where I grew up, I wasn’t exposed to things. Part of it was my own doing because I was a very introverted person, so I didn’t go to the parties and I didn’t get exposed to the stuff at a young age like most people had,” Roberts says. “Even though I’m almost 23 years old, emotionally, in that respect, I’m not nearly that age.”
Further south, from Charleston, S.C., sophomore Katie Koval came here with a Catholic background, a private school education and strong convictions about sex and relationships.
“[My parents] always made it very clear that they expected me to abstain from that before marriage because that was the thing to do,” Koval says. “And originally that was very much my reasoning for doing it, along with the religious influences of confirmation and all the other stuff. It kind of changed when I realized that what my parents say isn’t necessarily right for me.”
After reexamining her beliefs and motivations, though, Koval, a sorority sister and singer in a female a capella group, made the decision to remain a virgin her own.
“It prevents me from ever being taken advantage of for that,” Koval explains. “I think it’s really cool to be able to give your spouse when you marry them something that you haven’t given to anyone else…. For me at least, it’s taken a lot of sacrifice to not do it, and that makes the gift worth even more.”
Standing on the outside, the sexual climate at college can be daunting. “I was really scared before coming to college,” Koval admits. “I thought, ‘these are high school kids, they’ll still date me if I won’t have sex with them.’ But I was scared that I wouldn’t meet anyone that would date me if I wouldn’t have sex with them.”
Her abstinence became a secret that needed to be carefully guarded. “I was nervous that people would find out, but now that I think about it, it’s something that I’m pretty proud of,” she says.
For Babu, the change in climate at Duke wasn’t noticeable at first. Her parents immigrated to the States from India to establish medical practices, and she grew up in the wealthy New York suburb of Westchester as a first generation Indian American. At her small public high school, Babu grew into the vivacious and out-going person she is today. But her attitudes toward sex and sexuality were always noticeably different, even earning her the nickname of “Chastity Babu” among her high school friends.
“I got here and I was just so innocent, and I wasn’t even aware of that innocence,” Babu says of her freshman year. “I remember being in Pegram and feeling that people just assumed that on those drunken nights when we would all go over to West, that I would end up in some guy’s bed. When really I was in the Pegram commons room stuffing my face and laughing with [friends].”
Faced with a shift in her surroundings, Babu was forced to articulate more fully her stance toward sex and virginity. At first it was easy, as she drew from her family background, her relationship with her older sister and her own personal beliefs. But as each of these factors was challenged in her new environment, Babu had to allow her reasons for her decision to evolve along the way.
“I realized that I had to start thinking about where [my choice] was coming from. If I was going to be with a guy more than once in an intimate setting, I had to decide what my boundaries were, because I didn’t want to wake up one day and feel bad about something,” she says.
According to Christian doctrine, premarital sex goes beyond a “bad feeling.” It’s a sin. The Bible says “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body” (I Corinthians 6:18). That philosophy still influences senior Charles Jardin.
Between an Episcopalian mother and a Catholic father, Jardin grew up using religion as more of a moral compass rather than a personal connection with God. Once he arrived at Duke, however, Jardin began to explore spirituality on a personal level through the interdenominational student Christian group Campus Crusade for Christ.
Having a biblical reason to remain sexually abstinent, he says, takes the decision to have sex out of the physical realm and places it in a higher one. “The reason I don’t have sex is because of my relationship with the Lord,” he says. “If I know who God is, and I’m continually growing in my understanding of who the Lord is, then… why would I want to go out and do something that is going to so displease my God?”
Outside of the religious context, in fraternities, sororities and selective living groups, the decision to remain abstinent can become even more difficult. Tight-knit social groups demand frank and detailed discussions about sex, and offer an open arena for trading tips in “dirt” sessions. Like Babu, Koval felt marginalized by what she eventually discovered was a minority presence within her sorority.
“There are a couple of the girls in our sorority that pride themselves on being sexually promiscuous, and there are so many others who aren’t like that at all, but that was my first impression because those were the ones who were outspoken and it was very intimidating at the time,” Koval says, describing an initiation dinner. “That was my misperception, but… that element is still present.”
When she looks back now on her statement, Babu sees it as an important step in helping new members understand the real purpose of being in a sorority.
“Some of the younger girls come into the sorority and are a little freaked out by the sketchy stories we tell, and they ask themselves, ‘Am I going to have to be like this too?’ And I’m saying, ‘No.’ The younger girls never would have stood up and been proud of it, and they said, ‘Wait, I’m like that too.’ I like that I can be that now as a senior, because no one told me that as a freshman.”
Lots of talk about sex creates peer pressure for male students, too. “I do think that in male groups, sex is emphasized,” says Roberts of his experience in an all-male selective living group. “People are always willing to do things in a group that they would not do otherwise.”
But choosing abstinence brings empowerment. By deciding to wait on having sex, each of these individuals has declared that they are in control by defining their sexual relationships. For Babu, this experience has often meant that some guys “walk away” from her.
“I get the last laugh, because as far as guys walking away from me, they think they’re saying no. I’m like, ‘But I said no first. You’re saying ‘no’ because I said ‘no,’” she says. In the end, she knows that no matter what happens she didn’t compromise her ideals for something that she wouldn’t have wanted in the long run.
Koval feels empowered by the way her decision frames the interactions she has with other people. “I don’t have to worry about what they’re thinking because [my choice for abstinence] is not something that I am going to question. So if someone doesn’t like it, then that’s their problem. If someone has a negative reaction, all I can say is that ‘I’m sorry that’s how you feel,’” she says.
The scarcity of a dating culture at Duke, however, makes it difficult to develop a romantic relationship that isn’t based on having sex, or any romantic relationship, for that matter. “People almost try not to be involved [in relationships],” Roberts says. “It seems like a dead end everywhere you go, because it is a hook-up culture. People go out, meet a person, maybe go back to their place, maybe they hook up for a week or two. Being in a relationship is almost frowned upon it seems.”
Not having experienced any type of romantic relationship in college seems to have become the norm for many students.
“When I graduated high school and had never been in a relationship, I felt like a reject. And yes, in two months I am going to graduate never having been in a relationship,” Babu says. “Now that we’re here and the years have flown by, and so many of my close girl friends have never been in a relationship, it just seems so normal.”
Central to each of these individuals’ decisions to remain abstinent is an understanding of sex as something greater than a mere physical fulfillment, whether a gift to a partner or a duty to a higher power. In thinking about losing his virginity, Roberts knows he would not simply have sex for the ride. “It would have to be something meaningful to both people,” he says. “There are many reasons that I’m still a virgin, but they all kind of come back to the fact that it has a meaning beyond the physical act.”
As she continues to reevaluate her stance, Babu realizes that when she decides she is ready to take the next step, it will be with someone with whom she shares more than a mere superficial attraction. “[Sex] is grounded in a very, very deep connection, and not just frivolous love,” she says.
For others, though, the decision to have sex will come at a much more definitive point. Jardin, staying true to his religious beliefs, knows exactly when that moment will be. “I’ll know when I put her wedding ring on, and we say ‘I do,’ and we go off to spend the rest of our lives together. That’s when it’ll be right.”
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