Sarah Cantin | Mixing a little body and a little soul

Today at noon, the Penn Women's Center is hosting its Sex Toy Social, a popular Women's Week event. You'll probably find some vibrators and flavored lubricant - but you probably won't find anything much more spiritual than a Kama Sutra, even though the Office of the Chaplain is just across the hall.

And you wouldn't expect it either, right? According to Donna Freitas, professor at Boston University and author of recently published Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses, that's because college students face sex and religion as "an either/or proposition."

But as hookup culture has taken hold, an increasing number of students have begun to identify as "spiritual" - often without identifying as religious. And while these two may seem like strange bedfellows, in reality, they're intertwined.

In her interviews across college campuses, Freitas noticed a pattern. "The shifting away from organized, institutional religion and/or the tradition of one's family seems to be related to also being sexually active," she reports. "For some students, calling oneself spiritual provides a safer space to navigate the waters of young adulthood and college, whereas with traditional religion, students often feel condemned if they are sexually active."

The sexual waters on college campuses tend to flow in one direction - toward hookup culture. But Freitas found that in addition to increasingly identifying as spiritual, "it was very clear from the study that men and women do not like hookup culture, period." That this dislike crosses gender lines "seems to be one of the most important findings of the study."

That's right - both men and women, when asked, didn't like hookup culture. But it's often the trade-off we need, in between the demands of extracurriculars, schoolwork and a social life.

And with compromised time comes compromised quality. "If you're not revealing anything about yourself, that guarantees that the sexual encounter is only superficial and fleetingly satisfying," says Rev. Beverly Dale, general minister of the Christian Association at Penn and founder of PassionWorks, a sex-positive ministry under the auspices of the CA.

But particularly in this hookup environment, Freitas maintains, "The fact that college students are hanging onto the label of spiritual is really significant."

Looking closer, I think the two findings are far from incongruous. In fact, I'd argue that those students identifying as spiritual are not just seeking a looser label than "religious" - they're seeking integrated lives. We are necessarily compartmentalized, and it's easy to feel disjointed - a feeling that hookup culture certainly doesn't remedy and probably only perpetuates.

A 2007 UCLA study shows that we do want our lives to feel more cohesive. The study found that as incoming freshmen, 48.7 percent of students rated "attaining inner harmony" as very important or essential - and by the time those students were juniors, 62.6 percent felt this way.

Getting our sex lives and spiritual lives more in sync can be a first step in creating a more holistic existence, and connecting the two could lead to improvements in both areas.

Penn fits in with the observations of Freitas and the UCLA study. "Along with the large number of students affiliated with religious communities, we find a lot of students who identify as spiritual but not as religious," Rev. Charles Howard, the University's chaplain, reports.

But, as Howard has also observed, too often at Penn, "the different roles we take on don't collide." He acknowledges, "Religion and spiritual expressions have a lot to say about sexuality - but a lot of times we separate them, instead of letting them have an open dialogue."

That's a dialogue Dale is looking to facilitate through PassionWorks, which helps integrate sexuality and spirituality. With Christian-based and secular programming, PassionWorks encourages students to talk and think about how their spiritual selves connect to their sexual selves. "We're called to live an abundant life, in the here and now," Dale claims, "And you cannot exclude the juiciness of sexuality from that."

At first, we may find such talk uncomfortable. But if the research signifies anything, it's that while students are experimenting with their sexual behavior, they are simultaneously trying to define what constitutes a meaningful life. Pretending like the two processes are unrelated only seems to leave more students seeking - and not finding - their own version of inner harmony.

Sarah Cantin is a College senior from Boston, Mass. Candid Cantin appears on alternating Mondays. Her email address is cantin@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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