Survey overhype: 9% of Yale students were paid for sex

Shocking news finds Ivy Leaguers are like other people.

By Rich_Maloof Mar 6, 2013 8:04PM

Nine percent of Yale University students have accepted payment for sex at least once. Twelve percent have filmed themselves. A full 52 percent have engaged in consensual pain. Three percent have engaged in bestiality.

But wait, it gets better: 22 percent haven’t had sex yet.

Naturally, it’s the whiff of prostitution among Ivy Leaguers that gets headlines. But the headlines — spoiler alert — don’t tell the whole story, or even convey it realistically.

So who were the muckrakers to come up with this story? Was it rivals from Harvard, peeking through windows into coed bedrooms? The cops, breaking up a sex ring at Kappa Alpha Theta? Or maybe some townie who wanted to knock those Yalie snobs off their perch?

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Um…no. It was Yale who broke the story about Yale students. Though professional haters like Matt Drudge and anti-Yale author Nathan Harden have made national news of it, the survey actually came out of the Yale’s own Sex Weekend, an offshoot of Sex Week. Yes, that sounds (and looks) like a glossy weekly magazine confirming the Bulldogs’ obsession, but it’s actually a bi-annual series of talks and events held at the school since 2002.

As reported more calmly and sensibly in Yale Daily News, roughly 40 students were given a questionnaire in a discussion last weekend hosted by sexologist Jill McDevitt. Her aim in conducting the informal survey was to get students to reconsider their idea of what’s “normal” in sex.

McDevitt is quoted as saying, “People don’t think a college student at an Ivy League university would accept payment for sex but I’ve never asked this question on a college campus and not had ‘yes’ answers.”

Judging by the uproar, people don’t like their idea of normal being shaken up too much. Why is it especially shocking and offensive that Yale students are paying for sex when we already know that 15 to 20 percent of American men are doing the same? Is it because smart people don’t like sex as much as everyone else? Did we think sex was beneath them, or that they’re so smart they should know better? Or is it that someone that bright should be able to figure out how to get sex without paying for it?

A few years back, Yale was in the news for a study conducted by an economic psychologist who trained a group of capuchin monkeys how to use money. Guess what the monkeys bought with it.

That’s right. Monkey sex.

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