<p>purplegirl: Your points of disease are valid, but you’ve clearly allowed your own personal judgment to cloud your response. As a professional, it reflects quite poorly on you to post such a response, and I really wonder at the disregard you apparently feel for your promiscuous patients who “slept” it all away, according to you. You suggest that having sex without a relationship is “blowing” your future prospects. To put forth such a view especially in your profession is particularly damaging. Sex means very different things to different people and it is both wrong and extremely narrow-minded of you to say that people who have sex are not looking for something “more meaningful and long lasting” . Your job as a gynecologist is not to judge, but rather to help your patients. Also as I’m sure you know, often times sexual disease is spread between partners in a relationship and is not merely a “consequence of sexual freedom.”
In addition, your attacking my own experience (and those of “my friends”), merely discounts your proposed “care” for young girls, as you’ve just attacked one you have no real knowledge of.</p>
<p>bopambo:royal73 puts it quite well. Big city colleges allow for an anonymity that, in my opinion, is potentially disastrous. The fact that, as you say, everyone knows everyone’s business, serves to reel us in to a degree. This is because we all know each other in one way or another; through friends, classes, dining hall exchanges, etc. You can’t just hook up with someone and expect to never see them again, because you absolutely will. In a big city, or one of these huge universities, this is not the case. You can hook up with someone and never see them again. This is dangerous because there is nothing to discourage a student from checking his or her actions, which they are far more likely to do when they know they’ll see their “partner” in casual sex,(as an example) the next day at brunch (mercedesAMG also mentions the safety afforded by this).
In addition, with anonymity increases the risk of sexual violence, yet another thing that is far less of a problem on small campuses like Bowdoin.
I respect the need to discuss this with your son, but I do think you should take these points to heart when you do.</p>