This was a communal bathroom with 4 stalls, 4 showers, 4 sinks. I don’t want to brush my teeth while sex acts are going on behind me, as the sign says, with people of either sex. Obviously a big enough problem they have to hang signs.
Just a reason I didn’t like Smith, keeping with the theme of the thread. Our ‘hate’ reasons can be irrational, rational, ecological, or stupid. I don’t like Reed either, and it has nothing to do with eating other people’s leftovers.
Since we’re on the topic of showers and what non-showering activities might be going on, does anyone remember reading about the prank letters posted at many universities telling the students that they should not, ahem, pleasure themselves in the showers because it was clogging the pipes?
Google “Huffington Post fake letter college shower” and you can see the article with sample signs from Georgetown, Iowa State, Kentucky, Syracuse, UMass, Penn, Duke and more. The Baylor one particularly cracks me up. >:)
@twoinanddone , I fully agree. Making others the unwilling audience to your sexual activities is the height of incivility.
@crazymamaB Yeah, I’ve spent time in New Jersey, and the one-finger salute is indeed common and well delivered there. NYC as well has some true artists when it comes to flipping the bone.
I think what sets Boston apart is the sheer omnipresence of the act. First of all, you could describe the population there as a half-million tightly wound souls who are a chipped nail or a small paper cut away from a full-blown punch-a-hole-in-the-wall tantrum. Add to that a system of roads that from the air looks like a plate of spaghetti. I mean there isn’t a 90-degree corner anywhere but the Back Bay. So almost every intersection involves indecision, confusion, frustration, and anger. Toss in an accent that sounds ticked off even when it isn’t, and wrap the whole wicked mess in crappy weather, and you know why the finger is a standard part of the Boston vocabulary. Toddlers learn it from their grandmothers. Kids practice it in elementary school. I think you even have to demonstrate proficiency with a middle finger to get a driver’s license there.
@dolomite there a saying in the area (tongue in cheek)…“better to die of a gunshot in Durham, than die of boredom in Cary” (the neighboring upscale town). But all kidding aside I never hesitant to go out in Durham and have done work in the public housing there.
So in the absence of a sign, shower sex is cool? 
I guess I’d prefer a school where there is no need for a sign, where people don’t need to be told it is not cool to do it in a public room. My daughter didn’t feel the need to hang a sign in her apartment. Maybe they just have more class than Smith girls?
Shower sex is by no means only a Smith thing. At least they had the wherewithal to call it out and address it. I have no doubt it is happening at many, many places - just like STDs. That’s why I respect schools that are open about such things. This is nothing to do with Smith “girls” or Carleton students and class.
“Add to that a system of roads that from the air looks like a plate of spaghetti. I mean there isn’t a 90-degree corner anywhere but the Back Bay. So almost every intersection involves indecision, confusion, frustration, and anger.”
Those of us who know the city know exactly where we are going. Just don’t ask us to explain to you as visitors how to get from here to there. And stay out of the way because they won’t be making eye contact with you unless they want to give you the salute. 
If I have to pick sides, I have to say that I’m for sex.
BTW my daughter got into Smith and the sign, if I had seen it would not have dissuaded me. What did dissuade me was the cost even with their highest merit scholarship.
Moop, the Back Bay is laid out on grid, parallel streets. Have you ever been to Boston?
I don’t care about this scrounge table practice one way or the other, but I think this is silly. More than half the things you listed, aren’t communicable through shared food/saliva. Hepatitis, HIV and MRSA, unless I’m misinfomed, require broken skin and direct contact (or even better, shared needles) to be communicated.
Lice? Are you kidding me?
If there’s a TB epidemic at Reed, then nobody should send their kid there, scrounge table or no!
Even for ordinary respiratory viruses, you are far more likely to catch something through handling doorknobs that hundreds of other people have handled, than you are to catch something through eating food off of a plate that ONE other person has eaten food off of. The odds that you will take a bite that is actually contaminated with that other person’s saliva (unless it’s soup or something, I suppose) is pretty remote.
Basically, this is purely all about your innate feelings of disgust, not about anything rational.
Hepatitis A can most definitely be contracted through contaminated food and often is. Whenever a food handler is diagnosed with Hepatitis A there is public announcement for patrons of said restaurant to see their doctor to receive preventative injections.
@dustypig mono, Hep A are definitely concerns with eating off other people’s leftover plates. Mono runs rampant at college campuses so I have to say this practice at Reed is disgusting and would turn me off to sending my kid there. Are there no standards at this university’s food service department? It’s one thing if this practice takes place in a shared dorm or off campus housing, but for it to be allowed in a dining hall is reprehensible.
Mono, Hep A, the stuff at Carlton, scrounge tables, gum walls, shower sex…did nobody put the fear of Cooties into these kids?
I’ll speak to broken skin? If you’ve ever worked out in a gym with barbells, or pull-up bars, as an example, you can easily break skin. My hands and shins look awful. :))
@dustypig Funny you should mention TB because I received an email at work that one of our employees had active TB. They’re beginning to survey employees for symptoms. Maybe I shouldn’t send myself to work?
Related to that, my daughter was really creeped out by our Bed and Breakfast in Amherst. All of the original owner’s children died from TB in the house in the 19th century. So if you want to really give your children a bad impression of Amherst or Umass, be sure to stay there.
Notre Dame was unique. We learned a new word for "curfew " there !
Notre Dame has a word for requiring boys to leave girls dorms there at midnight! It called : parietals !! Who knew? And I was raised Roman Catholic, but the nuns never went over parietals with me!
http://dulac.nd.edu/community-standards/standards/parietals/
But drinking is fine there, even underage, and you can get wine at any of about 200 churches and chapels on campus!
Its a lovely campus, fabulous liberal arts and engineering curriculum, very highly ranked business program, but just do not get caught trying to have premarital sex , that might result in expulsion.
Its not a JESUIT approach is all I can say.
And I do not think northern Indiana offers much… Campus is lovely though. Touchdown Jesus is a famous piece of art on campus, with a reflection pool , and wonderful European cathedral and a beautiful gold statue of St.Mary on top of the main academic hall.
I guess you don’t understand the Catholic faith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
Listen, this thread is for hating, not for arguing the pros and cons of Reed’s scrounge table. Start a new thread for that. You can catch anything anywhere if you don’t practice basic hygiene. Kids of all ages share food, swap spit, and worse. I don’t think Bluto Blutarsky was particularly concerned about spreading diseases when he famously popped his zit.
Meanwhile, let’s get back to sex in the shower. My thought is that the best way to enocurage students to have sex in the showers is to put up a sign telling them not to.
@Coloradomama Parietals was a common term back in the 1960’s and 1970’s and I attended a secular college.