I asked Newcastle students about their sex lives as freshers – it got MESSY

Sweat, snogs, sore feet, BuzzBallz, bad wine. Your ID is probably somewhere at the bottom of Tropiloco’s ball pit.

Now you’ve got to take the obligatory pilgrimage to Bigg Market Chippy before you crawl home for a three hour flat debrief, unless you’ve left arm-in-arm with someone, in which case drunk sex might follow, and with it a horror story your friendship group will quote for years.

We’ve all been there.

So, as a new set of freshers enter university, we asked Newcastle students for their own sex stories as freshers, and the bigger question lurking underneath them: What exactly are we supposed to be losing when we ‘lose’ our virginity?

Going down

He shat himself in a Park View lift. Was it the chicken wine? Too many poppers? Pre-sex nerves? Who knows.

Eau de donner

Turns out the ‘meat sweats’ aren’t particularly seductive. One respondent wrote: “I left a man outside The Gate because he smelt too much like kebab” – the lingering essence of garlic sauce and BO is NOT the way into a women’s pants, gents.

Apparently, it was so bad that even showering and toothpaste couldn’t be a saving grace. Romance is alive and well.

Girlfriend? What girlfriend?

He’s off socials? His anti-Zuckerberg take is not as woke as you might think. Turns out he has a girlfriend back home.

Cute couple photos on the wall? Her thong casually strewn across the room? Condom from approximately an hour earlier in the bin? Ignore them x

The inevitable ‘hey girly’ text appearing, like a phantom, in your Instagram message requests almost goes without saying.

Not all Freshers’ Flu is a metaphor

The sexual health clinic waiting room also made several appearances in our DMs, with more than one respondent managing to contract both chlamydia and gonorrhoea simultaneously.

A useful reminder, if one were needed, that sometimes the morning-after pill isn’t the only morning-after admin.

Jokes aside, if you’re having unprotected sex, get tested. STIs can often have no symptoms, so feeling fine isn’t necessarily the all-clear.

The wrong kind of splash zone

One person threw up on a man’s penis after one too many tequila shots. Another managed the same feat during sex. And one woke up to discover that a man had mistaken her bedroom for a toilet, leaving no corner of the room untouched by his urine.

It’s also worth mentioning the phenomenon of ‘coke c*ck.’ As one respondent generously put it: “Lots of it. Bless a guy for trying.”

A VERY public display of affection

One respondent tried phone sex to keep a long-distance relationship alive, only for her flatmates to hear the entire performance through the walls. Nothing says intimacy quite like an unwilling audience of your new housemates.

A full English breakfast, God bless

Amongst all the carnage, there was one genuinely lovely contribution: “He made me a full English breakfast in the morning.”

Aww. Chivalry may not be dead after all. There is, perhaps, still hope for the men of Newcastle.

The leaderboard

One example came from Castle Leazes, where a respondent told me her 10 male flatmates were competing to see who could sleep with the most girls the fastest.

Another respondent described a sexual encounter between two men where it had become almost competitive. Three girls in one night is apparently a statistic worth reporting.

It’s difficult to dismiss this as simply a high libido. There’s a difference between enjoying sex and turning women into numbers on a scoreboard.

The virginity police

“Some sort of freak of nature”: That’s how one respondent said she was made to feel for still being a virgin during freshers. Another said the pressure to have sex was even greater during Partners’ Week than Freshers’ Week itself. It was as if everyone had arrived at university with a complete sexual CV.

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Sex as currency

One woman described sex as “some sort of currency” – something to acquire, compare, and use as a measure of status.

Suddenly, what started as funny freshers anecdotes begins to be a little more revealing: Why do we care so much about ‘losing’ our virginity in the first place? And more specifically: What exactly are we supposed to be losing?

A poll by The Newcastle Tab found that 75 per cent consider virginity to be a social construct, while 25 per cent do not. 

It’s important to know there isn’t an organ called virginity. There isn’t a biological switch that flips the moment you have sex for the first time. And there certainly isn’t a tiny receptionist inside your vagina waiting to stamp your paperwork after sex: CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE NOW SEXUALLY EXPERIENCED.

Sex is real, but so are the emotions, the memories, and the consequences.

The language we use for virginity is telling. Women are told they ‘lose’ it. Men are told they ‘take’ it. Women ‘give it up,’ and men ‘get’ girls. A sexual experience can become a transaction, a status symbol, or another number on that leaderboard.

The problem isn’t that people care about their first sexual experience. Of course they do. It can be intimate, exciting, awkward, funny, disappointing, or completely unremarkable. The problem is the value we attach to whether someone has had one, and what we think it says about them if they haven’t.

A woman can be judged for having too much sex, while a man can be made to feel like a failure for not having enough.

Socially, a virgin can be seen as some uncommon freak, while someone sexually experienced can be reduced to a statistic. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone with this narrative in mind.

What’s the bigger issue?

The concept of virginity has a long history of being tied to ideas about women’s purity, value, and who gets to claim or control their sexuality.

In a patriarchal system, virginity has often functioned as a way of regulating women’s sexuality, which is evident in the way we shame women having ‘too much,’ whilst the male sexual experience is framed as an achievement.

Beyond this, we see the control of a woman’s movements. Suddenly they belong to the man they’ve slept with. This controls women by shutting the option down for non-monogamy, keeping them as a ‘housemaker’ for the man.

It’s no wonder, then, that we continue to treat sexual experience as a measure of worth.

What’s sex really about then?

Sex is a normal part of being human. It can be intimate, pleasurable, awkward, exciting, funny, disappointing, or completely unremarkable.

None of these experiences should determine how we value ourselves or each other.

We should be normalising the fact that everyone’s experiences are different, instead of creating arbitrary deadlines around who should have had sex, how much sex is enough, or what it supposedly says about you.

Because sex isn’t a competition, and it certainly shouldn’t be about dominance or control. It’s about intimacy, curiosity, and connection – whatever that looks like for you.

So, if your Freshers’ Week involved three girls, a full English breakfast, a sexual health clinic, or absolutely nothing whatsoever, don’t worry – you haven’t fallen behind.

There was never a finish line, anyway x

Featured image: Animation Factory

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