Fri, Apr 29, 2016 page5

• College students’ casual sex doubles in 14 years

  ‘CANNONEERING ARRANGEMENTS’: A survey found only 50% of students who have casual sex use condoms, most arrange it online and many say that they regret it

  • By Jonathan Chin / Staff writer
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  Taiwanese university students are twice as likely to engage in casual sex compared with 14 years ago, according to the results of a survey on sexuality on campus.

  The poll, conducted by the Chinese-language Apple Daily and Eric Yu (俞振華), associate research fellow at National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center, found that 23.5 percent of respondents had casual sex — double the percentage found by the last survey 14 years ago — and only 50 percent of those who engage in casual sex said they use condoms regularly, a 10 percentage point decrease from the last survey.

  According to the survey, 95.5 percent of university students have heard of yuepao, (約砲, “cannoneering arrangements”), the Taiwanese slang for arranging casual sex.

  Also, 64.5 percent of respondents said they would like to have casual sex.

  Of university students who tried to have casual sex, female students had a success rate of 52.3 percent, while male students’ success rate was 26.4 percent, an analysis of the poll showed.

  When distributed according to academic departments, the poll results showed that casual sex is most prevalent in law schools for both male and female students, at 42.7 percent and 75.2 percent respectively, followed by education-related fields at 41.1 percent for males and 66.8 percent for females.

  Male students in social sciences are the third most likely to have casual sex at 33.6 percent, while female students in agricultural studies are the third most likely have casual sex at 59.3 percent. Natural science and engineering students of both genders are the least likely to have experienced casual sex, the poll showed.

  “The increasing openness of society legitimizes yuepao,” a 20-year-old female college student identified as “Reina” was quoted by the Apple Daily as saying.

  The Apple Daily quoted a male information technology student, surnamed Cheng (鄭), at National Taipei University of Technology as saying: “Men in natural science or engineering are not very good at striking up conversations with the opposite sex.”

  A female law student at -Soochow University, identified only as Cooper, said that students of law “have more stress to release.”

  Cheng Yun-chia (成雲佳), president of the Workshop for Gender Equality, a Chengchi student organization, said that consensual sex should not be subjected to moral judgement.

  Citing a 2014 study he commissioned, Yu said that 34 percent of Taiwanese female university students reported having sex, among whom 38.5 percent regretted the experience.

  Among male college students, 45.7 percent said they had sex, and 43 percent expressed regret, Yu said.

  “What is surprising is the high rate of regret,” he said, adding that while Taiwanese university students had significantly lower levels of reported sexual activity than their European and North American counterparts, every academic survey to date had found that less than 30 percent of university students practiced safe sex in all of their sexual encounters.

  People have the need for intimacy beyond brief physical gratification, but schools do not spend resources to hire teachers on subjects that are not tested in exams, Yu said.

  As a result, many students have no time, knowledge or experience of normal relationships, and a majority are hard-pressed to make conversation even in organized dating events, he said.

  Casual sex arranged via the Internet therefore have become the surrogate for meeting people and developing relationships, and the increasing rates of casual sex suggest “greater alienation in interpersonal relationships in the modern age,” Yu said.

  Hsingling Medical Foundation for Family Life and Sexual Education director-general Edwin Yen (晏涵文) said he was “not surprised” by the figures.

  Yen said the Ministry of Education is taking steps to address inadequate sexual education, and it has added sexual education and HIV prevention classes starting from elementary school, as well as launching a program last year to train teachers for sexual education at universities and vocational colleges.

  The online poll was conducted from March 10 to March 15 and collected 10,537 valid samples.
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