Casual sex among college students is so common. It is a well-known and celebrated fact that college students are some of the most sexually active people on the planet. Along those lines, on a campus like Sacramento State, with its 30,000 students, there is a lot of sexual tension and a lot of willing and able participants with which to fill your little black book. But as someone who has witnessed and internalized this opportunity not only in my own life but also in the lives of my friends, I have had a strange revelation: Casual sex isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

I remember in elementary school, everyone in the fifth and sixth grades had to do a unit about sexual education. In order to participate in this unit, we had to bring a permission slip signed by our parents, so the school knew that our parents were aware of what would be discussed in class. I remember those units always spurring controversy, and all my friends who were raised in church-going families never got to enjoy the public school rendition of sexual education.

However, the school’s program was way better than the embarrassing lecture my dad gave me about sex when I was 11. Picture this: an early-40s, stressed out and intense, loud man giving a lecture about the details of sex to his 11-year-old son in the backyard while handing his child (me) a box of Trojans condoms, with the advice to not get a girl (in my fifth grade class) pregnant. And my dad never had enough tact to use the “nature” metaphors; he chose more explicit descriptors. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to my dad, our next-door neighbors were having a family barbecue and being thoroughly entertained by my dad’s obnoxious lecture.

The fifth grade version of the program at school was always more watered down than the sixth grade version; by seventh grade, sexual education included pictures, which, for the boys in the class, made it all worthwhile. However, there is something that was never taught in my sexual education classes that should be in the company of the traditional “reproductive anatomy” and “STD beware” vocabulary: I am talking about the emotional attachment that accompanies sex.

Aside from the physical risk factors associated with the “hook-up” scene, I bet there are even more subtle risks involved: the eroding of the significance of sex.

Sex is something that everyone loves and anyone can get (if they just lower their standards), and yet it is something that I really think is supposed to be special. In college, when many of us have the very first opportunity to do whatever we want under the guise of independence, it is too rare that we stop and think about whether we should, especially when we’re talking about sex.

Casual sex is a scary scene because it is so anonymous and discreet that there is no accountability — and because there is no accountability, there isn’t anyone to tell you to stop.

It is foolish to think that sex is something that can be worn on your sleeve. But it is something that I believe most people try to do. There is something about the vulnerability and intimacy of sex that makes emotional attachment inherent. And I believe that the biggest risk from the college hook-up scene isn’t contracting a sexually transmitted disease, although that risk is great. I believe the biggest risk is devaluation of such a timeless expression of intimacy. I think that this generation has been fooled to think that sex can be substituted for love, and that each is mutually exclusive. But becoming unfeeling about intimacy is something even a condom can’t prevent.

And now that it is spring, we are in the season of love. The birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees, and the moon up above — and a thing called casual sex. I implore you, as your peer: think about it.

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Austin Phillips can be reached at [email protected]