Loose Men: on sex

Not so long ago, the people over at Student Beans put together a survey – with the help of a few very candid students and a rather dubious use of statistics – to show us all that Warwick doesn’t really have very much sex. Rebecca Myers has already taken a fairly irreverent look at this, so I need not repeat exactly the findings, except to say that compared to Bangor, Plymouth and Manchester Met, Warwick is struggling somewhat to get its figures up. And for a proud university like ours, the outcome of the study is somewhat hard to – ahem – swallow.

Now, I have my own theory about why Warwick comes up a little, er, short. Let’s not forget that a few days before that survey came out, the Guardian ranked us the 5th best university in the country. Now I don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions – as it were – but I think this tells us a fair bit about why exactly we’re failing to penetrate the upper echelons of this particular league table. The truth is that whilst Warwick might be a fucking great uni, it’s not a great uni for fucking.

It is no secret that Warwick is by and large populated by bourgeois try-hards like yours truly. Being vaguely socially awkward and generally pretty dull, our priorities are shaped more by our degree course than our intercourse; and we are more likely to practise French oral than… well, you get the picture. There are plenty of those who are more concerned about how many times they can get a first, than with how they might have their first time.

Yes, we are probably more employable than the average Liverpool John Moore’s student – but we finished some 79 places below them in the table at a lowly 83rd, with an average of 2.6 shags per student. (I don’t much care to speculate as to what, precisely, constitutes 0.6 of a shag.) And whilst that’s clearly something of an anti-climax, so to speak, we can at least take comfort in the fact that a job with a corporate finance house or a swanky law firm lies in wait for those whose celibacy allows them more time to study. When you’re a banker, at least, you’ll have all sorts of time to do what you please. Why do you think they say everybody in the City’s a wanker anyway?

Promiscuous universities with pretentions to dominate the sex league will come and go like a Coventry student on a one night stand, but few of them will rival Warwick in its own distinct smugness. We’re going down, you might say, in the survey standings, and on all-round old fashioned promiscuity we’re emphatically spanked even by Hull, where it is so cold that removing one’s clothes carries a serious health risk. But one position remains our strong point: that hallowed spot in the top ten of the real university rankings.

The dream of Woxbridge, at least, is still alive – and we continue to enter willingly those tables which, in life, actually matter.