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" \n  Almost a year ago, I sat down with New York Times reporter Kate Taylor to talk about sex at the University of Pennsylvania. The bright and bubbly blonde spent the entire school year interviewing Penn women like myself, examining the role of women in hookup culture. The resulting article, &amp;quot;She Can Play That Game, Too,&amp;quot; appeared in the Sunday issue of the Times and came to the groundbreaking conclusion that \u2014 surprise! \u2014 college women have casual sex. Yes, this much is true, but Taylor missed the mark on several other points. As a rising senior at Penn, I&amp;#039;m here to set the record straight. Women have caught on to the hookup game... Taylor suggests that college women are engaging in hookup culture because we&amp;#039;re so obsessed with our career goals, there&amp;#039;s no time for real relationships, writing, &amp;quot;These women said they saw building their r\u00E9sum\u00E9s, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job at Penn.&amp;quot; By pursuing both our career ambitions and our sex lives, Taylor thinks that women are playing the same &amp;quot;game&amp;quot; that men have always played\u2014getting off while not interrupting our rise to the top. \u2026but it&amp;#039;s not just because we want a great job after graduation. For Taylor, Penn women have a choice between career success and relationships, and they&amp;#039;re choosing careers\u2014but casual sex isn&amp;#039;t a way for women to &amp;quot;get ahead,&amp;quot; or play some sort of &amp;quot;game&amp;quot; with sexual partners who we don&amp;#039;t actually like. Sometimes, we just want to have sex for sex&amp;#039;s sake. What&amp;#039;s wrong with that? Drinking and hooking up go hand-in-hand...Taylor reported that among the 60 Penn women she interviewed, we said &amp;quot;universally that hookups could not exist without alcohol, because they were for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk.&amp;quot; This is largely true. And when we drink, the clear line of consent can become blurred. As one Penn girl put it: When alcohol is involved, &amp;quot;guys assume that the default answer is always yes.&amp;quot; \u2026but we don&amp;#039;t take rape lightly. Taylor&amp;#039;s casual mention of rape \u2014 the anecdotes of a girl who literally fell asleep during sex because she was so drunk and a girl who was coerced into giving a blowjob \u2014 make it seem as though rape is just a residual effect of casual sex at Penn. The fact that Taylor describes these stories in such an off-the-cuff way completely cheapens the issue of consent. Sex at Penn may be casual \u2014 but rape is not. Finding a boyfriend in the crazy clime of college can be tough... So Taylor is right to suggest that having a &amp;quot;hookup buddy&amp;quot; can sometimes fill the void. \u2026but plenty of us do have boyfriends, or sex lives that we consider meaningful. In fact, when Taylor interviewed me, I told her about how I had been seriously dating someone I met at Penn for the past two and a half years (and I still made the Dean&amp;#039;s List). Weirdly, Taylor doesn&amp;#039;t include any examples of girls with boyfriends in her piece, despite the fact that relationships definitely exist on campus. Women don&amp;#039;t go to universities like Penn to find boyfriends (nevermind husbands!)... When Princeton mom Susan Patton penned an editorial last year advising women to find a husband before we graduate, my friends and I were all floored \u2014 does anyone actually believe in the &amp;quot;MRS degree&amp;quot; anymore? Taylor correctly noted that &amp;quot;Penn is filled with driven young women, many of whom aspire to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers, or corporate executives&amp;quot; (or, ahem, writers for Cosmo). \u2026but just because most of us don&amp;#039;t want to be married by graduation, we don&amp;#039;t all fit into two boxes: seeking &amp;quot;meaningless hookups&amp;quot; or matrimony. Taylor cherry-picks examples of women who are either having no-strings-attached sex or saving themselves until marriage, which reinforces the idea that women are either &amp;quot;sluts&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;prudes,&amp;quot; Samanthas or Charlottes, either having one-night-stands or waiting for a ring by spring. What about everyone else in between? Can&amp;#039;t we sexually experiment and date in college\u2014and end up married to a great person later on? Arielle Pardes is a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Holger Pooten / Gallery Stock  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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