Wednesday, December 7, 2022 // The Statement — 4
Let’s talk date parties, pseudo-consent
 and transactional sex

“He tried to kiss me like 
eight times,” my friend said 
as she casually took a sip from 
her iced coffee — her mascara 
from the night 
before 
smudged 
un-
der her eyes. 
“He did 
what?” I 

asked. 
“I kept telling him it 
wouldn’t be a good idea, but he 
was so drunk he just kept lean-
ing in. It was crazy,” she chuck-
led uncomfortably, as if remem-
bering an off-color joke.
Our group of friends sat 
around the living room, dishev-
eled and numbingly hungover. 
When we each took our turn in 
the sacred “morning debrief,” I 
was appalled at the stories com-
ing from each one of my girl 
friends after the fraternity date 
party we attended the night 
before.
A lot of my friends’ 
testimonies seemed to 
carry a similar theme: 
One of pseudo-con-
sent, with many of 
their male dates be-
having under the im-
pression that a date 
party invite meant 
implicit consent, con-
sent that lasted all night 
and expired at sunrise. 
That all their nights would 
end in an inevitable, albeit 
not 
explicitly-consensual 

hookup. 
“You know that’s not okay, 
right?” I inquired wearily. 
Intrinsically, we all knew 
this behavior was not okay, but 
that didn’t stop the stories from 
the night before to be told with a 
casual lightness — with us all too 
afraid to address the underlying 
level of discomfort. With each 
story of one of my friends being 
groped or continually hit on by 
her date, I became increasingly 
disgusted. I began to wonder 
why this was coming up now. 
My friends and I go out to 
bars and parties on a regular ba-
sis without having to withstand 
such blatant lack of respect for 
our bodies. There was some-
thing about this outing — The 
Date Party — that made the no-
tion of consent feel different. 
Date parties are a common 
occurrence on college cam-
puses in many student organiza-
tions. While they have origins 
in college Greek Life communi-
ties, they also occur frequently 
in professional fraternities and 
other organizations, like pre-
law frats, pre-health frats and 

other university clubs. 
LSA Sophomore Jenna 
Al-Nouri has experience with 
date parties as a member of both 
a social sorority and a profes-
sional 
pre-health 
fraternity. 
Thankfully, Al-Nouri hasn’t 
had a date party experience in 
which a date has pressured her 
into feeling like hooking up was 
the only way to end the night. 
But, she is still aware that this 
culture exists. She reminisced 
on a time when a male friend of 
hers stated that he “wanted to 
bring a date that he could hook 
up with.”
Al-Nouri recognizes the 
disrespect toward a woman’s 
boundaries that is often height-
ened around date party season 
and has come up with ways to 
combat this negativity while still 
preserving the fun of the event.
“I made a rule that I will 
only bring a best friend that’s a 
girl because I know she will be 
chill,” Al-Nouri shared. “I have 
a lot more fun when I bring a 
friend.” 

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

2012

2022

Sex or scripture? 
The Madonna-Whore complex

Sex, in a sense, has become 
one of the most commercialized 
phenomena of our evolution-
ary biology. Evolving for over 2 
billion years, the first archaeo-
logical record of penetrative 
intercourse dates to 385 million 
years ago between prehistoric 
fish named Microbrachius dicki 
(giggle now if you need to).
Since the time of Mycenae 
Greece, however, sex has been 
streamlined into embodying the 
more sociocultural aspects of 
our societies, with the biological 
effects of pregnancy and disease 
being redefined as a simple and 
banal prologue to the complex 
and emotionally-enriching pro-

cesses of sexual intimacy.
Often the source of drama 
and action in art as much as in 
real life, sex has come to define 
humanity and its transience, 
influencing political beliefs and 
policy, cultural and structural 
development of societies and 
our self-identity and relation-
ships. The psychology of sex, in 
a way, supersedes its physicality 
because the meaning behind the 
act distorts our cultural values 
more so than physical penetra-
tion ever could.
The most notable contribu-
tions to our contemporary val-
ues of sex stem from the works 
of 
psychoanalyst 
Sigmund 
Freud, who rose to prominence 
for his outlandish (and often 
correct) hypotheses about sex.

Of the most striking — and 
trust me, there’s a lot — notions 
is the foundation and defini-
tion of the Madonna-Whore 
complex. The term came about 
when the shifty, yet often spot-
on, psychoanalyst had observed 
a strange dichotomy in his male 
patients, who came to him com-
plaining that they didn’t feel any 
sexual desires for their wives as 
they did for prostitutes. 
Mostly applicable to het-
eronormative ideals of sex, this 
complex, as defined by Freud, is 
the black-and-white splitting of 
female partners into two groups: 
the chaste and virtuous Madon-
na, and the immoral and promis-
cuous Whore. Freud illustrated 
the paradoxical nature of this 
phenomenon by explaining that 

“where men love, they have no 
desire and where they desire, 
they cannot love.” This theory 
turns respect and attraction into 
mutually exclusive traits, with 
tumultuous implications in the 
scope of sexual dynamics.
What drew me in about 
this complex was the absurdity 
of this subconscious rationale, 
how the male-centered fallacy 
views a woman’s modesty as a 
determinant of the respect she 
is owed, and the implication that 
a woman who has liberated 
herself from the anxiety of 
social scrutiny ought to be 
ousted from the societal 
hierarchy.

Design by Serena Shen

Design by Serena Shen

A DECADE OF SEX

VALERIJA MALASHEVICH
Statement Correspondent

 ELLA KOPELMAN
Statement Columnist

Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Design by Serena Shen