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There is a time and a place for Cornell students to have casual sex. It’s called Spring Break. Better judgment seems to take a sudden vacation when you visit a place where the shots are free if you dance on the bar and the dress code is “wear something.” Like any good orgy, everyone at Spring Break is looking for a commitment-less good time. After an entire week spent downing as many shots as you can afford and judging people solely based on the way they look in a bathing suit, our inner demons are bound to make an appearance.

In Acapulco, these demons are personified by one mystifying creature: The Devil. Based upon the dancers of ancient Aztec culture, The Devil arrives at Acapulco’s two main clubs every night at about 4:30 a.m. carrying a torch, wearing a large feathered headdress and silver contact lenses and painted entirely silver (note: It has been confirmed that he is painted entirely silver).

I’ll admit that, the first time I saw The Devil, I didn’t fully understand why he was such a big deal. It was five o’clock in the morning and some 30-year-old Mexican man who painted himself silver was groping some college girls in the middle of a club, and everyone was going crazy over it? It took a day for me to finally understand what exactly The Devil symbolized.

At Cornell, there really isn’t too much casual sex happening. People either have “relationships,” which are basically marriages without the wedding gifts, or they have pseudo-casual sex (a.k.a. hook-ups), which is basically just two acquaintances having sex laced with “friendship” — for good measure. When you hook up with someone at Cornell, you inevitably see that person again, and, unfortunately, you might not be wearing your beer goggles when you do. There’s no magical sex island in Ithaca full of strangers just waiting to sleep with you.

Spring Break, however, is like a week-long frat party where you don’t know every single person, and all the people you do know are wasted beyond rational thought. What you have is a bunch of drunken kids who are so aroused from all the bumping and grinding of the club — not to mention watching each other in bathing suits all day — that they’ll hook up with basically anything the little devil on their shoulder says to.

“It’s about quantity — not quality,” explained one of my more … let’s call him honest … friends, as he and his buddies clinked their Coronas. You don’t have to really enjoy a person’s personality too much (they aren’t talking while you are making out) and, frankly, you don’t even have to really like how they look (your eyes are usually closed anyway).

The thing is that everyone has that mentality. They didn’t go on Spring Break to start a relationship. In fact, if you actually spend time talking to someone for an extended period of time, or (gasp!) actually getting to know someone, it’s as awkward afterward as, well, as it is after sex in college. People go on Spring Break because they want what The Devil sings about: Sex, Drugs and House (House is dance music … don’t worry, I didn’t know, either). They want what they can never truly get otherwise.

It’s easy to get swept up in this state of mind (or lack thereof) because that’s the whole goal of Spring Break. That’s what it’s designed for. Frankly, there’s not much to do at 5 a.m. in a club in Acapulco but dance with The Devil. By the second night, I, myself, was so intoxicated by the Acapulco haze that I cheered right alongside the rest of the crowd when a girl I’d known since middle school was dancing with The Devil and waving her bra around over her head. And I wasn’t even surprised at myself … because it was Spring Break.

What was most interesting to me is how the Cornellians in Acapulco behave compared to the kids from other schools there. It seemed to me that, like everything else, we seemed to take the Spring Break a lot more seriously than everyone else there. When the girls from “party schools” would be sitting and eating their dinners, the girls from Cornell would be dancing on the tables. When the people at other schools would make out on the dance floor, girls from Cornell would be making out with The Devil.

The reason for this, and the explanation for why casual sex happens so much more on Spring Break, is that we, at Cornell, are starved for casualness throughout our lives. We are either shacked up, pretending to be married, or “single” occasionally hooking up with people we know. There’s no in-between. We don’t party every second of every day or have truly casual, don’t-know-you-won’t-ever-see-you-again sex, really, ever. So, when we get the chance to, we let loose like there’s no tomorrow. Because, for us, there really isn’t.

Once you leave Cornell, however, people actually date. They’re older and not so interested in being with someone they don’t consider “marriage material.” They’ll date a bunch of people at once — and by date, I mean actually get to know — so that they can find the right one as soon as possible.

In the mean time, we Cornell students are stuck up in Ithaca with all of our hormones and no new people to release (no pun intended) them with. What with all of those pent up demons confined to challenging courses and stuffy libraries, it’s no wonder we go nuts on Spring Break. That’s why it was so funny to me that, throughout Spring Break, students from other schools were so surprised that, when it comes to the craziest night with the Devil, “It’s always a girl from Cornell.” I just smiled and thought to myself, I can’t imagine who else it could be.

Nikki Nussbaum is a sophomore in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be contacted at opinion@cornellsun.com. Cornell Unzipped appears alternate Tuesdays.

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There is a time and a place for Cornell students to have casual sex. It’s called Spring Break. Better judgment seems to take a sudden vacation when you visit a place where the shots are free if you dance on the bar and the dress code is “wear something.” Like any good orgy, everyone at Spring Break is looking for a commitment-less good time. After an entire week spent downing as many shots as you can afford and judging people solely based on the way they look in a bathing suit, our inner demons are bound to make an appearance.

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