February 20, 2019

SEX ON THURSDAY | Spit Sisters

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was one of the 4,106 Cornellians that participated in the now-infamous Cornell Business Analytics Love Match survey. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, duh. (For any of you living under a rock, this survey promised to unite soulmates based on personality and midnight snack preferences, and it went viral). I, shamefully, stayed up until obscenely late hours of the night with some girlfriends waiting for the unveiling of the matches, and we screamed with anguish when it was delayed for a day. It was like Christmas Eve, but more desperate. Much more desperate.

When I woke the next morning, I eagerly opened the email that sat waiting in my inbox. After a quick social media scan, I was pleasantly surprised that both of my soulmates had pleasant-enough looking faces. I sent a screenshot of their names to group messages, as girls do.

Then disaster struck.

Within .0007 seconds of receiving the names of my two new other halves, I got three texts from three different friends that said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I totally hooked up with that guy freshmen year!”, one that read, “I’m literally in [my love match’s] bed right NOW!” and a third, “Get this, I went to date night with your soulmate last week!”

Insert Pikachu baffled face meme here.

Both of my love matches have been inside (literally) some of my closest friends. I thought this was just an ironic twist of fate, but as the gossip chains expanded, I started to hear that my story was common. More than a few people matched with their friend/enemy/TA’s ex-lovers.

Is Cornell really that small?

Or do we all just have a lot of sex?

As I started thinking about it, I figured that if you drew a line connecting everyone that has shagged at Cornell, we’d probably all be related in one big orgy-web. My Spit Sisters could probably fill a sorority house, or two.

Spit Sisters (n): two women who have had sexual relations with the same penis.

And then you’ve got Spit Brothers. In the modern-day fraternity context, two Spit Brothers who put their peas in the same pod are probably bros; no grudge between them, definitely no stories shared, but maybe a beer to christen the new bond. Tunnel Buddies.

Spit Sisters — well, that’s another story. The game Spit Sisters play is far more complex. For me, some of my closest friends are my Spit Sisters, due to a small social circle and way too many Phi Apple Pi wine tours. Navigating these intra-friend group Spit Sister situations requires skill. These bonds are built on the joys of shared experience — “he came in like two minutes for you, too?” — and respecting boundaries, aka NEVER “husband exchanges” where actual feelings were felt. And the most important: discretion. I have a few such “sisters” where I know that she knows and she knows that I know, but we both know that we are going to both pretend that we don’t know until one of us dies. Never talk about your mutual phallic UNLESS you’ve had a fishbowl, and even then only jokingly, in the girl’s bathroom of the bar. Because everything is fair game between women in the bathroom of the bar.

Without the profuse amount of “wife swapping” and “husband exchanging” that goes on here far above Cayuga’s waters, us girls have to band together, especially since our boyfriends have boned half the graduating class.

Dear all-knowing Cornell Business Analytics Survey: Next time can you make sure your algorithm accounts for Tunnel Buddies and Penis Partners?

Much appreciated.

Goddess Horny is a student at Cornell University. Her column, Sex in the Stacks, runs monthly.