[xoxoxoBruce]

Think colleges are one long orgy? Read this.

It wasn't the first time, obviously, that a campus sex story had been blown out of proportion. Last fall, The New York Daily News ran a thoughtful, nuanced article with the headline ''WILD SEX 101: S&M Clubs, Nude Parties, Porn, X-Rated Romps Rule at Columbia.'' Having gone to Columbia, where we had experience with only the third item, we read eagerly and canvassed some friends for our blog: Forget the kinky part; how often are you having sex at all? Here are some of the responses:

``Once every six months. Columbia is a rough world for single people.''

``The average in the engineering school is probably like once a semester.''

``Either I missed out or everyone else in college isn't having sex at all.''

``Random hookups do happen, but it is probably rare for most students. At night people just go back to their rooms and finish their homework, or maybe heat up a Hot Pocket.''

Tantalizing! Having eaten a Hot Pocket or two ourselves, we will vouch that there's a lot more truth to these kids' answers than what you see on CollegeHumor.com. Statistics bear this out. In a 2000 Zogby poll, 40 percent of students nationwide reported that they were not ''sexually active'' -- a term left vague enough to include everything from kissing to soliciting strangers in a Minneapolis airport men's room. At the country's top schools, the dry spells approach levels not seen since 1930s Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Harvard's health department reported last year that 47 percent of students there said they had not yet had vaginal intercourse. (Numbers not adjusted for homosexuality, apparently.) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a 2001 survey found that only 51 percent of undergrads had lost their virginity; at Princeton the same year, the student body was 44 percent pure.

Parents and other interested parties often confuse HAVING HAD sex with REGULARLY HAVING SEX. One landmark 2000 study found that kids have an average of 10.8 hookups in college. That seems like a lot. But the math works out to only 1.35 hookups per semester -- and remember, some of these incidents are merely make-out sessions. This is what we're getting so worked up about?

Students hugely overestimate the notches on their classmates' mortarboards. In 2005, a survey of four universities found that while 80 percent of students had had one sex partner or fewer in the previous year, only 22 percent thought that the average number of partners was that low. In a similar survey in 2002, most guessed that three or more was the norm.