Numerous blogs, newspapers, and alternative weeklies are picking up the story about the alarming rise in cost of contraceptives on college campuses. For quite possibly the first and last time that this current administration has done something harmful to women and their sexual health, the damage appears to be completely unintentional, the result of a bill intended to reduce the federal debt. The government has recalculated Medicaid rebates, and drug companies have eliminated the deep discounts they offered university health services on certain drugs (especially the birth control pill) in order to make up the difference. Now prices at university health centers have risen up to 200%, and the chances of having the burden relieved are slim.

I'll admit that a small, selfish part of me had a flicker of lack of sympathy for women facing this dilemma. I went to a Catholic university, and while the order that ran the university itself was rather liberal, the health center on campus belonged to a network of Catholic hospitals and clinics in the area. As you can imagine, you could get your cough syrups and flu shots at our university health center, but good luck finding a condom, much less a pill prescription. So I had to get my pills from Planned Parenthood at a price of $30 a month in 1996.

Thinking back on that renews my sympathies, since I remember how much $30 a month represented to a college kid. I couldn't even go the recommended route and buy a few packs at a time, since money was so tight for me then. I remember justifying the cost to myself by divvying up the number of times I had sex a month and figuring the per-encounter cost. Hell, I was in college, and it was cheaper entertainment than renting a movie, let alone going to one.

The downside of this strategy was that you can't really go on and off the pill for short dry spells, which meant that I had my times of spending $1 a day and still needing the movies for entertainment, at a savings of $0. Friends who respected my frugality would point out that at least dry spells meant saving on condoms, but that always led us to bemoan the need for both condoms and the pill (because you can't go wrong with being extra super careful not to get pregnant while also avoiding disease would be the answer), and ended up making sex seem, to our financial aid-addled minds, like a very expensive endeavor indeed. Yet somehow giving it up completely seemed out of the question. You just had to look a little harder for the used textbooks and consider the benefits of drinking Keystone over those pricier beers like Budweiser.

According to modern media hysteria over sex and the college girl, my friends and I were hopeless lost cases. For some professional anti-feminists, promoting that idea that the sexual world for college girls is nothing but a dreary landscape full of humiliation and heartbreak has become something of a cottage industry. Various anti-feminist groups love nothing more than to show up on campus and try to spin the experimental and conception-free college years as a hellhole for young women, curable only by retreating into stifling and old-fashioned gender roles from the era before reliable hormonal contraception and widespread condom use.

The more popular approach to alarm-raising about college girls and sex is the one taken by the Independent Women's Forum, funded by that right wing gadfly Richard Mellon Scaife. In a two-fer of anti-feminism, IWF sponsors a series of events that both attack feminist anti-violence programs and attack college women's sexual freedom, called "Take Back The Date," a mockery of the famous anti-rape activist event Take Back The Night. The idea is to go on a date with lots of flowers and no sex. In lieu of spending time horizontal and naked, you can entertain yourself and your date with a smug discussion of how nice it was in the days when good girls who got raped just suffered in silence rather than ruin the career prospects of some nice young man who has a bad habit of raping on occasion.

The IWF tries to blame pretty much everything that could go wrong in a young woman's life on the state of her hymen or her willingness to have a little casual sex during downtime from studying. They start from an inarguably true premise–that it's not fun to be dumped or to find yourself lovesick over someone who doesn't love you back–and move from there to implying that if college women just kept their panties on and spent more time filling the hope chest, then they can safely avoid having romantic problems altogether. For some reason, they don't continue this logic and point out to young women that if they never get married, they never run the risk of divorce. Or that if they never eat anything, they never run the risk of indigestion. Or that if they lie in bed all day without moving, they strongly reduce their risk of twisting an ankle.

I for one am glad for the opportunity for tears and heartbreak and sexual mistakes in college. To have the chance to learn your lessons when the stakes are low is a privilege that more people should have. Facing adult problems before we've become adults is what turns us from children into grown-ups. While the mistakes we make in college are painful, they are often less consequential than if we were trying to swing it out in the real world where the stakes are much higher. Many things about right wingers puzzle me, but I'll admit the opposition to people gaining a measure of maturity before inflicting themselves on spouses and children might top the list.