Sex and the Smithie: The nasty truth about your mattress

The "Sex and the Smithie" column is written by a different Smith student each week.Smithies always get on top. So many talents have come before us, soaking in the creative juices here, grinding away at the workload and practicing their technique, all in preparation for the future. They then maneuvered the fluid job market of the post-graduation world and through toil and sweat scored, coming to the climax of their careers and the payoff for those years of exertion. The campus is penetrated with the ability of future high-performers.

Usually, when we think of Smithies' hard thrusts for achievement, we imagine the academic buildings of the campus, yet those are not the erections our students come home to each night. Nothing is more welcoming at the end of the day than the lush carpets, love seats and sofas in every house. Houses are the home of all Smithie activities, including, yes, sex. Each house has been the site of sex hundreds, if not thousands, of times. On your rugs. On your couches. On your bed. Chances are, wherever you're sitting right now has been befouled. Try to relax.

House furniture has a long, sordid sexual history. House parties, midnight trysts and the weirdly kinky have all done their part in ensuring that most of your furniture is probably corrupted. Any place that is somewhat private at some point in the day - beau parlors, single bathrooms, showers, laundry rooms - can and has been disgraced. Yet precise data on just how often they have been disgraced is elusive, as few Smithies will admit to the deed.

There is one piece of furniture, however, whose routine use allows further investigation: mattresses. We all have them, we all sleep on them and some of us, well, you know. But do you ever wonder about the sad little life your mattress saw before you lay with it? Allegedly the lifespan of a Smith mattress is about 10 years. You could be sleeping on a mattress in its second year of life, or one that should have hit the junkyard years ago. The fact is that you will never really know - scary, huh?

If you could determine the amount of booty that your mattress has bore, would you really want to know? Well folks, if you aren't brave enough to know the truth about your bed I suggest you stop reading here, for the results may be disturbing.

In order to determine the amount of wear and tear a mattress gets, we must first have an approximation of the amount of action an average Smithie gets in a given year. Sex-life wise, Smith students can be divided into four categories: the virgins by choice, students who aren't getting any and asexuals, who together comprise about 60 percent of the school; students in relationships with local significant others or random hookups, about 20 percent of the school; the Smith students sleeping with other Smith students, about 15 percent; and students in long distance relationships, about 5 percent. (We are talking about sex between two or more people; the commitment you may share with your vibrator is not included in the equation.)

We spend about 250 days out of the year at Smith, which means 250 opportunities to get laid. Smithies dating other Smithies are an unpredictable lot: some may go at it twice a day, others once a month. Factoring this into the equation, it is estimated that an average Smithie committed to another Smithie gets it on about 87 times out of the year. The students dating people in the area or having random sex only have a chance to fornicate on the weekends, which makes their average number smaller at about 37 times a year. For those students in long distance relationships, sex time is limited, and averages out to only four times a year (phone sex and Webcam sex do not count in terms of the mattress question). And the virgins by choice, students who aren't getting any and asexuals, of course, don't contribute to mattress abuse.


Averaging out the number of sex acts each year in accordance with the percentage of students they apply to, it is estimated that the average Smithie has sex about 21 times a year. If your mattress is 10 years old and each year 21 sex acts occur on top of it, that means that the bed you are sleeping on tonight could have seen 210 nights of terror in its sad little lifetime. Try thinking about that the next time you change your sheets!

So there you have it: your bed's history. It might be shocking, it might be gross or you might be thinking you do it 21 times a month. Whatever the case, we hope we haven't driven you to the floor.