“He’s not going to call you!”

This is the last thing that you want bellowed at you from a man in a beat-up sedan as you trek back from a frat house on a Sunday morning.

But, that is exactly what was bellowed at my good friend from a man in a beat-up sedan as she trekked back from a frat house on a Sunday morning.

Many of us have been there.

As you try to appear collected heading back to your room, you can tell that the baggy T-shirt last night’s affair flung at you before you hit the road is failing to make you look more casual. You attempt to keep your face on your phone and you try to wipe away the rings of smeared black makeup that have taken over the skin around your eyes.

It’s no use, you know people know. You had sex last night.

People often assume — or even expect — that any girl walking in the wee morning hours is doing the notorious “walk of shame.” As soon as their eyes fall onto the disheveled outfit, they begin to ooze judgment.

Walk of shame: Let’s deconstruct that statement.

To walk is the act of traveling on foot. Fine, we’re headed back to a place where we can get a shower and find comfier clothes.

Of is a preposition. We got that one.

And then, we end the statement with shame. Shame — what oxforddictionaries.com defines as, “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”

Now pause and let that one sink in — painful, humiliation, wrong, foolish. This three-word phrase, walk of shame, is begging you to feel remorse for the act of sex. An act that is perhaps the most natural thing for human beings to do, something that, if nobody ever did, no one would exist.

So why do we slut-shame everyone who chooses to do it? Why don’t we celebrate it instead?

You went out, you met someone or met up with someone, you made each other feel good and then they let you sleep over. To me, “walk of triumph” seems to reflect this situation more accurately.

About 51 percent of college students have reported having a one-night stand, a statistic found in a 20-year-long study conducted by Dr. Sandra Carton, according to The Huffington Post. That’s a lot of people who had to wake up and haul themselves back to their respective rooms while feeling degraded during the journey. If it’s so prevalent, then why are we still pretending it’s a shameful action? Even if you don’t want to call it a walk of triumph, our society needs to accept that a lot of people have sex and not make it a bigger deal than it is.

Perhaps, you are reading this and want to shove me off my high horse.

“Nobody actually cares about the walk of shame, Alex. It’s all just a joke.”

And yes, my friend and I both agreed that when she was screamed at by an unknown man, it was a little comical. But at the same time, it was completely inappropriate.

First, his statement implies that the hookup was random. For all this man knew, she could have been walking back from her boyfriend’s room, in which case many would deem the situation much less shameful. Carton’s study also found that the average number of sexual partners for college students across four years is three to four — about one partner per year.

Secondly, girls aren’t the only ones who do the walk of shame, yet I would be willing to bet that far fewer boys are publicly humiliated by it. While it may be that boys’ walks of shame are less obvious simply by the nature of the clothes they go out in, we also live in a culture where a boy who hooks up with many girls is seen as “the man,” but when a girl makes the same choices, she is seen as loose, easy and undesirable.

Boys and girls alike have the same right to engage in sex and deserve the same respect after this decision. The choices you make in bed are yours and the only person who can say whether or not it was a bad idea is you.

So, the next time you are taking the stroll back to your room, wear that T-shirt proudly, look at everyone with those raccoon makeup eyes and own your walk of triumph.

Alex Archambault is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. You can email her at ararcham@syr.edu or follow her @Alex_And_Raa on Twitter.

Published on September 28, 2015 at 8:51 pm