Spring Break - the tradition

As mentioned in my previous post, I was watching CIS: Miami today. The plot of the show is that Miami is awash in college students (presumably - I think in real life a few high school students get in on the act as well).

And all the young women are walking around in the skimpiest of bikinis, and all the guys in swimsuits (no mankinis on view, thank goodness), and of course they are getting drunk and having sex, and 3 of them end up murdered.

As the detective crew go around trying to solve the crime, they keep saying with irony - when learning of some particular excess - well, it's spring break.

And I found myself wondering, when this spring break phenomenon - of college students deliberately going out to party, get drunk and have sex - start?

I went to Amazon and did a search on books with the keywords Spring Break - and every single book that came back had some kind of sexual connotation, for example:

Showing 1 - 12 of 8,384 Result
--Spring Break (Summer) by Katherine A. Applegate (Jan 26, 2010)
--Spring Break: An Erotic Lesbian Seduction by Eva Scarlett (Aug 19, 2011) - Kindle eBook
--Spring Break Sex Stories, Volume One by Julieta Hyde (Jun 17, 2011) - Kindle eBook
--Spring Fling by Sabrina James (Feb 1, 2010)
--Revelations: A Tale of Spring Break, Sex, Drugs, & Alcohol by Chris Robertson (Aug 13, 2010) - Kindle eBook
--Confessions of a Sorority Girl: Spring Break Gangbang by Natalia Darque (Oct 19, 2011) - Kindle eBook
--Rites of Spring (Break) (An Ivy League Novel) by Diana Peterfreund (Jun 24, 2008)
--Spring Break by Kayla Perrin (Mar 2, 2010)
--Spring Break Submission by Jere Haken (Apr 13, 2012) - Kindle eBook
--It's Always Spring Break Somewhere In The Galaxy by Raven c.s. McCracken (Oct 31, 2011)
--Hooked Up Over Spring Break by Sandra Sookoo, Emma Lai and D. L. Shorts (Mar 13, 2012) - Kindle eBook
--Spring Fling (A Warm Night On The Beach) (College Girls On Spring Break) by Amber Hunt (Mar 13, 2012)

And of course all the covers featured the same types of things. The woman's body from the neck down. If she's facing the reader, the photo features large breasts about to break out of a small bikini top. If she's facing away from the reader, it features her rounded buttocks bisected by a thong.

There's a saying, "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas." There's another saying, if this ep of CSI Miami is to be believed, "What happens on Spring Break stays on Spring Break."

But of course neither statement is true. I wonder how many college girls get pregnant on spring break, and never know the name(s) of the father of their little bun in the oven. How many contract venereal diseases?

Of course TV series do "glamorize" things...maybe it's not as easy to get sex on spring break as CSI Miami would have you believe, but somehow I doubt it. College kids, hormones, the romanticization of spring break, the idea if you come back from spring break without being able to boast about your sexual exploits will forever leave you out of the popular cliques... oh, yes, I think these days that's all spring break is, an excuse to have free sex.

Very sad, and only going to get worse.