For all the talk of threesomes and sex on the beach, there was also a clear gender divide at Schoolies that was not salacious, but rather endearingly immature.
After spending two days on the front lines of Schoolies, which mostly involved repeating to myself, “I’m not old, they’re just really young”, I feel I’m an expert on the behaviours of Gen Z in the wild.
I quickly realised that, besides everyone really being into the singer Sombr (he spells his name without an e, that isn’t a typo), there was also a clear gender divide.
I clocked that, at Schoolies, predominantly (there’s always a few outliers), the girls hung out with the girls, and the boys hung out with the boys.
If I am going to be honest, it was really undermining all their talk of hook-ups, threesomes, and sex on the beach.
I’ve never found that sand goes well with nakedness, but as a $50-per-15-minutes fortune teller once told me, we are all on our own journey.
Anyway, back to this gender trend.
I am not sure if this is because a lot of them that came to the party went to single sex private schools, or because when you are young, you tend to mainly hang out with people of the same gender.
Throughout Schoolies you would see groups of girls and groups of boys. Sometimes, when things got really scandalous, a group of girls would approach a group of boys, and they would all mingle.
But then you would watch as the girls would move on for the night, while the boys would remain together.
At one point, when I was chatting with a group of guys, one got brave and yelled out to a group of girls to come to a party later, and they enthusiastically nodded and giggled.
Then his friends immediately teased him for calling out to the group of girls, and he looked slightly embarrassed but also a bit proud.
This is the level of maturity we’re dealing with.
The fact that they were prepared to hook up with each other, but didn’t really know how to be friends with the opposite sex, was amusing.
It reminded me of high school when you wouldn’t dare approach a boy unless you had a pack of girls by your side.
Then you enter the workforce and, sadly, realise that you can’t bring a whole posse with you to make your conversation with Gavin from accounts any less awkward.
That is not to say there was not a huge amount of hooking up taking place during the first Schoolies week.
A lot of them managed to push through their juvenile awkwardness.
At one point, one young girl gravely told me that she had been turfed out of her room the night before and forced to sleep on the floor because her roommate had brought a boy back.
She was naturally perturbed, because who wants to sleep on the floor?
There was also, of course, the girl who informed me that a threesome had happened on the first night.
Not to mention a guy who revealed he had seen a couple having sex on the beach, he even pointed to the beach, so I understood exactly where it took place. Very informative.
The irony was not lost on me.
On one hand, I was listening to the Gen Zers tell me all about all the wild sex stuff happening at Schoolies and, on the other, I was watching them awkwardly tiptoe around the opposite sex in groups.
It felt like the equivalent of constantly telling your mum to treat you like an adult, but still wanting her to make all your doctor’s appointments for you.
School leavers might be doing adult things like having sex on the beach (you could argue no self-respecting adult would combine nudity with fine grains), but they are also still trying to work out how even to be friends with the opposite sex.
Mature? No. Relatable? Hell yeah.
Or should I say, 67? Probably not. I still have no idea what that means.
