The music is thumping, bodies are grinding and your partner for the night and you leave the party, for obvious reasons. When you got back to your place, you start kissing-but it’s more like fumbling with your lips. The clothes come off-but you’re not sure how you managed that. The blow job was terrible-but 15 minutes of it was the only way you could get hard. And you’re sure you gave the worst oral sex of your life, too. The sex-well, you’re not sure you can call it that. There was penetration, but shortly after, you fell asleep.

This isn’t a farfetched scenario. Hook-up culture on campus is based on alcohol, yet alcohol is one of the main reasons hooking up is so unsatisfying.

Proving that Shakespeare was a genius for the ages, he wrote, “It provokes the desire, but takes away the performance” on alcohol’s role in sex. I wish I’d read “Macbeth” in high school.

Alcohol is a depressant. After just two drinks-two drinks!-sexual dysfunction kicks in, according to the Center for Healthy Student Behaviors at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For men, it’s harder to get and maintain an erection, and premature ejaculation becomes more likely. Women have their own problems, namely inadequate lubrication and decreased quality of orgasms.

And I’m not even talking about how difficult it is to actually have sex while drunk. Alcohol makes technique sloppy and dulls sensations, meaning you fumble around not satisfying your partner while getting no physical pleasure out of sex yourself.

It’s not surprising that alcohol and sex seem like a perfect match. Alcohol is liquid courage. By lowering inhibitions, it makes those people more willing to have sex. In fact, up to 70 percent of college students admitted to having sex primarily because they were inebriated, or having sex that they wouldn’t have had while sober, according to Facts on Tap, a Web site run by the American Council for Drug Education.

Aside from alcohol making sex just plain awful, it also makes sex much more dangerous. The College Alcohol Study from the Harvard School of Public Health found that 3.4 percent of college women were raped while intoxicated; 72 percent of college women who were raped were drunk at the time. All in all, 75 percent of all campus sexual assaults involved alcohol, according to Carol Bohmer and Andrea Parrot’s book “Sexual Assault on Campus: the Problem and the Solution.”

Does it get worse? You bet. Three-fifths of college women who acquired an STD report they were under the influence when their partners transmitted the infection. And one-fifth of students who otherwise practice safe sex have unprotected sex while drunk, says Facts on Tap.

But again, the scary statistics aren’t my primary concern. Rather, why do students ruin what otherwise could be a perfectly good lay by drinking? It’s sad that they’re too shy or prudish to be able to initiate and enjoy sex while sober. A hook-up scene that uses alcohol as an enabler certainly leads to more sex, but it’s bad sex. That’s what you get for mixing sex and alcohol: more bad sex.

And nobody wants more bad sex. We want more good (or great) sex, and even no sex is better than bad sex. So this Valentine’s Day, join me in demanding better sexual experiences. Make sure you and your partner stay away from the alcohol before you hit the sack. You’ll thank each other for it the next morning.

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