by William Dean
(08/27/03)
While officials in the United States are trying to turn back the sexual education clock to the ignorance and intolerance of the 1950s, frustrated university students are taking to heart the examples of Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and other journalists of liberty, freedom, and common sense.
Clearly shunning the abstinence-only policies beloved by fundamentalists, the inheritors of the feminist health, sexual revolution, and AIDS consciousness movements are taking their sexual awareness and education into their own hands and publishing sex positive magazines even in the Ivy League bastions once haunted by the Boston Brahmins and Yalies of old.
You may have read that within the last few years, many college campus newspapers have instituted sex advice columns, sometimes gaining national media attention, sometimes roundly condemned by deans' councils. Fortunately -- through the WWW, instant messaging, and hardcopy printing -- the newest generation to flex its intellectual and emotional muscles seems strongly committed to getting the word out, and the word is good.
Katha Pollitt in a July article for Le Monde diplomatique says, "On the university campus today sex-positivity rules. It is fashionable among young feminists to go to strip clubs, and even work in them. While older feminists reluctantly defended President Bill Clinton from impeachment, young feminists defended what they saw as Monica Lewinsky's bold sexuality. The monolithic, moralistic feminism of the l970s has given way to a multiplicity of feminisms -- queer theory and social constructionism have thrown the idea of woman up in the air. Suggest that a man who's had a sex change isn't really a woman, and you may find yourself tagged as an old-fashioned essentialist."
Four years ago, students at Vassar started their own erotica magazine called Squirm: The Art of Campus Sex, a blend of sensual prose, photography, and poetry for and by the university's students. The impetus for this radical publication was, to quote its editor Chrys Fawley, to "start dialogue [and] act as a forum for queer/sex-positive ideas."
The Squirmers are not alone at Vassar which is also host to the The Sex Avengers, a group dedicated to Sex Positive Theory and Action. Through sex radicalism and a denial of what they perceive as society's moral hierarchies, the Sex Avengers bring sex and sexuality into a greater discussion of queer power. The Sex Avengers put on campus events such as the annual Masturbate-a-thon and have brought speakers to the campus on such subjects as "The Female Orgasm" and "How to Get The Safer Sex You Want."
Vassar also has a Lesbian and Gay Alumnae/i Association, which serves the LGBT community and acts as a network for LGBT alumnae/i.
To help the university community stay informed about GLBT issues and events, Vassar publishes a weekly newsletter, Queer Briefs.
Well known Philadelphia area university, Swarthmore, founded by Quakers, publishes its own erotica magazine called The Unmentionables.
Students also see explicit material, including pornographic films, as part of their human sexuality classes at numerous higher-learning institutions. Many universities have classes in the history of prostitution, erotic literature, and the sexual revolution and there are classes on pornography offered at Arizona State, Emerson College, NYU, Northwestern, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Wesleyan.
When I was researching materials for interviews with authors of lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s and early 1960s, I discovered that most of the larger collections of these paperbacks were held by colleges.
Since 1991, Oberlin college has hosted an annual all campus party called "Safer Sex Night," which can include everything from free condoms and lube to demonstrations of "safe sex" SM. Last year, according to clevescene.com, a Web site devoted to news of the Cleveland area, one of the event's highlights was the "Tent of Consent." The tent provided a private place to release the urges built up from all the dirty dancing. Designed as a teaching aid as well, the rules for tent use were strictly enforced:
1) Present yourself with partners to tent staff.
2) Request to perform a specific act.
3) All parties must agree to specified act.
4) All parties must agree on a "safe word."
5) The tent staff will not admit anyone who is too intoxicated to give or receive consent.
6) You have 1.5 minutes in the tent.
Inside the tent were a few couch cushions and an old blanket, more evocative of stolen moments in a basement or garage than a seductive love pad. A tent guard waited outside, staring at her watch. Exactly one and a half minutes after a couple entered, she yelled, "Time!"
"It's just so everybody understands what consent is and so that everything is explicit and agreed upon," a spokesperson explained.
A group of Smith College students even started their own pornographic Web site called www.smithiegirls.com. A popular web surfing destination for collegiates is www.goaskalice.com, a sexual health Q&A forum, which originated at New York's Columbia University.
What's perhaps most important is that the newly established sex-positive groups at universities are fundamentally GLBT-friendly. The old sexual revolution of the women's movement accepted non-procreative sex such as masturbation and lesbianism while AIDS activism helped bring homosexual practices into the public discussion area. Contemporary sex positive culture also embraces emerging identities like bisexual and transgender with understanding and support.
What we can see from all this activity is that the collective student body refuses to accept sexual ignorance or intolerance. They are confidently tearing the closet doors off their hinges. As old Tom Paine once said, "But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing."
