Sex-Ed Redux
by William Hinton
It looks like the Bush administration’s push for abstinence-only education isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Despite a proliferation of sexual images in the media, undergrads arriving on local campuses tend to be almost embarrassingly naive. “Some of them have never seen a condom,” says Vanderbilt senior Katie Protos. What’s more, many don’t have a clue how to have a positive sexual experience, let alone a sexual relationship.
For the past two years, Vanderbilt University’s Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center has tried to bridge the gap between TV romance and the real thing by offering a series that focuses on nothing more than the sex act. Some of the sessions tend to be academic—a discussion of the history of sex or debating what exactly sex is. Others, with titles like “The Big O and Other Kinds of Fun in Bed” and “Private Dicks,” operate more like a how-to manual in getting off. The series has attracted more women than men, though administrators noticed a substantial increase in male attendance when the featured topic last semester was the clitoris.
The next speaker in the series is Debra Haffner, a Unitarian minister and former head of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, the archenemy of the abstinence-only tripe-pushing Bushies. Her March 28 lecture on faith and sexuality could be the last in the series, as Women’s Center director Jennifer Hackett is stepping down and her replacement, yet to be named, might not continue it.
On the Austin Peay State University campus in Clarksville, Glenn Carter, chair of the social work program, asks guest lecturers from the bondage, gay and transgender communities to speak to his students, many of whom arrive at APSU from nearby rural counties.
His guests might seem eye-rollingly mundane in the age of Jerry Springer. But Carter says universities aren’t always progressive when it comes to sex. “It’s controversial to even teach it in college,” he says. “But it’s important for our students to see alternative sex types rather than just read about them. They need faces put to them.”
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