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A look at the sex advice columns in college newspapers.
"It's a lot of advice on technique and pleasure," said Sonia Chen, 22, a fifth-year student at Cal who has been reading "Sex on Tuesday" since she was a freshman. "It's like anonymous sex advice. You don't have to ask your friends questions because it's in the campus paper."
But others, including parents and alumni, are aghast at the frank and sometimes explicit nature of the columns, which discuss everything from orgasm to tantric sex to G-spots - and that's just for starters. Some adults have expressed concern about the soundness of the advice, but many students say they find the columns both entertaining and informative.
Some columns are humorous essays based on interviews with students and the writer's personal experience, while others follow a question-and-answer format. While critics worry that the columns reinforce stereotypes that college students are promiscuous, others argue that the trend toward "abstinence-only" campaigns in high schools means that many students arrive on campus starved for information because they've had little to no sex education.
Dana Hull: Sex talk on campus: Columnists don't shy away from explicit advice
Comments
Richard, I’d like to sound off as someone who has recently graduated from college; but… in the Deep South. If any of you students of this(meaning the article) particular college or any other college where you’re allowed or, even, capable of expressing yourself sexually I’d like you to notice. Some of us are or weren’t as lucky as you are. Where I graduated there was no sex, much less sex advice. I may be flippant in this regard but I am serious about what a positive step this is toward sexual expression. Being ‘sex positive’ is important in our time. What this term implies is not rampant humping… It implies a recognition of ourselves, people, as sexual beings and of all the positive and negative that such implies. I hope I have not lost anyone due to excessive verbiage. Being sex positive does not in the literal interpretation mean having sex as much as possible. It means that you are positive, or, curious, or, seeking the reality of what sex means within our contemporary society. We cannot, nor should we (IMHO) turn our eyes away from what sex means. If we are to do our frantic humpings we must be able to recognize it as part of our lives. (All Catholic clergy please avert your eyes)
josh
Posted by: josh | September 23, 2004 2:09 PM
Some of this depends on whom you know and hang out with.
There was plenty of sex going on at the four-year college that I attended briefly in Savannah, GA years ago. There were also huge quantities of institutionalized virginity.
And this isn’t the cool kids vs. the square kids ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s always been plenty of teenage sex. A Virginia author I’m fond of wrote back in the 1920s of his surprise that ‘young people’ didn’t know this. And his teen years were in the 1890s.
I’m sure that at this minute the youth of Alabama are enjoying oral sex and anal sex. But lying about it and hiding it from their elders. I never got to enjoy any of it until I moved to the ugly center of a major city in my home state where people didn’t have time, reason or inclination to fool themselves or anybody else.
Posted by: Richard | September 23, 2004 5:10 PM