“We are taking sex out of the closet.”
So reads the Facebook group for the second annual Sex Week, sponsored by the College Feminists, which is responsible for a slew of events “aimed at teaching sexual health and fostering an open dialogue about sexuality,” according to its magazine.
Weinberg junior Stella Fayman, Sex Week’s founder and director, talked to NBN about the week’s mission, beyond the pun-filled flyers.
NBN: What’s the No. 1 thing you want students to come out of this week with?
Fayman: A more-open mind. One of the goals of Sex Week is to challenge why sex is still considered somewhat taboo to talk about as a society and so people can not only learn but question, and hopefully go home after the events and talk about with a friend what they learned.
So it’s just to get the conversation going.
Exactly.
How will this year’s Sex Week be different from last year’s?
We have twice the number of events, we have a magazine, we have a Web site, and we really hope that more people that kind of know about it from last year will be more informed.
How will you try and engage students that might not be that interested in talking about sex?
We try to engage as many different interest areas of students by having a great variety of events. We have an event with theater and sexuality with students who put on plays about that aspect of sexuality. We also have the economics of sex talk, for students who are more interested in stuff that kind of has to do with economics or business. We have an event that deals with sexuality and religion, which can bring in a more-diverse crowd. The Sexual Health and Assault Resource Center is going to feature over 25 different organizations in and around the Chicago area where people can get free HIV testing. There’s going to be a raffle, there’s gonna be educational things like Planned Parenthood, and also resources for sexual assault, survivors or just even what to do if you have a friend who has been sexually assaulted because a lot of times, it’s just hard to find that information on campus.
It sounds like you don’t want to be classified as a celebration of sexuality or a sexual-health week.
Exactly. The point is to get people to start talking. I’m very happy when people disagree with me, because that means that at least they’re thinking about it, and that’s not something that they might have been doing before. We don’t have an agenda, we want to make people start talking. We don’t want people to feel ashamed when they talk about sex or sexuality or anything that has to do with it.
If you’re saying that you don’t have an agenda, then you’re saying that you’re not advocating anything about sex except that we should talk about it more.
We’re advocating healthy, smart, informed decision-making.
You could call the flyers on campus somewhat shocking. Is that because you want people to form an opinion on it them?
I guess I don’t really see them as shocking. We can’t put everything on one flyer, so with any sort of publicity, we want to catch people’s attentions and keep interacting and then hopefully they’ll look for our Web site or our Facebook group or more flyers that have maybe event details on them.
Do you have some kind of example of something that you want people to be comfortable talking about in public or with friends that you don’t think Northwestern students are necessarily?
I would encourage people to look for information outside of just their friends because at our sexual-health info session, I had so many organizations for students to ask some professionals who have all sorts of degrees and can answer if you’ve heard something through the grapevine that isn’t actually true. I guess something that’s really important is for people to reject stereotypes that exist in popular culture. For example: Why is it that everybody thinks people are hooking up when it isn’t necessarily true. When a person thinks that everyone is hooking up but it’s not necessarily the right choice for them and they hear it through the grapevine – to me that’s something that’s really sad because people should feel confident enough to make their own decisions.
In an article in PLAY last year, you said that not enough women talk about the services at Searle or the Women’s Center. Do you feel a change in that over the past year, since the first Sex Week?
I think so. Look at the Sex Week committee: The number of applications over the past year — I got so much more than I expected. I think it’s because of all the publicity that came with Sex Week last year. I hope so. I’m kind of biased though, because I’m around this stuff all the time.
One thing that students don’t know is that it’s so different on other campuses. Something that might seem radical to us — like putting sex on a flyer — is not radical at other schools. In fact, it’s something that’s encouraged, or more natural. Katie Guilfoyle, who is in charge of the Sexual Health Fair on campus, told me that at U of I that there are so many more resources and student organizations that dealt with sexual assault prevention, and here there’s really none of that, aside from SHAPE and Sex Week.
Could you explain for someone who maybe wouldn’t see the connection between the College Feminists and Sex Week right away?
For me it’s somewhat obvious, because it goes back to stereotypes. I don’t think a lot of people really know exactly what feminism is, and I think that open, frank discussion about sexuality — not just for men, but for society, is important for preventing things like sexual assault, sexual harassment. There’s a famous quote that says, “Feminism is the radical belief that women are people,” and I like that because Sex Week is definitely an issue for everybody, and I think that College Feminists provided open-minded, non-stereotypical programming, so it fit in perfectly with my vision.
Where do you see the male participation coming in?
Well, one of the things that I heard last year was that it was too female-centered. I definitely took that into account this year. We have an event sponsored by the Interfraternity Council: A sex carnival, which is our way of trying to get more male involvement. But something like the economics of sex, or the sexual health resource center, or HIV testing — is that just for women? Definitely not. We have a screening about homosexuality. Is that just a woman thing? Definitely not. Hopefully this year’s programming can be seen as less female-centered. Even though I didn’t feel that last year’s was.
What about the sex carnival? The posting on NUlink says it’s “all the fun of a sexually charged circus…minus the carnies.” That could be seen as pretty shocking.
Yeah, but sex is a fun topic to talk about, and when we make puns and stuff, it’s just to be fun. We’re not going to stand there just doing condom demonstrations on bananas. We wanted to try and get all of the different topics we wanted to talk about, but in a more fun way, trying to include as many people as we could. When you appeal to college students, it has to be done in a humorous type of way. The point of the Sex Week carnival was to get the fraternities involved. The fraternities all will have games that have to do with sexual health.