Have you ever wondered where to have sex in Chicago? Sampled flavored lube? Listened to sex poetry? This week is full of answers and opportunities.
Monday marks the start of the fourth annual Sex Week at Northwestern, which is (as the name implies) an entire week devoted to all things sexual. While advertisements for the week’s events are full of humorous innuendos such as “It’s coming” and “Putting the ‘ahhh’ in Chicago,” this year’s director, Weinberg senior Alex Russell, says Sex Week is no joke.
“Our goal is to provide an open forum that gets people talking about sex,” explains Russell. “These are things that everyone is interested in, and these are things that you talk about with your friends when no one’s listening, but finally you can talk about it in the open.”
According to Laura Stuart, SHAPE advisor and coordinator of Sexual Health Education and Violence Prevention, starting the conversation about sex will make the experience more enjoyable and safe.
“It is still too common today that people feel uncomfortable talking about sex,” says Stuart. “Any event like this that makes people more comfortable talking about sexuality, the more they’ll talk to their partners and the more they’ll be able to set boundaries. Open communication about sex gives people the opportunity to make decisions that are better for them.”
It was the lack of dialogue about sex that inspired Stella Fayman, a member of College Feminists and a 2009 Weinberg grad, to bring Sex Week to Northwestern.
“I wanted to create a solution to this problem that would empower people, especially women, to make informed decisions regarding sexuality, rather than follow what was popular,” says Fayman.
The initial idea stemmed from a program that began at Yale in 2002, when a student decided to have “a campus-wide interdisciplinary sex education program designed to pique students’ interest and spark dialogue through creative, interactive and innovative programming.” Though still relatively young, Northwestern’s program is well-established compared to other universities’ Sex Weeks, such as Brown University’s and Northeastern’s. Four years and 8,000 free condoms after coming to Northwestern, Sex Week is one of the most popular series of events on campus, and with good reason.
“All this stuff is in the back of our minds and it’s in our stomachs,” says Communication junior Alyssa Vera Ramos. “We do things but we don’t talk about it, and I think that’s not right.”
Upperclassmen like Ramos return year after year to Sex Week events, but the directors are also looking to attract the freshman class. This is especially important considering high school sexual education curriculum varies nationwide, and not everyone has received equal exposure to topics such as STIs and protection methods when they arrive at Northwestern.
“Freshmen have a really wide variety of sexual education. If students did receive some sort of sexual education in high school, their needs as college students are much different,” says Stuart. “I think there’s just a different conversation that happens when students get to campus.”
To cater to the freshman population, Sex Week coordinators have planned events dealing with the basics, like the art of seduction. Early to Bed, a Chicago-based sex shop, is hosting “Quintessential NU: Flirting for Geeks, Nerds and Everyone Else” on Monday night.
Medill freshman Christina Walker is curious to see if Sex Week lives up to the hype. “I guess I’d be interested just to see what it’s about,” says Walker, who is looking to compare Sex Week to her gender-related Sociology class. “There are just some issues that people push under the rug and this could be used to inform people who maybe don’t know about things like safe sex.”
Other events throughout the week will include a discussion led by Northwestern professor Lane Fenrich on the Larry Craig scandal, a talk on where to have sex in Chicago, sex through poetry and the spoken word, keynote speaker and former CEO of Planned Parenthood Gloria Feldt and the annual Sexpo! health resource fair.
But Sex Week isn’t all about doing the dirty deed.
“In the past we’ve been criticized for not talking about abstinence or choosing not to have sex, so we’re actually having an event about that this year,” says Russell. “We’re having a panel talk about the choice that students have of not having sex or waiting until marriage.”
Russell says the abstinence panel will be comprised of religious leaders, students and a sexual educator. The event is one of the ways Sex Week is evolving. This marks the first year Sex Week is without its founding directors, and Russell says this year’s directors have decided to expand on events that took place in previous years.
“We’re partnering with new people and we’re really trying to look at different aspects of sex and sexuality that we haven’t looked at before,” explains Russell. He says that this year’s topics are “very local” and will appeal to a wider student population.
More importantly, Sex Week will get people talking. And at the very least, there will be some good dirty jokes.
“I think opening the dialogue and saying, ‘Hey this is funny, this is human, this is important to talk about and can be fun’ is really, really important,” says Ramos. “I think it has a fun sense of humor that is cool.”