Don't Censor Me

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Don't censor me, please


Marisa Picker
Posted: 4/18/06
I have more condoms than I know what to do with - about 200, actually. Need some Trojan Magnums, a vibrating ring or an Elexa Natural Feel? You name it, I've got it. Oh, and did I mention they were free?

This weekend, Trojan Condoms flew me to Boston to participate in a roundtable discussion featuring other college sex columnists and feature editors. Celebrity addictionologist and sex counselor Dr. Drew Pinsky mediated the discussion. There were students representing Harvard, UVA, Tufts, Duke, Princeton, Rhodes College, U. Penn, N.C. State, Rutgers and, of course, Maryland.

While we were treated to loads of celebrity gossip from Dr. Drew (His good friend Adam Carolla is a chronic masturbator!), the goal of the weekend was discussing sexual health.

Dr. Drew is amazingly hardworking, yet very down-to-earth. The night we arrived, Trojan took us out to dinner to get to know each other. After gorging ourselves on far too much seafood, most of us went back to the hotel to pass out. Dr. Drew, however, left to host his weekly radio show, Loveline, and didn't return to the hotel until 3 a.m.

The next day, we all met up at a posh restaurant called The Living Room. The tables were decorated with way too much food and a plethora of condoms. For three hours we discussed everything from the biological differences between men and women to the "hook-up culture."
It was encouraging to learn how liberal the University of Maryland is when it comes to sex discussion. Most of the other schools' writers/editors unfortunately seemed to face adversity from either their administrations or their students.

At Rhodes College, the president has been pressuring for less open sex discussion, as one student said. The college is funded by the Presbyterian Church, which further complicates matters.

The University of Pennsylvania representative recalled being compared to a "heroin peddler" for creating and distributing her erotica magazine, Quake.

North Carolina State University is predominantly male and conservative, according to the school's representative. He blamed N.C. State's location on the Bible Belt and the lack of male sex columnists for the unpopularity of sex writing on the campus.

Boston University, according to a student covering the roundtable discussion, is surprisingly conservative when it comes to sex.

Duke's representative (who, by the way, congratulated me on the women's basketball team's win!) said students were often unwilling to talk about sex. She said students were "more reserved."

Schools that were liberal, as expected, included Harvard, Tufts, Princeton, Rutgers and Maryland.

While schools like Rhodes are struggling for open discussion, I am free to write an entire article about the healthy effects of masturbation or the details of an abortion. Other universities aren't lucky enough to be privy to a production of The Vagina Monologues every year. At other schools, Human Sexuality isn't one of the most popular classes on the campus.

"When I first started out in this business," Dr. Drew said, "no one was talking about what STDs were. - Safe sex wasn't a coined term and condoms were behind the counters [in convenience stores]. And there was no public discussion at all."

What most people call sex education, Dr. Drew sees as something more cohesive.

"You really forget you're talking about sex or condoms. You're really just talking about health," Dr. Drew said.

I was extremely proud to be able to say that our administration had not tried to censor my column or any other open forums for sexual education. Hopefully the administrative backlash that is invading our country's higher educational programs has passed over our community without effect. The most important sexual health tool is, of course, knowledge.