Let's talk about you and me and everyone we know. Let's talk about sex.
"I think that we're a highly sexualized culture but we refuse to admit it," said Victoria Flagg, a 3rd-semester women's studies major.
No, seriously, can we talk about sex? Let's make with the admitting, already. We're sexy people. We live around sex, we do it all the time and we're bombarded with raunchy media blitzkriegs left and right.
"Look at music videos," said Krissy Dolce, a 5th-semester English major. "If you watch them out of their context, it's disgusting - just women's bodies being used as decoration and objects around male singers."
It is no surprise that "The Female Orgasm" lecture is consistently well attended every year it comes to UConn: it's fun, it's sexy and it's not a documentary screening. Yet aside from being an entertaining way to spend your Tuesday night (and possibly giving your sex life a helping hand in the process), lectures like "I <3 Female Orgasm" fill an important void in our culture by giving female sexuality its own voice.
As a culture we stick women in an awkward, unpleasant place sex-wise.
"[Girls] are taught to be sexual without having a sexuality," Dolce said. "We're supposed to present ourselves, look good, be a sexual object - but we're never taught to voice our own desires, we aren't supposed to want anything in return."
However, according to the cultural media, wanting something in return isn't quite okay either. Being comfortable with your own body isn't a message that girls get in big doses.
"There's a lot of things that girls are told in their lives that affect them negatively," said Michelle Bold, a 3rd-semester linguistics and psychology major. "Stuff boys don't have to experience. I mean, once boys hit a certain age, masturbation is a-OK, but for girls it remains a taboo subject."
Bold highlights an obvious point; boys can at least settle for being straightforward randy, once they hit puberty. Girls don't have it so easy.
"Women's sexuality is expected to be a lot of things that are contradictory," Flagg said. "Women are supposed to be open and inviting, but if they're too open and inviting, they're called sluts. If they aren't [open] enough, they're called prudes."
So women's sexuality generally gets two cultural outlets; the permissive message that suggests women should be passive receptacles, or the forbidding message that says women should avoid the subject entirely.
Without getting too political, there are plenty of elected officials that take the same stance on sexual education. Sex is bad and we shouldn't talk about bad things in front of the kids. Yet kids get a very different message everywhere they turn by watching a music video, looking at the magazines at the checkout counter or by reading a college newspaper.
"Explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support," said now-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2006.
Despite the best efforts of abstinence-only educators, people tend to figure out that sex exists.
"People seem to think that abstinence-only sex education will keep people from having sex, but that makes it a lot more difficult to talk about and more difficult to keep people safe," Flagg said.
Even at "The Female Orgasm" lecture, women and men were separated for the sex-specific sections of the discussion, which is probably a good thing. Talking about finicky body stuff can make anyone uncomfortable. But where does all that discomfort come from? Maybe men need to have a better attitude toward female sexuality and maybe women need to have a better attitude towards their own.
"It'd be nice if we could live in a culture where that [separation] wasn't necessary," Dolce said.
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