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College Kids These Days
by Shayla Pandava It seems everyone's getting censured for stepping over the sexual line these days. And legislatures are busy trying to curb foul tongues and keep nudists out of neighborhoods. But if you think sex is dead in the modern world, leave it to the college kids to get the gonads going and bare the booty. Not that sex and nudity on college campuses is a new thing. Let's not forget Animal House, from the 70s and based on reminiscences that were even older. Even at Ivy League schools, drinking and getting laid is kind of the point -- always has been.

The hallowed halls of Harvard are a prime example. This year, two Harvard students applied to register a new sexy magazine, H Bomb, as a recognized Harvard student enterprise (making it eligible to receive monies from student fees). Conservative groups on campus were not pleased. H Bomb is a sex-positive magazine that plans to print provocative articles on sex as well as erotic student photos -- naked college kids, both sexes, shot by fellow students. Even though the two Harvard girls creating the magazine got the idea from an established Vassar magazine called Squirm (apparently pretty squirmy, judging from the Harvard faculty's response to the sample copies), there was a good deal of controversial hoopla in the media back in February when the magazine's intentions became known. Luckily for the H Bomb squad, they made it through the approval process with only minor restrictions -- for example, students won't be able to take nude photos for the magazine in any of Harvard's buildings. There may be some flustered parents come May if H Bomb completes issue 1 on schedule. The magazine's co-founders are planning to pass their first issue out at graduation.

Certainly with spring in the air, college campuses are alive with "educational" sex, classes, seminars, and weekly events that stir up local hornets' nests every chance they get. Yale's Sex Week, long on sexperts and academics but short on attendance, was the subject of debate that ranged from Connecticut to New York City. Penn State's, one-day Sex Faire, made quite an impression -- sculpting genitals out of clay, 18-part clitoris demonstration, games like Consensual Haircut and Orgasm bingo. The Faire had a decidedly female slant and plenty of giveaways: free female condoms and dental dams; free plastic specula (mirrored doctor's tools) to ladies after lessons in pussy prodding (or self-examination). The University of Illinois had a similar Fair and the center piece was a giant vagina where people could get their pictures taken with heads through the hole. Oh, my. Such creativity. You can bet that event drew some concerned letters from the locals. Mostly the letters of complaint stayed local.

What drew even more flak was a lecture entitled "Sexploration" given by Tristan Taormino, author of The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, during U. North Carolina's "Sexual Responsibility Week." The local Greensboro paper got a hold of the news and looked up Taormino's bio, where they found 2 anal demonstration videos -- ooh, ah. Soon editorials were lamenting the taxpayer dollars lost bringing a "porn star" to campus (not to worry taxpayers of NC, Taormino's honorarium actually came out of the fees students pay every year for campus activities). Following the local paper's account, the UNC chancellor came out with a statement regretting Taormino's appearance and the school's failure to have "more thoroughly investigated Ms. Taormino." (Maybe it's a myth that universities are bastions of free thinking.)

In a letter Taormino wrote in response, she mentioned that she had had similar issues in 2003 at Colby College in Maine, except that there, her topic was "queer sex." At Colby, it was conservative students, not locals, who objected to Taormino's advance press. But still, the students who thought she might be offensive attended her lecture and engaged in thoughtful discourse, rather than in shout fests and sloganeering, and Taormino praised the debate and "respectful disagreement" that ensued. Alas, tolerance may ever be an exclusive province of the young.

Meanwhile at Chapel Hill's UNC (University of North Carolina), a teacher ended up on early retirement when a classroom demonstration he'd been using for years finally backfired. In a discussion of cultural norms, the professor challenged whether any student would strip naked in front of the class just for an A. For the first time in all the years the professor had used this demonstration, a student stood up and met the challenge right down to his willie. The flustered professor dismissed the class, but stories got out, not only around town but nationally -- Rush Lumbaugh even decried the professor in a half-informed rant. Though the professor apologized to the class and went directly to college president Dan Lunsford to ask for advice, the advice he most likely got (judging from things Lundsford has said in public)was take your retirement package and run.

Funny that this is the same UNC, Chapel Hill, that 30 years ago staged one of the largest streaking events on record. Streaking as in naked students -- mostly guys, with a few women (who had guys assigned to watch out for them)-- running across campus in the moonlight. March 7, 1974, mostly to outdo a streak held by a rival college, about a thousand students streaked together across the UNC quad, buck naked as babies.

Has the culture gotten more repressive about such things, or are young people truly getting more extreme?

As we look to colleges at other western nations, we find that not only does nudity not seem to be the problem, but there seems to be a trend toward naked protesting -- who would have thought? On a cold February day in Berlin, students danced naked in the streets to protest intended financial cuts by the government. And in New Zealand, college students and other activists stripped and lied down outside the gates of the American ESCHELON surveillance station, Waihopai Spy Base. In fact, all over Europe, Australia, New Zealand, even Nepal, naked protesting is not just a student phemomenon. People are stripping off in support of causes as wide-ranging as circus animals to funding cuts.

But that's a story for another day.