By Day Greenberg and Matt SpectorThe Daily Northwestern
This week, campus activists want students to see the naked truth.
Monday marked the beginning of Northwestern's first Sex Week, which will feature lectures, workshops and entertainment addressing important sexual issues on campus and will encourage open dialogue, event organizers said.
Weinberg sophomore Stella Fayman, the founder of the event, called Sex Week "a series of provocative events aimed at exploring sexuality and encouraging sexual health awareness."
Monday's events included a sexual health fair at Norris University Center, and back-to-back lectures in Annenberg Hall about social issues surrounding sex in the U.S. The lectures were hosted by NU psychology Prof. Eli Finkel and history Prof. Lane Fenrich.
The professors used humor and candor to pull students into discussions about safety, personal decision making and discrimination in mainstream media coverage of the HIV epidemic in the country.
Finkel shared a study done on male students at Carnegie Mellon University that posed questions such as, "Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?"
Meanwhile, Fenrich discussed controversial topics, such as using "educational pornography" to promote safe sexual practices; singer and beauty queen Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in the 1970s; and a National Public Radio story titled "Meth Use Among Gays Worries Health Officials."
"We think it's gross or nasty and so we don't want to have these conversations," said Fenrich, who teaches a course on gay and lesbian history. "The key isn't just having these conversations (about sex) in classrooms. … We need to start talking about ways to have these conversations differently."
Weinberg and Communication junior Marcus Bermudez-DeLeon said he appreciated that Fenrich addressed stereotypes about homosexuals that are "so spread out in society and have nothing to do with party lines."
Spring Break
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