NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, February 9, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Sex Week gets into full steam at Yale University with its calendar of pornographic events including “bawdy storytelling”, “Your body is a wonderland”, “BDSM and Alternative sexualities”, and “Fornication 101 with Oh Megan!”, a group of countercultural students have decided to do something about what they call a “degrading and trivializing vision of sexuality.”
“Yale’s sexual climate is one where rape is tragically too frequent, where the point of most campus parties is to find a hook-up buddy and binge drink, and where women and men do not have the discipline to demand more of their sexual partners than physical pleasure,” said Isabel Marin of Undergraduates for a Better Yale College, a group that advocates for what they call “a better sexual culture” at Yale.
Undergraduates for a Better Yale College (UBYC) organized True Love Week to run alongside Sex Week. Their event seeks to showcase an alternative to sexual objectification and to the prevalent college hook-up lifestyle.
Events during True Love Week may be lighter on sexual titillation, but they promise to expose the secret of something far better than fleeting and impersonal sexual pleasure: true happiness through authentic love. Events include: “The Person as a Gift”, “Sexual Bliss: Satisfaction and Marital Happiness for today’s Couples,” and “Chastity and Human Goods.”
“Yalies do not respect themselves enough to ask their partners to care about them as people – to engage with them in a relationship,” UBYC’s Isabel Marin told LifeSiteNews.com.
“They think that being kissed — or more — for a few hours is the most care and attention they can reasonably ask of their peers. I care that my peers learn about healthy relationships so that rape and STIs on campus are diminished, and so that Yalies realize that they can demand more respect from those they engage with sexually.”
One event at Sex Week titled “Fornication 101 with Oh Megan!” has “certified sexologist” Megan Andelloux, who is the director of the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health, present a course that introduces students to “carnal knowledge, comfort in awkward situations, and hot safer sex behaviours.”
Topics in the course include “ejaculation, petting kitties, anal adventures, g-spot stimulation, and sexual positions” with a note that the event will not “involve typical attire”.
LifeSiteNews asked Marin to explain what sex is about, if it is not about maximizing physical pleasure, as Andelloux would have it.
“Sex is about being fully unified with someone,” Marin explained. “It expresses your passionate love and commitment to another person – to finally being so unified with someone that you are completely open to them.”
Marin argued that if a man has not promised his “entire love and life” to his girl — something that she believes happens in marriage— then he is “holding back love and commitment.” She argues that if the guy is not “ready and open to having a baby” with his gal, then he is not “completely open” to anything she might give him, especially a child. Such a couple should “not be having sex,” she argued.
Marin speculated that women in Yale’s hook-up culture are really “looking for affirmation that someone finds them attractive, that someone likes them enough to ‘make out’ with them. They see a cute guy and want to see if he likes her back,” she said.
The problem encountered by women, Marin explained, is that when the guy no longer wants a relationship with her, it “tears her self-confidence down”.
Marin also related how men in the hook up culture are using women as a means to feeling “physical pleasure”, as a tool to be “stimulated, and ideally to orgasm.” She pointed out that orgasming without relationship is an “empty pleasure, and cannot sustain real happiness.”
“This is not the way to find affirmation and happiness,” she said.
The UBYC members believe that it is their mission to spread what they call the “good news” that “real happiness does exist” in “committed relationships.”
“All we can do is ask people to say ‘no’ to a hook up and ask for a real relationship; to be brave enough to respect themselves; to have higher standards for themselves and their peers.”
Yale’s Sex Week ends with a bang on Valentine’s Day as “pleasure activist” and sexologist Carol Queen explores the “paths to great sex” and examines the “role of partnering and love, casual experiences, identity and affiliation, and of course learning solo.”
Contact Yale University
Richard C. Levin, president
E-mail: [email protected]
Ph: (203) 432-2550
Send words of support to Undergraduates for a Better Yale College
Eduardo Andino, UBYC co-founder
E-mail: [email protected]
Isabel Marin
E-mail: [email protected]