By Nico Machlitt
STAFF WRITER
Drawings of the vagina and penis covered the classroom whiteboard while various sex toys were displayed on the front table. As students yelled words like “vagina” and “a**hole,” it was sure to be an unusual night in Brower Hall.
This was all part of an event co-sponsored by Campus Feminist Collective, Hofstra’s Organization of Latin Americans (HOLA), The Pride Network, Student Advocates of Safe Sex and Babeland, a feminist sex toy boutique.
The event was created to educate students on safe ways to have sex. This talk gave no mention of the birds or the bees, but instead talked more in depth about sexual intercourse and the importance of pleasure, safety and communication.
Sex-educated sales associate at Babeland, Mehron Abdollmohammadi, led the workshop about having safer sex sexily. The workshop addressed many common myths about intercourse and sex toys as well as healthy ways to have sex that can be pleasurable and safe.
President of the Campus Feminist Collective, Che Sullivan spoke about why it was important to bring Babeland to campus. “I felt it was important to depart from the basic sex education people get in high school,” Sullivan said. “That’s just the bare minimum and it doesn’t talk about things can be fun or be pleasurable, but people are thinking about that anyway, so it’s important to address it.”
Students listened to the lecture on everything from the female anatomy to anal sex. Many people don’t know how to communicate during sex or don’t feel educated enough to have conversations about it. This workshop helped teach students about how the body works and how to have fun sex while being safe.
Safety is something that is really important to many people while sexually active and was part of the reason for the turnout. “I came to the event tonight because safe sex is something that I pride myself on knowing, so I know that [people] can come to me and ask me and I want to know the best information to give them,” said Emily Stafford, freshman theater production and English double major.
Many conversations about sex have become taboo or uncomfortable and associated with shame. Abdollmohammadi and Babeland are working together to change the typical conversations about sex by making them more inclusive.
“Our mission statement is providing sexual education and promoting sexual vitality for a more healthy, positive world,” said Abdollmohammadi. “It’s just about an approach to sex that is all about enthusiasm and curiosity and not shame. It’s about pleasure, whatever that means to you. It’s about having an attitude towards one’s body and one’s pleasure that is positive and accepting.”
Many conversations about sex are leaving many people uneducated about how to have safe sex. This is a problem for many people of the LGBTQ community and people that are curious about more topics than high schools are allowed to teach.
Many students that came to the talk were happy to finally feel included in the conversations about sex and others appreciated that their friends felt included. “It is really important to have gender- and sexuality-inclusive education,” said Stafford. “Lots of high school and sex education programs, in general, only focus on heterosexual students or heterosexual sex and those programs are really exclusive of many people.”
Freshman psychology major Nicole Chevalier appreciated the environment of the workshop. “Conversations about sex are often so taboo it’s just something people don’t talk about and the more we educate people the healthier and happier we can become,” she said. “It was definitely educational and because it was voluntary the students who were here wanted to be here and so it was more of a safe learning environment.”
The workshop ended with a question and answer period where students were encouraged to ask whatever questions they had. Many students participated in this part of the event and talked openly about sex.
Students left the workshop with condoms, rubber gloves and other items. In addition, Sullivan hopes the participants also left with a better understanding of their wants and needs and the confidence to talk about them openly.
