Student groups show lighter side of sex to solicit conversation By Manuel Barrientos May 18, 2005 The Daily of the University of Washington-Seattle A group of eighth graders touring campus from Odle Middle School in Bellevue sheepishly giggled as they looked at tables set up for Sex Week on the HUB lawn. Some of the boys took free condoms and some of the girls gathered in front of the "who do you want to do?" poster to write in their favorite pick. "It's a good view of college life -- which includes sex," said Gary Abbrederis, a 14-year-old student from Odle. The tables were a promotion of Sex Week, a planned effort focused on raising awareness of sex issues to the UW student body. Put on by the UW chapter of VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood, the event is in its 3rd year at the UW. "We want people to start talking about sex and [to give] people access to information about ways to have sex safely and myths about sex," said Alice Lemieux, VOX volunteer. Event organizers said this is the biggest and most comprehensive Sex Week yet. This year's goal was simply to raise a dialogue about sex. With posters on safe sex, cancer detection, sexually transmitted diseases testing and sex tips, the club, along with collaborating groups such as Students for Choice and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Comission, are making an effort to get students talking about sex. "It's nice to be able to talk about the nicer parts of sex," said Lemieux. Volunteers passed out 500 condoms in the last two days, said Lemieux. "We want students to know information to have safer sex, to teach that it is not taboo to talk about sex," said volunteer Drew Simshaw. But organizers for this year did not want to merely talk about the informative sides of sex. They conjured up ways to bring a little fun and humor to the issue. "Sex is funny, it's ridiculous," said Lemieux. "It's utterly ridiculous. I think some people go at it too seriously. While we want people to have the information to keep it safe and respectful and how to communicate, we also want people to be comfortable to talk about it, joke about it." Yesterday evening in the HUB, six women and one man gathered for "porn karaoke." The karaoke required participants to improv the dialogue of the movies shown, which included heterosexual, gay and lesbian movies from Toys in Babeland. VOX will continue tabling the rest of the week and showcase different sex positions on the HUB lawn today. A dominatrix, who goes by the name of Mistress Mattisse, will speak tonight in Savery 239 about the many sides of "kink." http://thedaily.washington.edu/news.lasso?-database=DailyWebSQL&-table=Articles&-r esponse=newspage.lasso&-keyField=__Record_ID__&-keyValue=13208&-search |