Are college sex columns the stuff of revolution?
Alex DiBranco of The Nation thinks so. The often-controversial (and often-terrible) pieces have been on the front lines of the battle for student press rights, he argues in a recent article.
A short history: the birth of sex columns in college newspapers wasn’t all that long ago, with the 1996 publication of “Sex on Tuesdays” at the University of California, Berkley. Little more than a decade later, sex advice graces the pages of over 200 campus papers across the country, and everyone from skittish parents to state leaders have scrambled to censor them through a variety of means: outraged letters to the editor, yanking copies from newsstands and even attempts to cut state funding for student papers (sound familiar?).
But even though they rattle conservatives, sex-and-dating columns are far from radical, counters Washington City Paper blogger Amanda Hess. In fact, what with frequent anti-feminist views (such as mentions of “Prince Charming”) and a nearly universal neglect of gay issues, some are downright oppressive, she writes.
The persistent notion that acknowledging sex is “enough” is partly responsible for the increasingly conservative bent of a faction of campus sex columns. The first-person confessional formula is one echoed in much college sex writing and attempts to serve an entire campus community with only the limited sexual experiences of one student. Too often, “sex is OK” falls short.
Nevertheless in a later post, Hess ranks Diamondback advice columnist Esti Frischling’s latest column (whose tip of the week is to “stop snitchin’”) higher than her peers at G.W. and American University, who wrote about f—ing a Marine and safe sex respectively.