'Sex-Positive' Movement on College Campuses, The

Human Events, Jan 26, 2004 by Pearce, Jean

Parents Help Underwrite Debauchery Via Student Tuition Fees

Most parents struggling to pay college tuition bills are blissfully unaware that that they are helping college administrators fund the sexual indoctrination of their children.

In the process, a cottage industry that promotes deviant sex as normal and healthy is flourishing around college sex festivals, on-campus sex workshops and women's studies departments.

It's all part of a national trend on college campuses that encourages promiscuity and glorifies prostitution and pornography under the guise of sex and-gender education.

Prostitutes, porn stars, sex shop owners, transvestites and lesbian cross dressers called drag kings are finding second careers on campuses across the country as part of something academics call the "sex positive feminist movement."

This movement seeks to undo the "damage" caused by years of abstinence-based sex education that focuses only on the consequences of sex, like pregnancy and disease, and to reverse negative stigma attached to do-as-you-like sexuality.

Sex positive groups and individuals are essentially those who are accepting of all bacchanalia as positive, no matter how promiscuous or personally degrading, as long as it's pleasurable to those involved.

The leaders of this "movement" are in high demand these days by star-struck feminist administrators and gay student groups who use department and student activity fee funds to bring these "sexperts" to campus as lecturers, guest speakers and performers.

Porn star and self-described former prostitute Annie Sprinkle is considered by the academics that seek her guidance to be a founder, if not the founder, of the sex-positive movement.

Sprinkle does a workshop for students and faculty that includes a diagram of how many men she's performed fellatio on and sexual imagery from her career as a porn star that's too graphic to describe here. She's spoken at dozens of public and private colleges in the past few years, including Vassar College, where she taught an Easter morning sex workshop last spring for female students and faculty called "A Reserection."

This year, when not busy having sex on stage, she taught sex workshops at New York University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Coe College, and guest lectured in graduate classes at Berkley and Columbia University.

Like others who carry the "sex-positive" message to campuses, Sprinkle has an agenda. She seeks to legalize and legitimize prostitution and remove the stigma attached to pornography, female sex work and sex workers. According to her website, Sprinkle considers herself a "model" for a new generation of feminists. So, apparently, do feminist college administrators who seem to consider extensive sexual experience a plus in a guest speaker.

When she's not starring in and producing pornos or putting on sex workshops, which are her specialty, Tristan Taormino lectures and gives workshops for college faculty and students. Taormino has lectured at 15 colleges since 2000, including Oberlin, Smith and Vassar colleges, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia universities.

Emi Koyama, another sought-after "sex-positive" speaker, describes herself as a "multi-issue social justice slut sex worker," which was apparently all the academic qualification she needed to teach a class on hermaphrodites at Portland State University. Koyama has taught classes, given talks and lectured at dozens of campuses across the country, including Reed, Antioch and Massachusetts colleges and Western Washington University.

Other popular sex-positive speakers like San Francisco sex shop owner, sex worker and sex party hostess Carol Queen bring sex toys to campus for workshops in which they teach students the how-tos on everything from anal sex to bondage. Queen has spoken at dozens of colleges, including Yale and the University of Wisconsin.

Some sex-positive speakers are solo acts, while others are part of themed "festivals," like the one held at the University of Arizona in 2002, where prostitutes, porn stars and sex workers put on workshops on "fisting," bondage and masochism.

Others are brought to campus as part of increasingly popular transgender and gay themed drag king shows, where lesbians dressed as men perform on stage.

Lesbian drag king troops like Club Casanova are finding a real market on college campuses. Half the stops on Club Casanova's tour schedule were at college campuses, including Coolidge, Smith and Wesleyan colleges. Often the shows are crude in the extreme. At Oberlin College in Ohio, drag kings "dressed as a priest and altar boy performed mock sex acts on stage.

The five-year-old International Drag King Extravaganza (IDKE), which was held at the University of Minnesota in 2003, is hosted by a different campus each year and features drag king performances sandwiched in between workshops on everything from "BDSM for Beginners" to non-monogamous relationships to how to cross-dress.

This is what parents are buying when they pay for a "higher" education at an increasing number of American colleges. College administrators, it seems, are no longer content with merely molding the minds of the next generation, but are determined to extend their institutional guidance into students' bedrooms as well-at the expense of unwitting parents of undergraduates.