November 23, 2003 The University of Arizona does a great job educating its students about sex. For the year and a half I have attended the UA, I have received numerous fliers discussing how better to achieve a better orgasm, how to determine if I have a sexually transmitted disease, and how to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after unprotected sex. Walking up and down the steps of my residence hall to get to my room, I encounter several posters that declare that only 20% of students on campus have slept with more than one partner over the past year.
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Even the student newspaper contributes to the sexual education of the students attending the university with little factoids issued by Campus Health Service, the same campus organization that puts out the "SexTalk Newsletter." Visiting Campus Health Service?s website is an enlightening experience where I get to read about how to have uninterrupted sex in a college dorm room and that sex hurts virgins. But my favorite University-sponsored event came last year when a sex-workers festival came to campus celebrating the art of, well, sex workers. An educational workshop was taught by a professional dominatrix and former porn star Porsche Lynn. I was disappointed at the time for missing such an event. However, the University of Arizona trumps it all with a student-funded course called Biology 181 lab. Although most of the course covers biological issues such as gametes, fermentation, and photosynthesis, the last official lesson in the class covers AIDS. Now, a discussion about AIDS and its biological factors, especially in relation to antigens and antibodies, viruses, and the immune system, would not be considered ill-use of class time. But the lesson talked more than about the biological aspects of AIDS. In fact, when you walked into the room located in the Koffler building, several pamphlets regarding AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases welcomed you; but this was only the preview of what was to come. After a brief discussion of the immune system in regards to AIDS and how clinics test for the HIV virus, the students were told to choose a vial of liquid, which represented their bodily fluids. They were also told that one of the vials contained a protein that would represent the HIV virus. After the teacher?s assistant finished passing out the vials of bodily fluids, students were told to "mingle" and mix the liquids in the vials with a single person during each of the three rounds. Following the end of the lab, the students were asked whether they agreed with the statement "when you have sex with someone, you are also having se with everyone they have previously had sex with." The question immediately following it asked students how they would protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases. This activity and the following questions might have been appropriate for a sex education course but they had no purpose in a biology lab where the class lectures simply discuss viruses, bacteria, genetics, and cancer; none of the class lectures ever discussed how to protect oneself from sexually transmitted diseases. Why then was it necessary for the accompanying lab to broach the issue? Simply put, it was not necessary. But more deeply than that, as evidenced by procedures of the lab and other University-sponsored events, college officials and course directors expect college students to have sex. If this simulation is supposed to emulate reality, then the reality embraced by the college leadership includes every student in this small-scale society having sex and having sex with multiple partners. Also, the class is not evenly divided between male and female, resulting in "mingling" between people of the same sex. As the teacher's aide declared, this is a liberal campus where women get with women and men with men. As a result, another part of this reality includes a large amount of homosexual relationships. If the simulation was to provide an adequate representation of reality, then, in a class of twenty students, if two women or two men mixed their vials? contents, the representation of homosexual relations in America would have been approximately 10%; however, more than just two female or two male students swapped bodily fluids during the course of the lab. But all these assumptions of the make-believe world perpetuated by the course material fly in the face of reality. A large majority of Americans may be sexually active, but not every single American, or even every single student in America, is sexually or has been sexually active. Nor are these people sleeping with everyone that comes their way--male or female. Also, despite what mainstream America believes about homosexuality, approximately 2.5% of the American population is homosexual?not the 10% widely flaunted by gay-rights activitists. The course's attempt at educating students regarding the reality of sexually transmitted diseases did a poor job simply because it disregarded reality for a myth. If the course work would have stuck with biology, what it is supposed to be teaching, and forgot about the sex education, the lesson that day in class would have been objective and educational, which is what class should always be like. But instead of having biology lab, we had a sex education lab that any one of us could have received from reading a Cosmo magazine. |