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Around 60 students attend the “O Face Oral” workshop as part of UNM “Sex Week” on Thursday. The seminar took place one day after the University formally apologized for the controversial nature of the events.

Around 60 students attend the “O Face Oral” workshop as part of UNM “Sex Week” on Thursday. The seminar took place one day after the University formally apologized for the controversial nature of the events.

Sex event titles, not content, provoke apology

UNM's Sex Week program titles cause parents to reach out to administration

Judging by the uproar surrounding UNM’s Sex Week, quite a bit.

Sex Week, co-organized by the Women’s Health Resource Center and Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center, was designed to stress the importance of consent and raise awareness about sexual assaults, but not everyone was happy with the execution of the event.

After the UNM president’s office received more than 40 complaints mostly from parents, Eliseo “Cheo” Torres, student affairs vice president, issued an apology on Wednesday. Torres said the complaints were primarily concerning the titles of the workshops. The most controversial titles included “Reid’s Negotiating Successful Threesomes” and “BJs and Beyond with Reid.”

“It’s not what I see; it’s what the parents were concerned with, that is more important right now,” Torres said Thursday. “After I had explained that these were titles to attract students, some of them seemed to understand.”

The average age of a UNM student is 24 or 25 years old, he said. But because these are parents who pay tuition, their voice had to be considered. It was a misunderstanding that could have been avoided by better worded or more thoroughly explained titles, he said.

Sex education is important and while the University is a good place to start the discussion, there was not enough oversight for the event, he said.

“While the University administration believes that it is important to offer opportunities for sex education to college students, it should be done in a careful and respectful manner,” Torres wrote in the apology. “We will do a better job in the future of vetting and selecting programs offered through campus groups.”

Hunter Riley, the store manager of Self Serve and one of the event coordinators, said the idea behind the event was to stop the epidemic of violence on campus. After organizing sex education workshops for 10 years, the titles were designed to do one thing – get butts in the seats.

“We know that the title of a class is very important and that a title like ‘Healthy communication for better sex’ is not necessarily going to get somebody to come to a course, whereas ‘How to be a Gentleman AND Still Get Laid,’ that’s going to get people’s attention,” she said.

ASUNM President Rachel Williams said her office received complaints about the week’s events, but that they were mostly from parents rather than students. She said she thinks it is crucial for students to receive sex education whether it is from their family or in an academic setting.

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Sexual assault is an issue on most campuses, and students should have access to resources that promote healthy relationships, she said.

Williams said she understands the outcry from parents and knows they are interested in the information students are receiving at the University, but their complaints should not influence decision made by the administration.

“If students are genuinely upset, that’s where the ball needs to start rolling,” Williams said. “Students are adults, while there parent’s opinions maybe are valuable to the students themselves, I don’t think parent’s opinions should be considered too heavily when it comes to these events moving forward or not moving forward.”

Katherine Schweizer, president of Students for Life and junior elementary education major, said she was opposed to the event not because of the ideas discussed during Sex Week, but because of the titles of the workshops.

The workshop titled “How to be a Gentleman AND Get Laid” represents the idea that a guy can be a nice person and still get whatever he wants, an idea she doesn’t support, she said.

“We just felt that was very inappropriate,” she said. “It says nothing about a woman having the right to say no.”

Schweizer attended a portion of the “How to be a Gentleman AND Get Laid” workshop, and said that the presenters talked about victim blame and stressed consent, she said. Overall, she said, the presenters of that workshop did present good information on that specific topic. However, she said the topics still should have been toned down.

“I would like to stress that we are not trying to keep people uneducated. We know that sex happens,” Schweizer said. “We are not here opposing Sex Week because we don’t care about this campus – it’s actually the reverse. We want them to be safe.”

Aleane Booker, a sophomore mortuary science major, agreed with Schweizer that sex education is important; however, she doesn’t understand why there is so much controversy surrounding it.

“I know a lot of people were upset at the idea, but I was more for it,” Booker said. “It’s a personal thing, and it gives you more information about how to approach sex and being more comfortable with giving and getting consent.”

Since no one was forced to attend the event, she said she didn’t understand what the problem was – anyone against the titles or topics did not have to go.

Booker said she feels if people don’t want their student fee money, which helped to pay for this and most of the events on campus, spent on events like this, they shouldn’t have to, but she’s happy to for sex education presentation.

After the apology was released on Wednesday, Riley said she was disappointed to see UNM retract their support for sex education.

“As one of the co-creators of UNM’s inaugural Sex Week, Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center is saddened and deeply disappointed to see UNM administration apologize for offering clear and empowering sex education to students,” she said.

Self Serve wants to see students informed about sex and relationships without fear or shame, she said. The apology undoes all of the work sex week has been doing.

“We invite UNM to live up to its mission to ‘educate and encourage students to develop values ...,” Riley said. “Apologizing for working with the community to arrange sex week — an effort clearly in service to that missions — helps no one.”

Riley said she would have like to see the UNM administrators attend the events for themselves to evaluate the content rather than caving from the pressure of criticism.

Sade Patterson, Students for Life vice president and sophomore journalism major, said she thought Sex Week was too vulgar to be classified as sex education.

“We were not supportive of Sex Week,” Patterson said. “We are supportive of sex education. We thought that Sex Week was taking it a little too far, past sexual education and making it a little bit objectifying to women.”

Patterson said she did not attend any of the presentations, but felt the titles of the events implied the sexual objectification of women. For example, she said the title "How to be a Gentleman AND Still Get Laid" made it seem as though men could just get sex from women by following a few steps. She said she received most of her information from talking with students who went.

“It is an offensive event,” Patterson said. “It was making sex seem like an objectified act instead of something that could lead to consequences, and they weren’t really educating students on what those were.”

Students for Life is about helping pregnant women and also offers free STD testing, she said. The group does not offer official sex education classes, but holds meetings and lectures on topics like birth control and STDs.

Patterson said she thinks the University is an appropriate place for sex education, but the group is more supportive of workshops that would inform people how to say no, how to prevent date rape, and what kind of STDs can be prevented, she said.

“The approach was not appropriate, even though sexual education has been needed,” Patterson said. “We should talk about sex ... the way they approached it was inappropriate on the University – that’s our money paying for the event – student’s tuition money – university money is funding that event.”

Summer Little, Women’s Resource Center director, said she thinks is it utterly important to talk about the ways sex and sexual violence are portrayed, which is that violence against women is inevitable.

“Through events like this, we can start challenging that because we are talking about healthy sexual relationships. Just by focusing on healthy relationships it is a counter to rape culture,” Little said. “And we really need to change rape culture in order to reduce rates of violence against women.”

The WRC received multiple complaints from parents and students, she said, but a university setting is the place to talk about everything, including sex, because of academic freedom.

“The events that we have put on (during Sex Week) are just such a small piece of all the work we’ve done to keep our students safe and to help insure that they don’t have to go through the trauma of sexual assault,” Little said.

Some students who attended the workshops said that while the information was helpful, it could have been done in a more tasteful manner.

Gregorio Hernandez, a sophomore music major, said the workshops would have been more appealing to a larger number of students if they had been toned down.

“Maybe it should have been done a bit more discreetly,” Hernandez said. “I don’t mind it, obviously not everybody is for that and maybe they shouldn’t have glorified it the way they did.”

Barbara Reyes, director of the women’s studies program on campus, said she doesn’t understand why there is so much controversy around sex. Programs such as sex education have been around for a long time, even before she came to UNM, and the reaction from parents and students is not new, she said.

“It might be not a reaction, necessarily to the importance of sex week as much as maybe fear of what some groups might feel is intimate rather than information that ought to be shared and discussed,” Reyes said.

Presentations about sex education are important to bringing awareness to rape and sexual identity, she said. For her, UNM’s apology was needless and uncalled for.

“I don’t think the apology was necessary or appropriate,” Reyes said. “Often groups that have particular interests, Students for Life, or other (similar) based groups, might find not just the language, but the intent of these workshops, or these sessions offensive to them.”

Reyes stressed the importance of sex education in order to promote a positive perspective on sex. She said she didn’t think complaints about Sex Week were anything to be concerned about.

“I guess people responded to the language used in the fliers, but quite frankly some people will object to anything that has to do with information on sexuality,” she said.

Little said that the events for Sex Week are about more than just sex education though, they are about safety. During the planning stages of Sex Week, Little said the WRC used guidelines and best practices from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House and the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, better known as the Cleary Act.

“I firmly believe that talking about sex and demystifying sex and addressing it in a shame-free manner helps promote the ideas of a healthy relationships, healthy sexuality, and consent and even empowers people around conflict,” Little said.

Sexual assaults have become a problem on UNM campuses. According to the Cleary Act, released Oct. 1, there were 11 reported cases of sexual assault in 2013. Of that number, seven were in residential facilities. The University also reported four cases of stalking, 13 cases of domestic violence and four cases of dating violence.

Lt. Tim Stump, public information officer for the UNM Police Department, said while students can report sexual assaults anonymously, most often don’t and not every assault is accounted for.

Stump said UNMPD receives reports from all over, but that sexual assaults are still underreported on campus. Even so, the number of reports they do receive show a problem on campus.

“As of this year we have had six cases of sexual assault reported, as of Aug. 31,” Stump said. “You look at last year, we reported 11 sexual assaults, from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2013, and the year before there were four reported.”

Williams said ASUNM supports the University engaging in discussion about this issue. It is important that student voices be heard and that they are actively involved in the UNM community, she said.

“I hope that we can start moving forward and the controversy starts dying down a little bit and that we can start coming to a level playing ground. I think that it’s really good students are raising their voices,” Williams said.

Lauren Marvin is the assistant culture editor for the Daily Lobo, and Moriah Carty is a staff reporter. They can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.

Jyllian Roach, Daniel Montano, Matthew Reisen and J.R. Oppenheim contributed to this report.

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