The Birds and the Bees, Part Two

This is a column I wrote for a newsmagazine at my school, the College of William and Mary. This poster is in plain view at one of our three dining halls, and it upset me and some of my other progressive-minded friends. Here’s the poster in question, and below is text of the article.

Any comments, anecdotes, stories of similar situations at other schools, etc. would be appreciated!

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Good news: William and Mary students are healthier than you think!

Or at least that’s what’s being touted to onlookers by a series of posters around campus, most prominently in each of the campus’ three dining halls.

It’s been drilled into our minds since early childhood that overall physical and mental health can be maintained through easy personal choices: exercising, eating enough vegetables, brushing teeth, refraining from dependence on alcohol and drugs.

A poster displayed in the Campus Center’s MarketPlace Café Dining Hall gives three facts as evidence that students at the College are healthier than common perceptions may lead to believe.

According to the 2008 National College Health Assessment Pilot Survey, 65 percent of students had four or fewer alcoholic drinks the last time they partied, and four out of five students don’t smoke––two statistics relevant to gauging student health.

But the College of William and Mary’s Office of Health Education (OHE) has decided to make an addition to this time-honored, scientifically proven list of ways to stay healthy.

The poster also states that 48 percent of students have never had vaginal intercourse.

But that one little statistic carries so much weight in setting impossibly stupid standards and exclusionary norms.

Most markedly, it establishes a norm that engaging in sexual activity is unhealthy.

College is so often generalized to be a time of promiscuity. Since F. Scott Fitzgerald first shocked the parents of college-aged children with his exposé novel This Side of Paradise, there has been a sort of mist hanging over the four years we spend away from home before starting a real life.

The OHE is (perhaps good-heartedly) trying to debunk these stereotypes, but by associating a low statistic of intercourse with overall good health, the Office is proclaiming to the world in poster form that the other 52 percent of students are by definition unhealthy, just like the one in five students who smokes and the 35 percent of students who have more than five drinks at parties.

This poster presents a horribly simplified, horribly false binary of the virginally pure minority and the unhealthily slutty majority.

And as soon as a boy puts his phallus into a woman––regardless of how many times a week either one exercises or how many servings of raw carrots either one eats in a day––both become instantly unhealthy, instantly part of that shameful majority.

Equally important but more veiled the poster establishes a standard of heteronormativity.

The poster only mentions vaginal intercourse, one specific type of intercourse only performable by a heterosexual male and a heterosexual woman. In doing so, it excludes students whose sexual preferences lie outside that narrowly defined norm.

Heterosexual students who engage in anal or oral sex as well as all students who self-identify as gay, lesbian, or asexual are simply swept to the side––their sexual encounters deemed unimportant and inconsequential. The poster presents the situation as if the only sex worth mentioning is vaginal intercourse, excluding other students not only from the general discussion on sex but most importantly the specific discussion of sex within the context of health.

In limiting both the topics discussed and the members of our community allowed to participate in the discussion, the poster (and the OHE) misses the sexual health issues that are actually important, especially for college students.

And the reason why those issues of sexual assault, rape, contraception and consent while under the influence are overlooked is truly the biggest problem evidenced by the poster: using statistics to cover up problems we don’t have the audacity to frankly discuss.

It’s as if in a singular statistic, the Office of Health Education is trying to tell that 48 percent of us, “It’s all right! There are thousands on campus just like you! You don’t even have to associate with those people! There are enough of us so that you can ignore the issue completely!”

By creating clear dichotomous labels, and drawing a thick line down the middle of our campus population, we create two separate communities with little need for interaction.

But, while it is certainly a personal issue, when it comes to discussing sex, we should take a page from those at our College who stress inter-faith, inter-cultural, and inter-racial dialoguing and just talk about it candidly.

Even those who don’t engage in “vaginal intercourse” are living in an environment where sex exists, thrives even, whether they like it or not. Ignoring the situation, relegating the voices of others to a separate sector of college life, will only make the schism more defined.