Several ASU students spent about an hour and a half trying to affix a large mesh condom atop the spire on the Tempe campus Hayden Lawn on Tuesday with a pulley system of cheap rope, broomsticks and spare shoes.

But the members of ASU Advocates for Sexual Health just couldn’t get it up.

Christina Mesiti, president of the group, which is in its inaugural year, said the 12-foot-wide creative project and its attempted installation was part of the group’s effort to advertise Smart Sex Week.

Her club, along with other student organizations, is advocating safe sex practices and better sex education on campus with events throughout the week, including a movie screening tonight and free HIV and syphilis testing outside the Memorial Union on Thursday afternoon.

Mesiti, a painting senior, said she and two friends spent about 18 hours stitching together the 37 yards of sheer fabric to make the condom. She had hoped the prominent phallic symbol on Hayden Lawn would serve as an artistic statement promoting the efforts of ASU Advocates for Sexual Health.

“By putting a condom on the ‘nipple of knowledge,’ we figured it would be, like, the Bat Signal for our cause,” Mesiti said. “It’s our symbol.”

After hearing that ASU was ranked 119 out of 139 schools in the 2008 Trojan Sexual Health Report Card, an annual ranking of the quality of sexual-health resources at American colleges and universities, Mesiti said she and others decided more sexual-health advocacy was needed on the ASU campus. The group has also been offering an anonymous online sexual-health blog and is pushing to have sex awareness taught in ASU 101 courses.

Even though Tuesday’s attempt to “protect” Hayden Lawn was unsuccessful, students on the Tempe campus said the condom’s intent to promote sexual health was still obvious.

“It’s not even fully on, and it’s a clear message,” said Samantha Ahn, a psychology freshman. She said it is especially necessary to advocate sexual awareness for college-age students, when hormones are raging and people are in an “experimental stage” in their lives.

Business sustainability freshman Aaron Quihuis said he thought the oversized condom was a “genius” way to get people’s attention about a message particularly important to ASU students.

“Of course, advertising safe sex [is important] at all colleges, but because of how much ASU parties, it leads to bad decisions,” he said.

Kate Rogers, a volunteer for Planned Parenthood AZ, said there is still an incredible need for sexual-health advocacy in America, especially on college campuses.

“There’s so much out there to make sex dangerous, and there’s such basic steps [you can take] to be safe,” she said. Rogers was invited by ASU Advocates for Sexual Health to distribute free condoms on Hayden Lawn on Tuesday afternoon in support of Safe Sex Week, and she stressed the importance of teaching college students these simple steps to practicing safe sex.

“If people are going to choose to be sexually active, they need to be educated,” she said, “both for the health of themselves and their partners.”

Mesiti said one of the goals of Safe Sex Week is to make topics of sexual education part of the common dialogue on campus. She said ASU Advocates for Sexual Health will be back on Hayden Lawn on Thursday, trying again to affix their oversized condom atop the spire in the center of campus with the hopes of destigmatizing sexual health issues for college students.

“We want to make sex less taboo to talk about, [and not] all doom and gloom with just talk of STDs,” Mesiti said. “We want people to think [of sex as], ‘It’s OK. Just put a condom on.’”

Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.