A lecture on safe sex and its social taboos drew a crowd Thursday night at the Downtown campus.
Speaker Lori Ebert, who calls herself Dr. Sex Talk, highlighted a variety of sex topics as she spoke to a packed room of students at the Fun Love Health Education Talk.
“Students need to know how to make healthy decisions,” Ebert said. “They need to know how to have safe sex.”
Residential hall community assistant and nursing junior Jaime Buchholz helped plan the event, and agreed with Ebert.
“As a community assistant, I see it all the time,” Ebert said. “People have sex and many people come from families where sex wasn’t discussed, so they don’t know what to do or how to react.”
Much of the interactive lecture was focused on discussing body parts and sexually transmitted diseases — there were pictures of STDs and male and female genitalia integrated into the presentation.
“If you don’t know what you look like healthy then you’re not going to know what you look like unhealthy,” Ebert said.
Ebert emphasized normalcy in the presentation and explained that there is no clear-cut definition of sexual normalcy because everyone has his or her quirks.
“When you leave here tonight you will have a broader spectrum of what is normal,” Ebert said to the crowd. “You’ll have a better perspective.”
Many students attended the event because they had been previous years and enjoyed it, including health and wellness sophomore Alexis Serrano.
“I saw it was a different (speaker) this year, and I wanted to see how her perspective differed,” Serrano said.
Criminal justice sophomore Michael Robertson came because his friends recommended it.
“I heard it was fun last year,” Robertson said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
The event, now in its third year, was sponsored by Fascinations, an adult shop with many locations throughout Arizona.
“Fascinations wants to help students out,” Ebert said. “They understand the importance of this subject.”
Fascinations also donated giveaway gifts, including condoms, different flavors of lube and a costume to be auctioned off at the end.
“I don’t want someone’s drunken night to turn into a lifetime of herpes,” Buchholz said. “We’re really just here to have an open conversation.”
Contact the reporter torunn.sinclair@asu.edu
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