Sex in the Classroom

Sex is out in the open, on display. It fills pages upon pages of news on aggregate news sites. But mostly it is no longer the frigidly received subject that was only spoken in hushed tones during the 1950s.

And now, it’s in the classroom, up for discussion.

Since the 1960s, the culture of sexuality in society, along with mass media, has become indelibly tied together, as both have expanded since their analytical beginnings.

Despite reaching the level of academia in those intervening years, the subject is still in a process of revision, with professionals in the field scrambling to analyze new topics of interest, including same-sex marriage, the effect of technology, such as pornography and sexting’s influence on extramarital affairs.

"The Philosophy of Sex," the textbook professor Elizabeth Brake uses, is now in it's sixth edition.

“There’s been a lot of change over the last 45 years, in who is included and what are the issues we’re looking at,” Brake says.

ASU is among hundreds of universities around the country that bring modernist views and analysis of sex and their representation in society to lecture halls.

If there’s a theme to these many courses, it’s that in recent decades, people questioning the status quo of sex, their set perceptions and realizing the reproductive cycle on many levels is still in a process of revision across the board.

One such class, titled “Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media,” deals with the misconceptions of romance in the different types of media across the board, and how to best counteract them.

The class these solutions are centered around, was created by Dr. Mary-Lou Galician, who also wrote the textbook for the online course, after she discovered such an academic book did not exist.

Galician, who prefers, Dr. Fun — an acronym for “Fire Up Now” — a moniker she gave herself, said her studies emerged after a turbulent period after she examined of the status of her romantic life, especially after a brief failed marriage.

In addition to her moniker, Galician infuses the syllabus for her course in media studies with medical vernacular, including designating a personal method for a person’s media ailments, coined a “7-Step Reality Check Up.”

“Most analysis and criticism kind of stops after the description, and I added those three steps to make it have a media literacy basis to make people think how could this have been rewritten to portray to present a healthier final message," Galician says.

Part of this includes diagnosing a person of potentially caustic romantic beliefs, enforced by the long-established myths of the media, in the form of a 10 true or false questionnaire.

This quiz asks readers questions like, if both potential suitors could encounter a ground-swell of feelings and fall in love at first sight.

That’s a free one. It’s false.

“We have our values in all the wrong places. There’s ‘lust at first sight’, ‘attraction at sight,’ but real love takes time,” Galician says. “And the obverse of that is ‘If I don’t feel for you immediately, this probably isn’t gonna be a good relationship.’”

Galician stresses that this unreasonable expectation is often stressed because of a media saturated landscape that has made the belief uniform.

“Children born now into absolute-24/7 media culture absolutely can’t escape it. So, no one should feel bad for falling for this stuff,” Galician says.

This new model of ‘what is love?’ pops up in another class that takes Galician’s basic ideas and breaks them down further into concepts with no definite answer.

Philosophy of Sex and Love, taught by Brake, takes the usual philosophical inquiries and applies it to love in it’s modern state.

Brake is a Virginia transplant. She unintentionally brought the course with her after two years at the University of Calgary, after she found out that ASU didn’t provide such a course for students.

When asked, most of the professors can’t pin down a predominant gender or major that enrollment favors more of, something that goes beyond the typical titillation hinted by their titles.

Whenever a new class gathers for a new semester, Brake opens it with a simple question, “What is love?” As result of the differing cultural perspectives, students never give her a mostly uniform answer.

“People are interested in talking about sex and love,” Brake says. “These are things are of deep importance to most of us in our lives, and once you start thinking through these topics, they’re a lot of questions that confront people.”

This, she says, is one of her favorite aspects of teaching the course. Generations again and again have distilled supposedly concrete concepts into a menagerie of splintered ideas.

“We’re aware of all these clashing cultures," Brake says. "There is a cultural component to the codes we think govern it, and you see that in the history of sexual forays and marriage that these are culturally shifting things."

The inquisitive nature of these class sessions reflect discussions veering to the latest topics up for debate around the country.

—Do people technically change genders when they undergo sexual reassignment surgery? 

—Does the very nature of some sexual activity, like a Slate article about sex between lesbians mentioned by Brake, count as actual sex?

“Even though, there’s a great deal of cultural changes, we’re still interested personally in the same questions as the ancient Greeks,” she says.

Brake’s classes are structured around these questions, mixed with the personal contexts of her students.

“I encourage them to relate it to their own experiences because when you read Plato and the ancient Greeks, it can seem removed for you own experiences, but if you start thinking of the arguments in your own experiences, it brings it life,” Brake says.

If the philosophical inquisitions of Brake’s course provided the framework, then Professor Breanne Fahs’ Critical Perspectives on Sexuality class, a women studies course, which is taught at the West campus, applies these bare essential questions into scholarly perspectives.

Perhaps indicative of the course’s name, for her classes, Fehs has her students examine articles of conflicting viewpoints, in conjunction with the lectures and power points.

In a different class, students prepare for a lecture by reading a theoretical perspective of sexuality involving capitalism, which allows them to be well-prepared for the upcoming lecture.

In a recent class, she gave out articles written by people advocating the careers of sex workers and another criticizing their work as exploiting women.

“People have a vague sense on how they feel or what they know, but that’s different when you can give them a different kinds of language to think about it more directly,” Fahs says.

All these lectures build toward an idea that sexuality is historically contingent and, therefore, a social construction, a thought she first came to realize during her time enrolled as an undergraduate at Occidental College, in Los Angeles.

When she was there, she enrolled in a cocktail of classes, courses like psychology and various feminism classes. In these classes she picked up on the undercurrent of sexuality that ran throughout the lectures. This piqued her interest.

Such subtexts like the archaeology of power appear in her teachings.

“It’s the avenue that lets people, who wouldn’t otherwise want to think about messy and complicated topics, (be) motivated to think about them because it’s about sexuality,” Fahs explains. “I don’t even know to phrase it other than that.”

“You’re dealing with a lot of different feelings at once; people feelings of shame, of excitement, or anxiety, combined with real potential for a transformation,” she says. “Sexuality sort of has that potential. We have the potential to exist at both of those polarities, and that’s really interesting and important.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, the caption for McNeil's photo was incorrectly labeled as a trans* media class. The caption has been updated.

 

Reach the writer at tccoste1@asu.edu or via Twitter @TaylorFromPhx

 

 

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