By Michael Gryboski
November 6, 2014
The Christian Post
An anti-pornography group is taking aim at Harvard University’s “sex week,” by calling on people to file complaints against the annual event.
“Harvard’s sex week encourages students to participate in acts that resemble or include sexual violence,” Dawn Hawkins, executive director for Morality in Media, told The Christian Post. “Research has shown these sex acts very often employ coercion to gain the participation of one partner.”
“Normalizing such actions has a profound effect on the participants, and society in general, by excusing sexual violence as ‘kink’ rather than seeking for healthy intimate relationships,” added Hawkins, whose organization released a statement Monday denouncing the seven-day series of events that are based on a variety of sexual topics.
Hawkins also told CP that there are “many things students and the public can do to combat the damaging messages at sex week.”
“We encourage parents and students at Harvard and other universities hosting similar sex weeks to file complaints about inappropriate events; contact university officials and administrators directly to voice their concerns; and organize events on campus that teach the truths about pornography, sexual violence and healthy intimacy,” Hawkins advised.
“We would like to see, at minimum, other healthy views of sexuality included in the agendas of sex week events to bring balance to the messaging.”
Harvard’s sex week started Monday and features various events on campus focused on assorted sexual topics.
According to the Sex Week Facebook group, the primary goal of sex week is to help educate students and others about “issues of love, sex, sexuality, gender, gender identity, and relationships.”
“As an annual campus-wide collaborative effort, sex week is positioned to actively engage Harvard students in embracing, thinking about, and discuss their experiences with their own sexualities,” reads their mission statement.
In past years, sponsors for Sex Week have included Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention & Response, the Harvard College Women’s Center, the office of BGLTQ Student Life, the Radcliffe Union of Students, Peer Contraceptive Counselors, Global Health & AIDS Coalition, and the Law Students for Reproductive Justice.
The group Sexual Health Education & Advocacy Throughout Harvard organizes the annual observance. Kirin Gupta, co-president of SHEATH, told CP that sex week stressed consent instead of violence.
“Each of our events explicitly addresses consent; we work with deeply feminist politics. And we always work with our feminist organization and the organizations that deal with sexual assault on our campus to hold several events that clearly deal exclusively with consent and anti-violence action and education,” said Gupta.
