Women: take control of your sexuality

by Brynn Burton

I have avoided addressing my rhyme and reason for writing this column all quarter. I have shied from sticking up for myself. I’ve tolerated name-calling and soft-core porn fiction stories about my life. I’ve ignored the raunchy comments and labels people have thrown my way. Until now.

Saturday night, something disgusting happened. At the Uptown Halloween block party, a clown approached me and asked if I would “make out with him so he could make it into my column.” The incident was pathetic. I couldn’t even look at this dork — who obviously thought he was funny. He was trying to be cocky and trying to degrade me. Too bad for him: the cracking red make up around his mouth made him look like a three-year-old boy after eating spaghetti.

I wasn’t outraged, but amused. I don’t write this column to get a date. I don’t go out every weekend hoping to get laid so I have new material for the following Thursday.

I write about situations that happen to the majority of Ohio University and college students across the nation. My only purpose is to make sex relatable and funny.

Last week a student working on a class project — about my column —approached me and asked, “Isn’t there a place and time for this?” She compared my column to LGBT pride, saying, “I don’t have a problem with gay and lesbians — but don’t parade it.”

My response was “why not?”

Why not celebrate our sexuality? Why not talk about it in an open forum, joke about it and treat it maturely? The more we talk about it, the more comfortable we become and the fewer stereotypes exist. Sadly, in the past quarter, I’ve begun to question if my theory is wrong — I have been labeled a slut and referred to as “one who celebrates promiscuity.”

I am neither. All I want is for people to read my column, laugh and say “Ha, ha. That has happened to me before.”

I want a girl who queefs during sex to be able to laugh about it with her partner instead of blushing in embarrassment.

When the girl who interviewed me said, “there isn’t a place for a sex column,” I had to ask myself: “Why not in college newspaper? Why not now?”

In college we question ourselves. We reconsider what we’ve been taught and what our notions of society are. Why not publish a sex column in a college newspaper? College papers are the only forms of media that can push the envelope. College papers are always questioning the establishment, expressing different ideas and essentially getting away with it. Why not question sex? Why not talk about dating in college?

Why is the television show Sex and the City so popular among intelligent, single women? The answer is simple: We are taking control of our sexuality. We are women who do not feel we need to hide sex. We are women who want to talk about it. But even as we proudly reclaim our sexuality, we still are seen as “sluts” and labeled as having “no self-respect.”

I read an article in The New York Timestitled “She’s got to be a macho girl” about women and teenage girls being sexual aggressors in music, videos, columns (wink wink) and how such a woman appears to be “almost macho in her pursuit of sex and advertising her pleasure in it.”

The article quoted therapists who said young girls are becoming more sexually liberated — and that this liberation will come and bite them in the ass.

I was outraged when I read this. Just because a woman takes control of her sexuality, she is chastised as a whore and predicted to be pregnant in five months.

There is something beautiful in a woman’s celebration of her sexuality and being intelligent. Not all women out there who don’t hide from their behavior — including myself — are frivolous and men-obsessed.

Luckily, there was light at the end of the otherwise-dark article. Being a good journalist, the reporter included the positive side of women taking advantage of their sexual power.

A journalist from Boy Crazy magazine said, “We’re about teaching our girls that they don’t have to sit around and wait to be chosen. They can get in the driver’s seat and choose what they want.”

The reporter quoted a mother who said her 16-year-old daughter summed up the revolution: “She looked at me and said, ‘Well of course we ask boys out. Come on, we’re equal now.”

I ask the women who read my column to get in the driver’s seat, take on the role as a man, talk about sex openly. We aren’t whores. We are women.

— Burton, a junior journalism major, is glad to have gotten all that off her chest. She promises she’ll be back to her old tricks next week, and hopes her column is around next quarter. Send her e-mail at bb155900@ohiou.edu.