College Tea with Transsexual Porn Star Buck Angel. “The Anatomy of the Vagina and How to Please it with your Mouth, Tongue, and Everything in Between” with Madison Young. A Screening with Director Paul Thomas featuring Sadomasochistic Porn. These are just three events that Sex Week at Yale advertised to students in past programming. And nearly everyone — from writers at the The Atlantic, to employees at Trojan Condoms, to college students at 18 other universities around the US — were as intrigued at the prospect of such stimulating intellectual conversation as you are now.
Eric Rubenstein, BK ’04, conceived of the idea of Sex Week in 2002, when he half-jokingly proposed to create a “Kosher Sex Week” at a Hillel Leadership Conference as a tactic to attract more students to Hillel events. The idea was consummated when Rubenstein teamed up with Jacqueline Farber, BR ’03, director of the Peer Health Educators at Yale, and Professor Bill Summers, who was then teaching “Science and Sexuality,” more popularly known on campus as “Porn in the Morn.” The team decided to secularize the event, and worked with the Women’s Center and the LGBTQ Co-Op in addition to Hillel and the Peer Health Educators to organize the week-long program.
Professor Summers recalled, “The idea was to have a series of talks that were informative and educational and pushing the boundaries. Discussing things that average Yale students didn’t have too much experience with, like, what kind of soap should I use on my leather sex toys? Or how do you get certain toys through airport security?”
The first Sex Week took place on the week of Valentine’s Day, and featured four or five guest speakers, and several faculty lecturers. According to Professor Summers, one or two of the events during the week were specifically LGBTQ-oriented. Summers, for his part, gave a lecture on intersex people.
In 2003, Rubenstein and Farber, a junior and senior at the time, had higher ambitions. They increased the number of guest speakers and programmed a full seven-day schedule, with topics ranging from “The Medicalization of Sex” to “The History of the Vibrator.” Still, Yale alum and writer for The Atlantic, Ron Rosenbaum, JE ’68, claimed the 2003 iteration of Sex Week at Yale had events so under-attended that “the attendees, if you exclude the two earnest and thoughtful undergraduate organizers of Sex Week, were outnumbered by the four panelists.”
After 2003, Sex Week became a biennial event and experienced a previously unimaginable surge in popularity. It was marketed in new ways, expanding through multi-media platforms including a radio show, blog, and magazine. Professor Summers remembers of the magazines that, “There were articles — some slightly amusing things — that certain people’s grandmothers would not be comfortable with.” Sex week organizers received funding from corporate sponsors like the sex toy company Pure Romance, and the festival began attracting more guest-speakers associated with the porn industry. In 2008, coordinators invited porn actor and director Paul Thomas. In 2010, coordinators invited transsexual porn actor Buck Angel for a Master’s Tea. A dominatrix came to speak in an earlier year, Summers recalls. The invite list piqued interest in Yale students and newspapers across the country. 18 other universities in the US followed Yale’s suit and created their own forms of Sex Week on campus. At one point, Yale’s Sex Week Magazine had a circulation of over 22,000.
As Sex Week became more porn-centered, students and faculty argued that the week-long event no longer fostered a positive and healthy sex culture at Yale; it did the opposite. In 2011, the Advisory Committee for Campus Climate, chaired by Margaret Marshall and comprising three other members, including current Vice President of Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews, identified Sex Week as an inhibition of a healthy sexual climate at Yale. In a statement to the Herald, Goff-Crews wrote, “Our charge was to advise President Levin and the university’s trustees on sexual misconduct and campus climate… We did not and could not make a decision to ban Sex Week.” The Committee’s report did state, however, that they had “overheard from students, faculty, and staff that ‘Sex Week at Yale,’ a student-sponsored event, is highly problematic.” The report continued, “Over time, this event has clearly lost the focus of its stated intention… in recent years it has prominently featured titillating displays, ‘adult’ film stars, and commercial sponsors of such material. We recommend that ‘Sex Week at Yale’ be prohibited from using Yale’s name and any Yale facilities.”
Undergraduates for a Better Yale College (UBYC), an organization established in 2012 with the purpose of creating a paradigm shift from hook-up culture to monogamous, long-term relationships, were also part of the opposition to Sex Week. UBYC even circulated a petition to end Sex Week. Co-founder of UBYC, Isabel Marin, TC ’12, declined to answer any questions about her opposition to the event. In response to administrative and student opposition, Sex Week at Yale took a two-year hiatus after 2012.
Sex Week did, however, make a return to campus in fall of 2015, this time under the name,“Sex and Sexuality Week.” Sex and Sexuality Week had an altered set of intentions and strategies centered around promoting a positive sexual atmosphere on campus. In past years, the directors of Sex Week organized the festival without consulting organizations and committees like the Advisory for Campus Climate. Katherine Fang, the Executive Director of Sex and Sexuality Week in 2015, took a different approach. Fang began formulating a mission statement for Sex and Sexuality Week through conversations with SHARE, the Office of Gender and Campus Climate, Yale Health Student Wellness, and various WGSS faculty members. The event was moved to take place in October instead of the week of Valentine’s Day.
Fang explained her rationale: “My main goal was to conceive of intersectionality broadly — to involve as many corners of campus as possible in conversation about sexual health and politics, because we all have stakes in them.” Fang’s board collaborated with the cultural centers, queer student groups, leaders of religious student organizations, and Greek groups. In contrast to the orignal Sex Week, Fang said that “Faculty and the administration were integral in helping our team pull [Sex and Sexuality Week] off.” Sex and Sexuality Week 2015 was popular among the student body, with some events boasting over 100 attendees.
Unfortunately, Sex and Sexuality Week was the last successful iteration of Sex Week that Yale’s campus saw. Becca Young, previous member of the student group that organized the event in 2016, said that “participation was very low.” Still, Young mentioned that there was a 2016 panel event for Sex and Sexuality Week on anal play that was very popular. When I asked why she thought this event might be more popular than others, Young explained, “It seems to me that people will go to events that they can advertise they’ve gone to. It is fun to say you’re going to this thing.” Sex Week was most popular, after all, when the events were most outrageous and sensationalized.
When Jacqueline Farber and Eric Rubenstein founded Sex Week in 2002, campus attitudes towards sex and LGBTQ issues were radically different. The campus lacked vibrant discourse on sex and sexuality, so students decided to push the envelope. 600 students were enrolled in Professor Summer’s class colloquially known as “Porn in the Morn.” Gay activist Larry Cramer was planning a large donation as part of an initiative to include sexuality studies to the Women and Gender Studies department. A club called Porn n’ Chicken produced and released a trailer for a student porno called “The StaXXX.” The notion of organizing a week-long event to educate students on and open discussions about the porn industry, sex toys, and transgenderism was unprecedented in a space like Yale. Sex Week made space for later educational events like Trans Week at Yale to transpire.
Becca Young thinks that one reason that today’s students may not be as interested in participating and facilitating an event like Sex Week is that in the past few years other social issues have taken precedent on campus. Young said, “I do think that campus changed fundamentally after the 2015 protests. It can feel indulgent to talk about the nitty-gritties of sex in an organized setting.”
The evolution of Sex Week is revelatory. As the sexual climate at Yale has evolved, so too have the attitudes of Yalies about the necessity of talking about the particulars of sex in public forums. With or without organized forums, Yale students will continue to discuss the particulars of sex. The sexual and political climate at Yale now does not necessitate organized discussions about porn and sex toys, but instead necessitates forums on consent.
The Rise and Fall of Sex Week at Yale was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.