From 18-29 September, the University of New South Wales is holding its annual SEXtember festival, which is billed as ‘celebrating all things sex, sexual health and relationships’ because apparently ‘sex is fun. Sex is spicy. Sex is intimate. Sex is respectful’ and most importantly ‘it’s time we talk about the kind of sex life you deserve.’
Sadly, the fact that UNSW is putting a great deal of thought, money, and organisation into something which will stunt the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth of its students is what have come to come to expect from our universities. UNSW claims that it’s one of the ‘best universities in Australia.’ If this is what goes on at one of the ‘best’, imagine what it is like at one of the worst.
Those who are keen to participate in SEXtember are presented with a dazzling array of activities from which to choose. The more artistic can make their own clay teacups while talking about ‘intimacy and consent’, while the lighthearted amongst them can attend a comedy night where comedians will regale the audience with stories about their sexual health. Speaking of which, the festival is also offering free STI tests, with the promise of prizes, as one its activities. The organisers do not specify whether the person with most, or the least STI’s wins.
Curious students can enjoy free snacks at a session about male circumcision, or they can attend ‘Queeriosity’: Let’s Talk about Sex’ which is fairly self-explanatory. The fitness fanatics among them can head to the aquatic centre for a high energy queer fitness workout. All in all, it’s going to be quite the ten days.
Imagine though, if UNSW was not holding SEXtember, but rather SHAKEStember. Imagine if for those ten days, students were able to watch performances of Macbeth or Hamlet or Measure for Measure. Imagine if instead of talking about sex, they spent ten days talking about Aristotle, or astronomy, or late Gothic architecture, or even coming to grips with the rules of cricket. Anything would be better than ten days of voyeuristic obsessing about everybody else’s sexual proclivities. There is no surer way of deadening the spirit and killing the transcendent than to focus entirely on the flesh.
This is, of course, not the fault of the student, but the teacher. As Christopher Joliffe remarks in Quadrant, ‘Young people today are experiencing a long hangover, the product of decades of collective over-indulgence, one that they had no hand in creating, and have been largely cast into, without anybody ever suggesting there might be a different way to do things.’
This is certainly true of UNSW staff. No single academic who is presenting a paper at the festival’s ‘Sex, Health and Society’ conference is suggesting that there might be a different way of doing things, or even not doing them at all.
From 25-27the September, academics from around the world will be ruminating upon topics such as ‘Making research more inclusive of gender and sexuality diversity: HDR perspectives’, ‘Yellow power play: Performing Asian American resistance through BDSM’, ‘I forgot how hot the sun is”: outdoor exercise as relational placemaking among LGBTQIA+ people living in Sydney’ and ‘Rewards and recognition: Grappling with queerness and normativity on Facebook,’ to name but a few.
Universities, as we all know, have long abandoned their higher purpose. Worse, they are now setting the young up for anarchy, chaos and failure by teaching them that freedom is the absence of restraint, rather than the ability to choose the right course of action.
