The Sex Edition

The purity culture ideology holds that if two people are in love, they should wait until they are married to have sex. The ideology birthed movements such as “True Love Waits” that stemmed from members of the Christian community who promoted abstinence from premarital sexual activity. The purity culture movement began in the 1990s with parents promoting the biblical ideas surrounding sex...

When Kaley Oschmann was a freshman at Seattle Pacific University, her and her floormates were hanging out in their Resident Advisor’s (RA) room when the conversation moved to the topic of sex. Right away, it was obvious to the RA that few of her residents knew anything about sex. She saw this as a problem and decided that it was her responsibility to educate them. Oschmann, who is now a senior ...

Female neoteny, sometimes called paedomorphism, is both highly sexualized and expected in modern media. It means that women are expected to look as if they were in their early twenties for the majority of their lives. As a species, humans are far more physically neotenous than any other primate, and females largely more so than males. Women, despite maturing earlier, do not acquire the traits commo...

Dr. Tina Sellers, a former professor of marriage and family therapy, has spent the last five years doing a different form of teaching than her work at Seattle Pacific University. Sellers made the transition in 2015 from professor to running her own institution for marriage and sex therapy. In 2015 Sellers founded the Northwest Institute of Intimacy (NWIOI). She started the institute to not ...

Many students remember the days in their high school health classroom, the teacher prattling on about the human reproductive systems over the unmistakable sound of teenagers giggling in the back.  Freshman ecology major Damarisse Valladares went through her academic career without any formal sex education. Like many students who came into college without a substantial sexual education, Val...

The Planned Parenthood website lists five birth control options for males: the utilization of condoms, practicing abstinence, getting a vasectomy, the withdrawal method and “outercourse” (anal penetration). The list for female birth control, on the other hand, is a lot more extensive, detailing nearly three times the amount of contraceptive methods. Included in this 14 item list of suggestions are...

Across the nation, college campuses offer easy access health service centers on campus for students. The range of services differ drastically from school to school. The resources available for sexual health vary depending on the religious tradition of each school. Public universities like the University of Washington are very open when discussing sexual health services. “Our door is always...

Sydney Hack, a sophomore integrated studies major at Seattle Pacific University, recalls her parents giving her the classic “birds and the bees” talk, explaining that sex is an act of romance. Hack shared that although she understands sex is an act of love, she feels it does not have to be strictly amorous. “It [sex] is to show that you care about someone, but it doesn’t have to me...

Humans often begin to understand what sex and sexuality are when they are children. They learn from school, home, the internet and from the people around them. Some of what they are told is obviously not true, but other misconceptions are more difficult to detect. Children are sometimes given misinformation to steer them away from asking questions about sex and sexuality; for instance, some lit...

Gracie Brown, a junior at Seattle Pacific University, remembers the first time she heard of the university’s no-sex policy as a freshman. Sitting in a large circle with her new floormates during their first floor-meeting, Brown’s jaw dropped when her RA read the contract that all students sign upon enrolling at SPU. Without really knowing, Brown had agreed to follow a policy she disagree...

Review (Some spoilers ahead) “Sex doesn’t make us whole, so how could you ever be broken?” Dr. Jean F. Milburn (played by Gillian Anderson) explains to a teen who comes into her office who is confused because she doesn’t want to have sex. Dr. Milburn describes how sexuality can be complicated because it is fluid and different for everyone.  Netflix’s original series, “Sex Educa...

Sex is a gloriously fun and complicated subject to dive into. But conversations about sex at Seattle Pacific University look different than conversations about sex at a secular, public university. The Falcon’s coverage of sex, at least in this edition, often revolves around the topic of sex policy, more specifically SPU’s policy of no-sex between unmarried partners.   The driving purpose behind having these aw...