What Is Harvard Sex Week Trying to Teach Us?

To spank someone properly, you need to keep your fingers together and lightly cup your hand. Certified sex educator Jamie Joy demonstrates this form at the front of Sever 110: At Joy’s instruction, the students in the audience practice by spanking their thighs beneath the desks.

This is “Knot Your Average Workshop: Introduction to BDSM and Kinks,” one of several events hosted on campus in late October as a part of the 12th annual Harvard Sex Week. Equipped with cheetah-print floggers, leather handcuffs, and sparkly paddles, Joy walks workshop participants through the basics of BDSM. Over the course of the hour, students tie bondage tape around their wrists, pour hot wax onto their arms, and identify themselves with a “kinky persona” listed on Joy’s hand-written poster (options include “mistress” and “pain slut,” among many, many others).

It’s difficult to generalize Sex Week’s programming from its promotional materials alone: On its Instagram, a Canva graphic publicizing a discussion on religion and sexuality sits near a photo of a beaming student holding an Ass Stroker from PeepShow Toys. In reporting on Sex Week, we (Maibritt, raised in Denmark on beer and sex positivity, and Yasmeen, a Texan who was taught that sex outside of marriage would leave her pregnant and diseased) set out to demystify this fabled Harvard phenomenon. How do conversations about pleasure and desire tie into those about safety and consent? How does Sex Week address the gaps in students’ high school health curriculums? And in a political climate increasingly hostile to conversations about reproductive rights and sexuality, what is Sex Week’s vision for sex education on Harvard’s campus?

According to Jaila C. Mabry ’27, the president of Sexual Education by Harvard College Students (or, SEHCS, pronounced exactly like you’re thinking), Sex Week’s range is intentional. She wanted this year’s programming to reflect the fact that sexual experiences “vary like crazy,” as she puts it.

Sex Week’s marketing promises a good time: bright colors, juicy peaches, and endless riffs on the word “come.” But the schedule Mabry and her team have put together goes beyond fun and fruit euphemisms. On Wednesday, we attended a workshop hosted by Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education on how to support a friend impacted by sexual harm. During the event, a SHARE practitioner presented a Power and Control Wheel, a diagram illustrating the tactics of abuse within a relationship. The practitioner also went over the importance of consent and resources for students affected by sexual trauma.

Though consent may seem like an essential part of sex, it can be absent from high school sex ed curriculums. In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that fewer than half of U.S. high schools teach all 20 topics recommended as essential components of sex education, ranging from STI prevention to verbal consent. Abstinence-only sex ed curricula, which warn against sex outside of marriage while withholding information on birth control and safe sex, receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding each year.

Sex Week dives deep into topics that traditional sex ed often leaves out. Directly following the SHARE event, another, titled “Queer Cliteracy: LGBTQ Sex Tips for Vulva Lovers and Owners,” explores queer sex, cunnilingus, and the question of whether scissoring is real.

Birna Gustafsson, a sexual health specialist, presents with a bedazzled fleshlight in hand (the biggest one TSA would let her fly with). Dressed in black and decked out in chunky gold jewelry (her ring, she reveals later, is actually a vibrator — “although not used!”), she breaks down anatomical diagrams of erogenous zones, G-spot myths, and how to keep your sex toys free of cat hairs. Gustafsson gives concrete suggestions on how to enhance sexual pleasure in the bedroom, while also reminding the room that sex isn’t just about “chasing orgasms.” A few participants jot down notes throughout. Several stick around to ask questions at the end.

Although we found the atmosphere at Harvard Sex Week warm and engaged, there’s no denying that both Gustafsson and Joy are teaching queer, sex-positive content in a relatively frigid political moment. Recent years have seen a significant uptick in restrictive sex education bills, with 19 states restricting the discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in public schools.

“We see policy changing in terms of gender affirming care, abortion, and even in some states like Florida, what you’re allowed to talk to grade schoolers about,” Gustafsson tells us.

Joy, the instructor at the BDSM workshop, says that the changing political climate has affected their ability to find work. “There’s gigs that I used to have in certain states that just stopped reaching out,” they say. “If I have been able to get in touch, they’ll say, ‘Our funding got cut,’ or ‘We’re not allowed to bring you back because of this law,’ or, ‘The culture has become more hostile, and we don’t think it’s a good idea to bring you here.’”

Compared to the rest of the country, pushback to comprehensive sex ed appears modest in the Harvard bubble. Mabry, for instance, recounts her faculty dean asking if the club could provide his office with free safe sex supplies. When we inquire about negative experiences, none immediately come to mind — but she remembers hearing a rumor about an article in the Salient.

Sure enough, the conservative student magazine’s December 2023 issue features “Birds, Bees, Animals: On the Disappearance of the Sexual Ethic.” “Sex Week should not be accepted as normal,” the anonymous author writes. “The public preaching of non-monogamous intercourse and sodomy is deplorable.”

Gustafsson is no stranger to such commentary. “There’s always going to be people who were raised to believe that this stuff is wrong and dirty and shameful,” she acknowledges. Yet, it is precisely the stigma around deviations from the “heteronormative script” that motivates her work. Tackling taboos is Gustafsson’s modus operandi. The biggest contribution you can make as an educator, she tells us, is to let students know: “You’re not broken, you’re normal, you’re okay.”

Even Sex Week’s most provocative events return to this theme of overcoming shame, as well as safety and consent. At the BDSM workshop, electro-wand demonstrations and spanking tips are threaded together by an ongoing discussion of boundaries and negotiation. During the presentation, Joy passes around a workbook filled with words that partners can use to describe how they want sex to make them feel: powerful, worshiped, naughty. It’s a level of specificity that encourages a person to pay attention to their partner while developing a deeper understanding of their own desires.

Abstinence-only curricula assume that monogamous, heterosexual sex is inherently safe and good sex — even though wedding vows are no safeguard against abuse, and they certainly don’t guarantee pleasure. Sex Week proposes an alternative sexual philosophy: one of pleasure rooted in consent, whether you’re having sex in matrimony, in handcuffs, or both.

Correction: November 12, 2024

A previous version of this article misspelled Birna Gustafsson’s last name.

— Magazine Editor-at-Large Yasmeen A. Khan can be reached at yasmeen.khan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @yazzywriting.