From the editors: Sex in academia

Sometimes sex hurts, but we will return to that in a bit.

In the preface to her book,… Sometimes sex hurts, but we will return to that in a bit.

In the preface to her book, “Screening Sex,” Linda Williams writes, “Sex is rarely just repressed or liberated. It is just as often incited and stimulated and nowhere more so than by media.”

Williams is a professor at UC Berkeley and arguably, the founder of pornographic studies in modern academia. She argues that having and exposing sex might be tools of social oppression just as easily as prohibition and censorship might be.

When discussing the sensational sex-of-exploitation films of the ’60s, Williams writes that by including only outrageous sex, those films “ … make all sex acts seem dangerous, excessive, and in their very convulsiveness, verging on violence.”

We face this problem when dealing with the presentation of sex. We can strike sex from our media and bury our heads, or we can grandstand it in all its splendor and make sex some aberrant, genital circus.

“I Love Lucy” or “The Real World” — either way, sex suffers and gets shuttled behind closed doors. Either way, sex becomes unnatural.

Today, we aim to give sex the attention it deserves without falling into the free love trap of neo-hippyism. When sexual revolution becomes sexual anarchy, sexuality becomes a mark of subculture, and chastity belts are ushered in amid the confusion.

It is with such careful consideration that The Pitt News presents today’s Sex Edition. Modern society is at a place where one can no longer deny that questions of sexuality need to be asked.

Through the thought of figures such as Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille and Linda Williams herself, sex has made its way into the university. We believe that we are all the better for such success.

Such scholastic consideration steers the narrow course between the two repressive alternatives of sex as secret or of sex as spectacle.

With history, psychology, philosophy, physiology and the whole host of disciplines we have at our fingertips, we can better shed light on the processes that produce our models of “normal” sexuality. We do not do so to create a better model but to criticize all models.

We accept that there is no “best” culture, no “best” government, no “best” religion. There are just better and worse agreements between a certain time and culture and a certain practice. Why should we hold sex to a different standard?

Furthermore, such study shifts the drive for sexual liberation away from the juvenile, “I wanna have more sex whenever I want.”

The motivation behind sexual freedom rightly becomes the recovery of the personhood of those who fall outside of traditional sexual molds.

To state what is normal or acceptable in sex marks those who are not grouped into normalcy as failed persons.

Through sexual scholarship, we become aware of the social dynamics that produce regulations, and sex might be given back to those having it.

It is under such a banner of critical evaluation that The Pitt News publishes its Sex Edition. Filled to the brim with sex toys, pheromones and unclothed bodies, issues of sexuality are addressed with the same standards as what comes out in a regular newspaper.

To those who cry “modesty,” I remind you that good taste is not drawn on lines of abstinence alone. The blind eye does as much damage as the worst vulgarity. It is not only our right but our duty to treat and respect issues of sexuality.

On the other hand, to those who say we do not go far enough, we agree.

Ideally, sexuality would be temperately addressed daily, not limited to a Valentine’s Day special edition once a year. Voice would be given to every sexual lifestyle, and our vocabulary would — as theorist Judith Butler writes — match the “gender complexity that we have always been living.”

But human capability and social rigidity limit us. We view our dialogue as a stepping stone, not an endpoint.

You are asked, then, to read this Sex Edition of The Pitt News with these issues in mind. It is not meant to shock or to sensationalize, because, as we have learned, sex can hurt sometimes. It is meant to inform and entertain. Sex is a part of culture and deserves nothing less than our close consideration.