This past week was the biannual “Sex Ed Week,” a well-known campus event put on by Wooster’s sexual respect and education group, k(no)w, with help from multiple other campus organizations.
The logo this year was a set of open legs. Neither the race nor the gender could have been assumed from the image and there was no overt nudity. If you have not seen it, it was literally just a pair of legs. K(no)w was told that the image did not meet campus guidelines as laid out in the Scot’s Key by the administration and instructed that they could not use the image at all. This reporting raises many issues, but I want to lay out three that I find to be important.
First, the passage in the Scot’s Key that the legs apparently violate is on page 68 and refers to approved materials for the Art Wall in Lowry. It reads “Posting may not have reference to alcohol, drug use, nudity or illicit activities in written or pictorial form.”
This is a broad swath of content with no specification to the purpose of content. It is, frankly, arbitrary, which facilitates administration hypocrisy.
For those of you not on campus second semester last year, the Sex Ed Week logo was a cartoon powder blue penis. Not the suggestion of a penis, but an actual penis, with a very pleasant smile. This image was not reported, which leads me to believe it is not against administration guidelines.
If the image of an actual penis is permissible but a pair of legs is not, then how is k(no)w supposed to follow Art Wall policy in the future?
It seems ridiculous to chastise the group when they are being given such varied guidelines. The administration appears to be using the ambiguity of the policy as leeway to pick and choose what it wants to censor. What is the point of having an Art Wall policy if it can be interpreted and implemented in such a broad manner and with such deference to administration?
The second issue is that the only pattern the administration appears to follow is an increased censure of images that either clearly or plausibly present vaginas.
The Sex Ed Week logo a year prior to the penis was an anatomically correct depiction of a clitoris. K(no)w was forced to take it down. The blue penis is clearly more flippant, and the clitoris was entirely educational, yet the administration deemed the latter inappropriate.
The reason I raise this is because there has been a long history in this country of deeming what is often described as “male” bodies as appropriate and what is often called “female” bodies as inappropriate.
This is rooted in longstanding sexist ideas of women as objects, and women’s bodies as unclean or shameful. Whether the administration realizes it or not, they are promulgating a sexist double standard of which bodies are intrinsically good or bad.
Finally, the reporting of the sex week logo is an issue because the administration’s focus on Sex Ed Week images entirely misses the point of the event and acts as a distraction from what really matters. Even I am at fault for feeding this distraction; I wrote a Voice viewpoint on it after all.
But really, this campus, like many college campuses, has a culture of violence against women that is not being addressed. The school’s choice to take issue with a pair of legs shows that it is more focused on optics than in aiding k(no)w in their goals of creating a supportive campus culture.
My suggestion to the school is to get down to students’ level, pause the immediate desire to wield bureaucratic control and work with us.
My suggestion to all of you is to support k(no)w and attend future Sex Ed Week events, stay informed about school policies (such as the fact that Wooster is currently not Title IX compliant), hold the administration accountable, and don’t let what appears to be administrative tively creating the campus you and all students deserve.
The image discussed in this viewpoint is pictured on page 2 of the Voice.