While sex blogger Lena Chen and abstinence advocates Sarah Kinsella and Justin Murray may disagree about what should go on between the sheets at Harvard University, all three Harvard undergraduates seem to agree that bedroom talk is too hushed in the Ivy environment.

True Love Revolution, an abstinence group started at Harvard in 2006, claims abstaining from sex is the new taboo at Harvard, while Chen said few of her classmates would be willing to go on the record — let alone the Internet — with their sexual experiences. Like other colleges, Harvard lacks — but also requires — a frank, open dialogue on campus.

Because there are many risks associated with unsafe sex, openness about protection, contraception and abstinence allows students to reaffirm their decisions and feel safer and better informed. While sexuality is a personal topic, TLR and the “Sex and the Ivy” writer have come forward as the talking points and participants in the public discussion about sex options and education. Neither view on sex is to be censored, as long as groups do not prevent others from obtaining the information, acceptance or sexual health services they need.

TLR does not take a stance on whether Harvard University’s Health Services should make contraception available to students, although it criticizes how HUHS advocates contraception and not abstinence. However, a college health clinic’s role is not to cater to a minority practice to the exclusion of others.

On U.S. college campuses, 29 percent of students reported no sexual partners in the past year, according to a American College Health Association’s spring 2006 survey. For the 70 percent of students who are having sex, options for on-campus sexual information — from contraception to abstinence — should always be available.

Chen’s decision to blog about her personal life — including her sexual life — is typical of today’s culture and hardly shocking. Since television drama Sex and the City made it acceptable, and even enviable, for young women to openly write about their sexual encounters, several sex commentators have found publicity on the Internet, in newspapers and in magazines.

At Harvard, some may claim that sexuality is only discussed in whispers, but the voices pronouncing both promiscuity and abstinence echo loudly off ivy-covered walls. While hardly different from the national situation, Harvard’s students’ decisions about sexuality are indicative of a generation’s unwillingness, and yet great need, to talk about sex.