Sex may still be an uncomfortable discussion topic for many, but Boston University Student Health Services’ Safer Sex Decathlon created a fun learning environment in a low-stakes game tournament Thursday evening in the College of Arts and Sciences.
As part of its month-long “Frisky February” series, Wellness and Prevention Services partnered with the Fenway Institute at Fenway Health to host its first Safer Sex Decathlon. The Fenway Institute is a local organization that works to provide sexual health resources for those who identify as LGBT or are living with HIV or AIDS, as well as the greater community.
Students competed in “Minute to Win It”-style games while competing for condoms and the chance to win gift cards to Sweet Cheeks, Target and Starbucks while learning about safe sex, gender identity and healthy relationships.
Four teams — “Clit Eastwood,” “Kegel Krushers,” “The Condames” and “AMPed for Safer Sex” — competed in 10 rounds of interactive games designed to test candidates’ knowledge about sexual health.
After each round, a condom was given as a point for the winning team. The team with the most condoms at the end of the decathlon won a grand prize of a $100 gift card to Sweet Cheeks. Other items, like smaller gift cards for iTunes and AMC Theatres, were raffled off at the end, and brochures, condoms and other paraphernalia were also handed out.
Throughout the night, students raced to put condoms on dildos, come up with slang terms for sex and answered true or false questions about gender identity and sexual orientation. Some rounds also quizzed participants on the resources of the Fenway Institute.
Despite living in a relatively liberal city like Boston, there is still a stigma surrounding talks about sex and healthy relationships.
“We don’t live in a sex positive society — we live in a sex-shaming society,” said Dwayne Steward, the community engagement coordinator at the Fenway Institute. “So talking about sex is not easy. It’s kind of hush-hush.”
SHS is hoping to make discussions about sex more comfortable by hosting a wide variety of “Frisky February” events.
Ava Marinelli, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences and an assistant at Wellness and Prevention Services, spearheaded the planning of all of “Frisky February” events this year. The popular event series is in its second year following last year’s success, and the entire month is devoted to educating students about healthy sex and relationships.
“We’re hoping to normalize the topic [of sexual health] by making it a part of peoples’ day-to-day experience, whether it’s by seeing ads on Facebook for it, hearing their friends talk about it or seeing bus ads on the shuttle,” Marinelli said. “We try to normalize the discussion, but I do think even still today in the liberal setting of Boston and BU, there is still some stigma.”
Steward said the idea for a sex-ed decathlon came after members of the Fenway Institute attended BU’s “Sex in the Dark” event in the fall.
“We were all sitting in a room and we thought, ‘How can we make safe sex fun to talk about?’” he said. “You know, we don’t want to do the slides with the nasty pictures to scare people. We want to do a fun event.”
Throughout the night, each team collected handfuls of condoms handed out as points. With each round, groups got more and more competitive, with team members often arguing about the winner of a round and joking, “Condoms for all!”
“Clit Eastwood,” a team of four students, including emerged victorious as the winning team at the end of the night.
Chelsea Lennox, a first-year graduate student in the School of Public Health and a team member of “Clit Eastwood,” said she thought the event was well done and had fun competing against others.
“If you look at BU and the fact that ‘Frisky February’ is even a thing, I think it’s great,” she said. “I went to a different Boston school for undergrad, and we had nothing like this except for vigilante student groups.”
Though the end of the month is approaching, the hope is that people stay conscious of safe sex, and not just in February.
“We at Fenway Health and the Fenway Institute are all about having a sex-positive conversation about sexual health,” Steward said. “We want to take away the shame so that we can have an open conversation that is educational.”
A previous version of this story described Ava Marinelli as a communication assistant at SHS rather than as a assistant at Wellness and Prevention Services. This correction is reflected in the story above.
