Sex on Campus Sells Papers

When my husband brought home the latest issue of Montana Kaimin, the school paper produced at his alma mater, the journalism school of the University of Montana, I was surprised to read a sample column by one of the students. Undergrad Bess Davis writes an opinion column titled Bess Sex about, well, sex. Sex columns in general interest publications started in the 1990s with Dan Savage's syndicated Savage Love and the almost quaint Sex in the City by Candace Bushnell in the New York Observer, but I had missed that risqué reads have become standard fare for college papers. In the issue on my kitchen counter, the up and coming writer details her preference for oral sex over cheese. "I happen to be vegan and have already given up cheese for other reasons, but ... I mean, why would you ever give up oral sex, for anything?"

It makes sense as blogs exponentially explode into confessional journalism that Davis and her classmates would be studying how to develop their own writing voices (or, at least those of their avatars). With the profession they are entering reinventing itself on the Internet, the syllabus for student reporters has expanded from who-what-when-where-and-how to how many times? In fact, it turns out the western state's public university is a little behind the curve, having only added the column to the paper at the beginning of the current semester. USA Today reported back in 2002 that sex-themed columns in college papers could be found on the very best campuses, including Yale ("Women know within the first five minutes of meeting a man whether they are going to hook up with him" -Daily News) and Jesuit-run Boston College ("They took 6,000 of us who are in our sexual prime and crammed us into a dorm room where there's nowhere to sit except on the bed" - The Heights).

It turns out, for many collegiate readers, the articles partially remediate "a really lousy sex education in high school." Sex themed college journalism is regularly aggregated on U-Wire, a website for students of the profession. Choice student writing samples from columns bannered Country Club Cockfight (The Cornell Daily Sun) or the The Sexpert (Daily Princetonian) abound.

Guess what, the sexy features are really popular with readers. The Kaimin lists three Bess Sex columns in the "5 most read stories" in the paper's online version. A fourth item, headlined "Sex column causes controversy," is about criticism of the state school and journalism department by one of its faculty. The objections come from law professor Kristen Juras who considers the writing and subject "inappropriate for college students." Threatening to take the matter to the state legislature, Juras remarked the column was personally embarrassing to her, "It affects my reputation as a member of the faculty." The journalism department may be catching up with the times, but it sounds like the law instructor needs to brush up on her First Amendment.