As reported on Jezebel.
The Daily Mail is horrified that a UC Berkeley student had sex on campus and wrote about it in the independent student paper’s regular “Sex on Tuesday” column.
“The elite University of California, Berkeley has seen a blow to its uber-serious reputation with a controversial article from a student boasting about her marathon campus sex sessions,” theDaily Mail reports, along with tons of irrelevant details regarding the history of The Daily Californian, one of the oldest college newspapers in the U.S., which has now had its reputation ripped to shreds by Nadia Cho’s declaration that “having sex on campus” — particularly in the library — “is actually very doable, and it’s lots of fun. It’s also surprisingly easy.”
“We have known about that column for a long time but there is nothing we can do about it,” a spokeswoman for the university said. “The students have a right to free speech.” And then she silently sobbed as the Cal Marching Band played a somber tune to mark the desecration of the university’s values.
No, just kidding, because every university paper ever runs a “scandalous” piece on having sex in the stacks, at least once a year. “When Cornell students think of the Big Red Ambition list, one task inevitably looms larger than all other entries on the list – #1: Sex in the Stacks,” The Cornell Daily Sun reported a few years back. Sex in the stacks is one of Duke’s “five widely accepted unofficial graduation requirements” and “a must for the more daring lovers of Michigan’sundergrads.” Students have sex in the stacks (or at least write/think about it) at Harvard,Columbia, Temple, OU, and the University of Miami. Even our Canadian friends are in on it!
Hey: we get it. Coeds + Sex + Public Sex = SexXxy Trend Piece! It’s dumb of the Daily Mail to make such a fuss over Cho’s piece, but it’s even dumber that college papers are obsessed with regurgitating the same lame “OMG I was almost caught fucking next to The Canterbury Tales” story over and over again.
I went to UC Berkeley, and the only time anyone read the “Sex on Tuesday” column was to make fun of it because the writers always tried way too hard to be controversial while also consistently writing about mind-numblingly cliche topics. (“Butt sex is a thing!” “Threesomes are a thing!”) It’s hard to win as a college sex columnist, though — when Cho wrote about sex-positivity and consent, she received comments like, “She wanted to write something juicy, couldn’t get laid, and had to churn out SOMETHING for publication 2 hours before the deadline.”
I also remember consistently overhearing students rate the attractiveness of each semester’s columnist — as if only people they thought were hot could give good sex advice — and, judging by the comments on Cho’s piece, that hasn’t changed either: “You are really ugly and unattractive. You sound desperate for male attention.” Ah, college.