Students at UW-Madison are having Sex Out Loud – and they’re doing it on student-segregated fees.
According to recent stories in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and The Badger Herald, Sex Out Loud is a student organization dedicated to promoting not only safe sex but pleasurable sex. One way it tries to meet this goal is through pleasure workshops in which students pass around boxes full of sex toys. Along with programs to raise awareness of safe sex and healthy relationships, it holds workshops on topics such as bondage and sadomasochism and how to please a partner.
According to the Badger Herald, Sex Out Loud will receive $83,000 in student segregated fees next year, including funds to hire more facilitators and purchase more “demonstration devices.”
In a nation where most high school students don’t get comprehensive sex education, open and honest discussion should be welcomed, and pleasure should be a part of that discussion. But buying sex toys for demonstration purposes – and hiring people to put on workshops to demonstrate them – is not an appropriate use of student money.
The use of toys and other practices certainly merits some kind of discussion as far as health, safety and learning to discuss boundaries are concerned, but this could be done in a less gratuitous manner. The group could have frank discussions of pleasure without using student money to demonstrate it, and it could point students to credible sources for more information.

It bears noting that other university organizations have been banned from buying “props,” such as political campaign signs, with segregated fees. Treating Sex Out Loud differently seems inconsistent.

The organization itself is worthy of funding for the other work that it does. Discussion of all aspects of sexuality, even pleasure, is sorely lacking in our society. But there are better ways to go about discussing them than student-fee-sponsored passion parties.