About

Sex Week 2012 (SWAY) seeks to cultivate a forum for engaging and meaningful discussions about sexuality, intimacy, and relationships. Our goal is to provide students with events and resources that increase self-awareness and understanding of sexual topics. We hope to promote students’ agency in making educated decisions and to foster a sexual environment that is respectful, well-informed, and intellectually engaged.

We recognize that this is not a goal that can be achieved in one week. This conversation is and should be ongoing because sex and sexuality are contextualized within the dynamics of our personal and social lives. However, Sex Week 2012 is an opportunity to shed new light on this conversation and share a common space for the multiplicity of discourses that engage the wide diversity of our student body.

Sexual culture is not homogeneous. We differ not only in the way we understand sexual culture, but also in the way we negotiate our place inside of it. Conversations about sexuality matter to us because they implicate ideas about what we should and should not do with our bodies; ideas that affect not only our physical, emotional, and mental well-being, but also the social environment around us.

For the past decade Sex Week has explored different methods of sharing information about sex and sexuality with the Yale community. Yale’s social climate is constantly evolving, and the 2012 Executive Board believes Sex Week should serve as a dynamic event that both reflects and facilitates the ongoing discourse on campus.

Recent events at Yale have stirred up reactions in both the student body and the outside media. Yale has been made-- and has made itself-- into an object of inquiry for people trying to understand sexual cultures on college campuses. Many people have expressed concern about sex at Yale, so it is now more important than ever to engage in conversations about these issues in an honest, critical, and respectful manner.

This year, Sex Week is collaborating with a wide variety of Yale student organizations and seeking constructive input from faculty and students alike. We want to create a communicative network of individuals and organizations on campus, in order to provide the most effective educational resources for Yale students on sexuality, intimacy, and relationships.

As Directors of Sex Week 2012, we care deeply about these issues. Like any educational program, Sex Week is not a neutral event; we are not without individual assumptions or opinions. But our strongest conviction is that an open and multifarious dialogue about sexuality is essential to the safety and well-being of our peers.