At Vulvapalooza, the annual sex fair sponsored by the Women's Center, students can decorate vagina cookies and stock up on free condoms packaged in wrappers that say "I love vaginas" in different languages.
This sexual candidness is a huge change from the climate of the early '60s at the University. "Anyone who talked openly about sexual issues was immediately branded as a fast and loose woman," said Linda Dixon (LA '63), current trustees secretary.
Sexuality on campus, from reproductive rights to homosexuality, has undergone a drastic transition over the last forty years.
When Dixon was an undergrad, students had a 10 p.m. curfew on weekdays and a midnight curfew on weekends. "Once I was 15 minutes late," Dixon said. "I had to appear before the headmistress and the judiciary committee of the dorm and explain myself. Things were strict."
"Reproductive rights were not even topics of conversation," she added. "Every now and then a classmate might get pregnant, but she would very quietly disappear."
The sexual revolution of the mid-'60s brought about major changes in issues surrounding heterosexual sex at Tufts. Karen Schwartz (LA '65) remembers a much more open campus than does Dixon. "The pill was seen by women as a sign of being free and liberated," she said.
At the time, Schwartz recalls, it was easier for women to admit that they were no longer virgins. "There wasn't as much awareness of STDs and there wasn't HIV," she said. "People didn't feel the constraints that they feel now."
Though Dixon acknowledges that her generation was sheltered, she still wonders if her classmates would switch places with today's undergrads. Dixon debated about the pros and cons of "sexual liberation" with fellow alumni at her 40th reunion last year.
"We thought maybe we were actually better off to have grown up and gone to school in simpler times when we had more rules, because today students are faced with so much pressure, so much freedom, and so many choices," Dixon said. With all that freedom, students "can maybe make some bad decisions and they can have very bad consequences - it's tough being 20 today," she said.
For Junior Judy Neufeld, Tufts Voices for Choice (VOX) president, the way to combat those bad decisions is through education, not naivet?©. "VOX is definitely working on making the atmosphere at Tufts open to sex-related issues because the more students talk about and discuss contraceptive options and sexuality issues, the more sexually healthy this campus will be," she said.
VOX, a new organization on campus, is an affiliate group of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. Neufeld said the general response to Tufts VOX has been overwhelmingly positive. "As a new group, we have grown exponentially from the day we were recognized as a new student group and have planned many successful programs and awareness campaigns this past year," she said.
Not all students, however, are comfortable with the presence of VOX on campus. When VOX organized the "Sex on the Hill" fair, which took place on Feb. 11 in the campus center, Tufts Republicans voiced concern about certain facets of it, such as the taste-testing of lubricants and life-size drawings of the human body on which students marked where they like to be rubbed, touched, licked, or kissed.
Following the event, Tufts Republicans sent out a press release to local news affiliates. In the release, senior Rachel Hoff, Tufts Republicans Women's Caucus Chair, said, "The University should not be promoting such a degraded view of sexuality."
How open and accepting the campus should be is still clearly a matter of debate. Neufeld believes that more openness would only help the campus. "There are too many students who do not know where to get contraceptives or emergency contraception, or who think that not talking to their partners about STDs is normal," she said. "We need to change the atmosphere so that students are comfortable talking to their partners, talking to their peers, talking to RAs, or talking to Health Services staff about sexuality and sexual health."
Compared to issues around reproductive rights, the shift in the atmosphere surrounding homosexuality is a much more recent phenomenon. "I don't think we even knew there were women homosexuals back then," Dixon said. "The term gay had not even been coined yet. Anyone who was homosexual was not overt about it. It was not something people felt comfortable talking about."
Even in the early eighties the atmosphere was not very accepting of homosexuality, according to some. "I do not remember there being incidents of harassment or intolerance, yet I also do not remember there being a sense of openness and acceptance," said Heidi Given (LA '85).
"There was an LGB [lesbian, gay, bisexual] club, but no 'T,'[transgendered] and certainly no center," Given said. "My sense is that many LGBT students at the time were silent about their sexuality."
English Professor Jonathan Strong remembers that the atmosphere was just beginning to change in 1989 when he came to the University. "There was a student advisor to the gay community and a student club, but it was not University-sponsored," he said.
"[Then-President] Jean Mayer was rather old-fashioned. When President DiBiaggio came, the climate changed," Strong said. Under DiBiaggio, the resource center was established and the nondiscrimination policy was changed to include sexual orientation.
Strong feels that a shift in American culture was the major catalyst for change. "The student body has become relatively accustomed to homosexuality," he said. "Students now have grown up with it."
Junior Laura Janowitch, a member of Tufts Transgender, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Collective (TLGBC), agrees with Strong. "I think with the sudden increase in queer media attention and political action, Tufts students, like the rest of the world, are more open in their discussion about queer issues."
"I transferred here from UMass Amherst, and in comparison to there, I feel that the majority of the Tufts population, though not all, are fairly sensitive to the queer community," Janowitch said.
Many feel the current climate could still use improvements. "Of course, there is a constant need to educate students on LGBT issues, and most reported bias incidents at Tufts are related to sexual orientation, but each year I talk to incoming first-years who decided to attend Tufts in part because it has a queer-friendly reputation," said Dona Yarbrough, director of the LGBT Center.
"One of the new changes I hope to see on the horizon involves expanding the nondiscrimination policy to include 'gender identity and expression,'" Yarbrough said. She said that the addition would protect transgender students from discrimination.
Overall, most believe the current climate to be quite positive. "This year's Homecoming king and queen would not have happened with the same spirit in the past," said Strong, referring to the crowning of a female king, senior Stacy Ulrich, and a male queen, senior Tyler Duckworth. "Socially positive people establish the right atmosphere."
