Columbia Sex Column Hits Newstands

Carrie Bradshaw may be on her way off the airwaves this week, but Columbia students can now get their regular fix of sex advice without a cable hook-up.

Columbia’s student newspaper, the Spectator, debuted Monday “One Night ’Stend”—a sex and dating column written by two pseudonymous sophomores that intends to answer students’ queries about the mechanics of relationships, hook-ups and other travails of the amorous undergraduate.

The first edition of this bi-weekly column pulled no punches with its frank talk about sex. Headlined, “Sucking Off, Then Sucking Face,” the piece discusses the etiquette of kissing after oral sex, and contains five separate euphemisms for semen.

“There’s been a lot of response. A lot of people saying this is trash, it shouldn’t be in [the Spectator],” said Rachael Scarborough King, editorial page editor, “and some people are saying this is what we’ve needed all along.”

“[Sex] has as much of a place on the opinion page as a column about Howard Dean,” King said.

The column “One Night ’Stend” follows a question-and-answer format, and King said that “mostly made-up questions” would be used.

The identities of the column’s two authors remain a mystery—the winning applicants insisted on anonymity, writing under the noms de plume of Scott McBain and Veronica Claremont.

“We would really prefer them to use their real names,” King said. “We’ll continue to encourage them to do so.”

The Spectator mounted a campus-wide advertising campaign to woo potential sex columnists, netting 35 submissions, “way more than we expected,” King said.

The opinions staff and editor-in-chief then whittled down the field to five finalists, whose submissions were

posted on the Spectator’s website last Monday.

Readers voted for their favorite column in an online poll last week, and the paper published one submission each day on its opinions page. The Spectator then chose “One Night ’Stend” as its sex column.

“I’ve never seen so many people read the paper as they did that week,” said Carolyn Braff, a Columbia first-year and associate sports editor at the Spectator.

The Spectator now joins the ranks of the Yale Daily News and New York University’s (NYU) Washington Square News, both of which feature sex columnists who have received national attention.

Natalie Krinsky, a Yale senior, started her column, “Sex and the (Elm) City” in November 2001; she was profiled in the New York Times less than a year later.

“Sexpert Tells All,” in the Washington Square News, is written by Yvonne K. Fulbright, a graduate student in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.

“[The column] was born out of a sense that this was something students would be interested in,” said Lisa Fleisher, managing editor of the Washington Square News. “We thought it would be a fun addition to the paper.”

Last Thursday, the Daily Princetonian began running a similar relationships column in its weekend section, according to Editor-in-Chief Zach Goldfarb.

Both the Brown Daily Herald and the Cornell Daily Sun have abstained from running sex columns this semester.

“We’re aware that it’s kind of a trend. I’m not necessarily sure we’ll bring somebody in,” said Kaitlin Bell, editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth.

Calls to the Daily Pennsylvanian were not returned.

The Harvard Independent also runs a sex column by Katie Giblin ’06. In her last column published Feb. 12, she documented various sex positions including spooning and “Puritan’s Pride,” another name for the missionary position.

“If you look at a lot of sex columnists now,” Giblin said, “a lot of them are Ivy League and female.”

The Crimson does not currently have a sex column.

—Staff writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard.edu.