Harvard's 'Sex Week' Is 'Boring,' Says Christian Campus Outreach Group
A Christian outreach director took an unusual approach in discussing Harvard University's "Sex Week," a semi-annual celebration and information week. He said it makes sex boring.
"They try to be titillating. Sex weeks actually make sex boring – it focuses on the mechanics, sex toys and how to lose your virginity," Greg Jao, national field director for the Christian campus outreach group Intervarsity, told The Christian Post in an interview on Friday.
"Sex is something God-given, beautiful, transcendent, and intimacy-creating," Jao explained. Rather than attack the wrongful use of sex outside of marriage, he pointed to the great value of sex in a Christian context. He also told CP that the Harvard chapter of Intervarsity has started a Bible study series focused on "true intimacy" and the Song of Songs.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The study focuses on what the Bible teaches about sex – "a gift from God, an illustration of the intimacy and trust that God has for the church," Jao explained. This approach, he argued, will prove more compelling, interesting and inviting to a world hungry for advice about relationships.
"We actually look at Sex Week as a week-long cry from the college community," Jao argued. "People are begging, it seems, to find how to develop authentic relationship intimacy." Sex Week cannot meet that need, because it only focuses on the mechanics – the how, when, where and with whom – instead of the why, the deep meaning behind this physical expression of love.
Jao compared Sex Week to porn – people get habituated to it and bored of it. So "every year they try to make it more titillating, more extreme, in order to generate an ever more modest response."
Instead of attacking sex by quoting Paul, as many Christians do, the Harvard group tries to put sex front and center, engaging in imagination and poetry to discuss the issue. "The Song of Songs engages the culture in the same way that popular music, love stories and romance engage the culture," he explained.
Harvard students will meet believers infused with the Song of Songs – what Jao called "joy, delight, mystery and discovery."
Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute at Concerned Women for America, agrees with Jao, and told CP, "In contrast to all the crass crudity of the 'sex week' view of sex, the Christian view is so much more beautiful, intriguing and romantic."
Crouse believes that young people, the Millennial generation, are moving away from the Sex Week view of sex.
"There is a hint of desperation in these events," Crouse noted. "Sponsors seem frantic, even desperate, in their promotion of a risqué lifestyle." Young men and women, hurt by over-indulgence in sex, are moving away from the "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle.
Those who listen to Sex Week "wake up from drunken, meaningless sex feeling repulsed by an experience that leaves them unsatisfied, unfulfilled and sick to their stomachs," Crouse said. In the Christian view, sex isn't meant to be like that, and Millennials know that, she explained.
"Young men and women today stil want romance; they want the knight in shining armor, the beautiful princess and all the courtship rituals that form memories that feed love through long marriages with the love of their life."
"Counselors are reporting that far too many of today's young married couples are not having sex; they speculate that all the negative sexual experiences before marriage have left them too damaged to maintain a normal sexual relationship," the scholar reported. She mentioned the "Love and Fidelity" movement and books like Sex and God at Yale as the way Millennials prefer.
"Students are wising up and they don't want to mess it up in the ways that they have seen older generations destroy theirs," Crouse said.
