By: ANNIE WILCOX
FEATURES EDITOR
We have all been in this situation. You are hooking up with a guy or girl. Things are starting to get hot and heavy. You reach into your bedside table and rummage your hand around trying to find a condom and there aren’t any left. You hesitate for a second, both gaging each other’s reaction before (hopefully) recognizing how bad the idea of condomless sex is. It’s an instant mood killer.
We are lucky at St. Lawrence because condoms are free for students. The Dub and the Health Center are two main organizations that provide free condoms to students. I decided to go straight to the source to see just how much condom-clad lovin’ St. Lawrence students are getting and answer the essential question ‘why does St. Lawrence order Lifestyles?’
New York State offers the NYS Condom Program which provides free condoms to non-profit organizations like universities. Barb Bacon from the Health Center is in charge of ordering them, all 18,000. Yes. 18,000 condoms are shipped and handed out through the Health Center every year. The program offers specific brands which the Heath Center has no control over, however, Barb said that if enough students were interested in a specific brand or type, she would try and supply them.
The Dub girls are large advocates for sex positivity on campus and provide various types of Trojans in the vestibule of their house. They obtain boxes of 500 from the Great American Condom campaign. This year, five of the girls got a grant which supplied the Dub with a total of 2,500 condoms, 1,500 of which have been used thus far. Olivia Hatch ’15 said that they focus on this particular project because they “want to advocate for sex positivity.” She continued by saying that “providing condoms increases safe sex and spreads positive and healthy messages.” Unlike the Health Center, the Dub condoms are available for your consensual weekend hookups.
We have been told one thousand times in one thousand different ways to always use a condom. “No glove, no love” has been a mantra for our generation because as any good Millennial knows, according to Coach Carr of Mean Girls, “if you do touch each other [without a condom], you will get chlamydia and die.” But regardless of the constant reminder about the risks of pregnancy and STIs, the National College Health Assessment Survey found that only 54% of college students consistently use condoms during intercourse. Though, thanks to the resources available on campus, there is no excuse for unsafe sex at SLU. Happy hookups!