Letter to the Editor: How Sex-Positive Is SLU Really?
At the St. Lawrence University Health Center, they want to be sex-positive and encourage students to practice safe sex, but they are missing a piece of the puzzle: testing for STIs.
People should get tested regularly, but according to McCaela Prentice’s article in The Hill News, on April 25, 2019, only 51 percent of SLU students have been tested. Prentice does not address how recently or with what regularity that testing had been done.
Although the Health Center offers free health visits, the lab results charge depending on what people are testing for.
The lab fees for testing chlamydia, gardnerella, and trichomonas cost $15 each, syphilis costs $10, and HIV costs $25. Emergency contraceptives are $30 each.
Although $25-$40 may not seem like a lot for some, it can be. It is safe to assume that some people only test when they are experiencing symptoms, but if prices were lower people could get tested regularly.
For most people, the greatest obstacles to getting medical attention are time and money.
If 24 percent of the U.S. does not seek medical attention due to cost, a college student is no different.
Furthermore, when you ask to get tested, you are expected to go to the hospital in Canton. Planned Parenthood offers some of the same testing, but they also have lab fees and are 0.7 miles off campus.
Although Resident Life offers CAs bags full of condoms, only a couple of dental dams are available, and sometimes only one female condom can be found. STIs can be transmitted outside of penetrative sex, in particular through oral sex. With access to dental dams, those numbers might go down.
Yet when you ask for dental dams, the Health Center says they have given all of them to ResLife, but ResLife only has a maximum of two per condom bag.
Not only is this harmful regularly, but this is particularly damning for the queer community on campus.
Access to condoms can be found in the Health Center, the Safe Place, the Dub, and some bathrooms in the Student Center, but most of the machines are empty.
Why not have more condoms out in the open, and give CAs more condoms?
SLU can call itself sex-positive, but to practice safe and healthy sex, we should have more access to cheaper/free testing and a less hetero-normative view of sex in reference to condoms/dental dams. If and when that changes, maybe the stigma surrounding STIs and testing will lessen.
Until students have access to more affordable testing and more condom varieties can SLU truly profess itself as sex-positive.