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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

SPECS and Sex at Midd

<span class="photocreditinline">COURTESY PHOTO</span><br />SPECS plan to provide accessible and comprehensive sex education to students
COURTESY PHOTO
SPECS plan to provide accessible and comprehensive sex education to students

As far as community-building measures on campus go, SPECS is one of the most promising new initiatives to build a better Middlebury environment. SPECS, standing for “Sex Positive Education, College Style,” is a gender studies project turned student organization, turned special student organization dedicated to teaching Middlebury students about safe and positive sex. 

“It’s just a fun environment where we meet and talk about stuff that we care about,” SPECS Co-President Isabelle Lee ’20 said.   

 For many, sex-ed is something best left in the past, in uncomfortable middle school classrooms. 

“I have a lot of negative associations with my PE teacher whipping out a condom,” Lee said. But it isn’t always as simple as that. “We recognize that people come to Middlebury with varying levels of knowledge,” she said, explaining that can have an important impact on students. “My sex education was very abstinence-based and a lot of other people have experienced the same thing where you’re just taught to not have sex.” 

When Lee came to Middlebury, she found herself venturing into new territory as she started to go to campus parties. 

“There was just all this information that was thrown at me. I’m really a person who likes to understand things,” she said. “I remember hearing, from my friends the next morning after hookups sitting in Proctor and thinking things like, ‘Well that’s problematic,’ ‘That shouldn’t have happened,’ ‘Why did that happen?’ and not having answers to those questions really propelled me to apply [to join SPECS].”  

SPECS sponsors roughly two events every month, such as first-year dorm workshops. The club has several modules, both for first-years and upperclassmen, including “Pleasure and Communication,” “Reproductive Justice,” “STDs and STIs,” “Healthy Relationships” and “Sexual Identity/Gender Identity.” 

“We really try to cover everything you get in a sex-ed curriculum,” Lee said. 

In addition to teaching workshops, SPECS also sponsors other social events, including Atwater dinners and trivia nights.

“We try to tackle [sex-ed] in a way that makes it approachable and fun and not this big thing that people are really intimidated by,” said Lee.

SPECS’ current healthy load of regular activities is just the beginning. Originally Pippa Raffel ’18 and Natalie Cheung’s ’18 Reproductive Justice project for one of Professor Carly Thomsen’s classes last year, SPECS quickly became an informal group of students meeting to talk about the needs they saw on campus for better sex-ed curriculum. Within a year, these discussions turned into curriculum and an SGA-certified student organization. By the year’s end, they were already talking with Director of Health and Wellness Education Barbara McCall about how they could be even more effective in promoting positive sex on campus. 

This year, SPECS became a special student organization, much like MiddSafe, and partnered with the Office of Health and Wellness Education. This expanded SPECS’ budget, giving them easier access to the ResLife system and the school calendar, and allowing them to distribute t-shirts, promotional items and quality, safe sex supplies. 

SPECS is poised to make major improvements to the Middlebury sex culture. 

“Now is the time to talk about this,” said Lee. “So we are really passionate about opening that space [to talk about positive sex] and fostering it in a way that’s responsible.” 

SPECS can be reached through their Facebook page or website (go/specs). While they have already accepted the applications of 15 new members this year, Lee and her co-president Annie Tong ’19 are always interested in hearing from people who would like to get involved or make suggestions.


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