Ryan Breedyk & Noah Godwin
Staff Writer & Assistant Sports Editor
Valentine’s Day. Did Hallmark create it to cash in on desperate souls trying to make a good impression on loved ones? Or was it flower shops or candy stores? No, it definitely had to be jewelers. Or could it be women desperately hoping for at least one romantic night out of the year?
While we can’t say anything to dispel the profit-related myths, we can categorically deny that Valentine’s Day is not merely a product of women hoping for a romantic evening.
Contrary to popular belief, the truth is that women are not romantic — men are. Women are only interested in sex.
Valentine’s Day is about men competing against one another to prove which one of us is the most romantic. It has nothing to do with hooking up, we promise.
Nevertheless, we do have a lot of women hoping the candlelit dinner will end early so the date can seemingly end on her doorstep until the invite to come upstairs for a “cup of coffee.”
With Feb. 14 quickly approaching, now is the perfect time to address Pepperdine’s policy of not passing out condoms at the Health Center.
We propose that Pepperdine should distribute condoms in every student mailbox. Promote sports teams with condom giveaways. Protect sports teams with condom giveaways.
We urge Pepperdine officials to please do whatever it takes to keep Valentine’s Day safe for students. We all know that abstinence is the only guarantee to prevent STDs and pregnancy — but some students find that option, well, boring.
While students having premarital, extramarital or homosexual relations are almost always painted as irresponsible, isn’t it almost as irresponsible for the administration to ignore the health concerns of those students?
The school goes far enough to ostracize sexually active students by making sex outside of marriage against the rules.
We understand that there is a conundrum facing the admininstration: How can the school make sex against the rules and pass out condoms?
Sometimes the pragmatics involved in real-life situations can interfere with lofty idealistic goals, and we urge the school to lean on pragmatism in this case, mainly because those real lives are ours.
For those who prefer to follow the rules, the handbook seems to have left a little loophole in the sexual relationships section. Interestingly, the handbook does not cover having sexual relations without another person.
Don’t have sex, don’t have safe sex, but by all means, have coitus interuptus (sex by yourself), it seems to say. That’s one way to beat the system.
But students continue to have sex on this campus. They’re definitely also having sex off-campus. What is keeping the administration from doing every little thing possible to ensure the safety of its students?
Maybe they think passing out condoms will promote premarital sex. The school’s position on sex has nothing to do with whether somebody engages in sexual intercourse, but merely what price might be paid. People don’t always base their actions purely on the standards of the school, but the use of condoms would protect sexual partners if this prohibited act occurs.
I can assure you that the deans and their policies on sex are usually the furthest things from a student’s mind when he or she is about to choose whether to have sex.
That’s why the deans always sit on the first-base side at baseball games, because the last thing anybody wants to see while rounding third base is a dean.
But if school policy included the passing out of condoms, it could make a difference in whether the sex he or she is about to have is safe.
Maybe it’s a money issue. And no, we’re not talking about saving $6.99 on a pack of condoms. Spending money does not deter men from having sex.
Men often spend hundreds of dollars just to have the option, so don’t think for a minute that spending that extra seven bucks is a deterrent. Just look at the expensive dates and gifts.
The real issue is the rumors that certain donors would stop giving if the Health Center passed out condoms.
If that’s the case, it would be nice to know how much money we’re getting from those people, so students could know how much they’re getting for one of these Pepperdine-sponsored sexually transmitted diseases.
We could even follow the labeling tradition such as they do with buildings and honor those donors by naming the diseases after them.
Maybe the administration thinks that using a condom isn’t Christian.
If that’s the case, we’re glad they’re more privy to the standards of Christianity than much of the rest of the world still trying to figure out if refusing to pass out condoms in the age of life-altering STD’s meets even the lowest moral standards.
And maybe that’s at the heart of the problem. The people making these decisions are, for the most part, past their days of sexual promiscuity, in spite of the best attempts of Cialis commercials.
They have wives and husbands. Many of them have probably never engaged in sex with anyone other than their current spouses, and we applaud them for that.
But we live in a different time. If the people choosing not to distribute condoms on a college campus could live just one day as an 18- to 22-year-old in the age of HIV/AIDS, then maybe they wouldn’t be so irrational as to think that passing out condoms would promote anything but safety.
2-10-2005