“I've been things and seen places.”
~Mae West
"When's the last time you got some mouth action on your genitals?" is the kind of question one might ask a friend after a few rounds at the local alcoholery. "Lay any good pipe recently?" is the kind posed to plumbers or by sex-starved boys/men** to one another (but only when there's no women around). Additionally, these types of queries would probably be acceptable at higher learning institutions but they'd be cleverly disguised under topics such as "sexual studies", "humanities", "social science" or some such similar nonsense.
Asking invasive, personal questions about students' sex lives is normally reserved for the students to ask one another when they wake up next to each other the morning after a wild evening. Even then it's always pretty tame with queries like "What's your name again?" or "Did we use a condom?" or "Do you have any STDs I should know about?"*** Consequently, when posed similar questions during a "
Title IX" related
"mandatory training" about drinking and sexual habits, it really shouldn't razzle any one's dazzles enough to kick a fuss,
and yet it does.
Clemson University, with an unusual amount of government compliance gusto, decided to take an interesting approach to the federal government's enforcement of the "
Campus SaVE" act recently signed into law in 2013. Basically, it's the government's attempts to withhold (or threaten to withhold) federal funding unless the institutions that receive the funding can provide proof that they're compliant with specific goals to deter sexual violence (date rape, regular rape, unwanted touching, stalking, poking, etc) by reporting information about instances of such crimes and statistics about the same.****
The students, upon receiving word they'd have to go through "title IX training," were directed to take a quiz with particularly probing questions about their "outside of class" behavior. The questions themselves were not un-answerable, as such, they were merely inappropriate. And yet that's still not the right way to describe the situation: the college wants knowledge about how the students behave when off-campus most likely with the intention of producing a better "safety program" to prevent more sexual violence happening on-campus. There are few that could argue against the righteousness of the cause, however it is the execution that gives offense. The problem with the quiz is that it isn't anonymous enough. Students that have a problem divulging all of their innermost perversions in a quiz administered by a third party vendor at the request of the college wouldn't think twice about sharing the same information in the right context, which in this instance would contain more anonymity.
What started as a well-intentioned effort to bring in more federal funding and increase the safety of the campus against perverts and rapists ended up as a pretty intimate invasion of the personal lives of the people the whole ordeal was trying to protect in the first place. None of this matters, at the end of the day, after all it's just academia and they don't have anything better to do with their time. However, if this playful bantering teaches anything, it ought to be that there is a proper time and venue for asking illicit information about sexual behaviors. That time is any time of the day or night and that place is the internet. Coat your perversions with a liberal dose of anonymity and use a picture with your post and you can get more information about personal perversions than you can shake a dick at.*****
*pedagoguery
n. A school or school-house.
n. The system of pedagogy; the office of a pedagogue.
n. A petty instructiveness; a dogmatic and narrow-minded method of dealing with things. -- (just in case)
**Men/Boys are synonymous terms when women aren't around because everything quickly devolves to tom-foolery and lively games of grab-ass.
***Everyone knows that if you pull out (coitus interruptus) then you can't get STDs or babies. Also, you can practice your aim.
****There were alcohol/drinking/recreational drug use questions as well and what alcohol or drug consumption habits have to do with this, I have no idea because alcohol is known to have no effect on behaviors, especially when it comes to questionable sexual decisions.