Club Spotlight: PALS

The vice president of this popular club is unabashedly fond of its nickname “the sex club.”

“We really try to educate people about any aspect of sexual health,” Bianca Logiurato ’17, the vice president of Peers Assisting Learning About Sex club says.

Dickinsonians’ sexual education backgrounds can range from extensive, to insubstantial. PALS addresses this disparity during their Thursday 12 p.m. sessions in the HUB side room.

“We feel like what we are doing is really important because a lot of students, especially first years, come from high schools or families that don’t teach them about it [sex],” Emma Jane Beckert ’17, the president of PALS says, “and we think it is really important to have happy healthy sex lives.”

Birth control and other preventative methods are a main topic of their lessons. However, the topical scope of their sessions also covers pleasurable sex, cancer and disease identification and ethics of consensual sex.

Often games are played as means of educating students. “It’s more fun to do condom races with people with beer goggles on, for them to learn how to put a condom on correctly,” Bianca said “than just yell at them with a banana.”

October is National Breast and Testicular Cancer Awareness Month, a campaign created by several charities. In support of this initiative, throughout October on Thursdays at 12 p.m. the members of PALS are sitting in the HUB underground at a table with an array of condoms, “feel your boobies” stickers, informative pamphlets and imitation breasts and testes used for educating.

Logiurta joined PALS because she comes from a background which stigmatized sex, and she was not taught sex education. “Getting into this club really meant a lot because I wanted other people to be more educated than I was,” Bianca said.

Passersby stopped and stared at the silicon breasts and testes. Students were encouraged to see if they could feel the cancer in the models.  “You’ll feel it,” Bianca said, “It’ll feel like a marble.”

“I think it is becoming more and more common for people to be telling younger women to check their breasts,” Beckert said. “We thought it was this thing you couldn’t get until you were middle aged, but I think it is really important for women to be checking their bodies every year.”

PALS also does teach-ins in first-year dorms.

“Tonight we are doing a teach-in on the second floor of Baird, the RAs asked us to come in and provide resources for their first years,” President Beckert said, “and be a general source of knowledge to their first-years.”

The group also had a table on Britton Plaza on Oct. 10.  A couple of women approached the PALS table at the “pop on a condom” event in Britton plaza, where members of PALS were giving out condoms and popsicles. Logiurato received criticism from a woman who asked her “does your mother know that you do this?” and scolded “this is very embarrassing for you.”

Besides this incident, PALS has received little opposition to their cause. “There are some people that get a little freaked out by us yelling about condoms,” Logiurato said, “it is kind of an uncomfortable topic sometimes, but we really like to be open about it.”

Beginning Nov. 12, PALS will host a lecture series on pleasurable sex in the Rector Science Complex. PALS hosts the lecture series every semester. “We get a romance specialist with sex toys to talk.” Logiurato said, “and a Dickinson professor comes to lecture about some interesting aspects [of] sex.”