This probably comes as a surprise. Porn seems like something I would be against. But honestly, I am for porn. I even think that in many ways, it is a good idea. There are just a couple of flaws with the system. If those cleared up, I would advocate pornography.

Our society is too afraid of sex. Sex is a taboo subject with mixed messages. It is bad until you are married. If you are a woman you are not supposed to like it or have it very often. If you are a man you are supposed to want it every second of every day with every woman you ever see. If we remember that people have always had sex, and therefore it is normal and perfectly OK to enjoy.

The way we view sex workers is skewed. The men are studs and the women are whores. Consumers can have 200 hours of downloaded porn, but the women in Playboy and pornography are total sluts who have compromised their image and can never work in a mainstream career.
The people who believe this are the same people who insist that they are not using or degrading women through pornography. The man paying a stripper to rub her breasts in his face says that he is better than her, but that he is not exploiting her?

You cannot insist that you do not use or exploit a group of people, but then not allow them the same social, political and career freedoms that you have yourself.

If you can watch porn and not be tainted by the stigma of public sex, then the sex workers deserve the same freedom and respect. It is all or nothing. Anything less is dishonest and exploitative.

I think all of us played house, made up our own mystery games, or had Power Ranger or Ninja Turtle adventures in the backyard. People love to be creative, and as children we exercised our creativity to the maximum.

Most of us carry that creativity with us into our future careers. Teachers, engineers, business people and doctors all have elements of creativity in their work.

Celebrate and support both creativity and UW-P students by attending the Creative Writing Festival from 4:30-7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 5 in the University South Room of the Pioneer Student Center. The humanities department’s Creative Writing Contest winners will read their pieces after a presentation by visiting poet James Pollock. Refreshments will be provided.

Then, go another step and take a look at the various creative writing courses offered by UW-P’s English programs. Creative writing classes are not just for English majors. I have been in creative writing seminars where some of the best writers are not affiliated with the English department at all. The best student fiction writer I have ever met was, in fact, a criminal justice major.

Creativity strengthens us for any career into which we may go after college. Writing is a means of communication and expressing yourself.

Writing is for everyone, and creativity is for everyone. No matter what your job, you will be required to write to communicate. Whether or not you write well may determine whether or not you hang on to your job. And learning to add a bit of spice and creativity to your work is an excellent skill. A hint of personality can separate you from the others in your field. Apart from that, creative writing is a great skill to have just for yourself. Even something as simple as keeping a journal can be a very therapeutic process. You do not have to plan on being the next Mark Twain to benefit from developing your creative skills.

So attend the Creative Writing Festival on Wednesday, May 5, and consider taking a course in creative writing. Trust me, you will be doing yourself a favor.

LGBT issues are important and relevant every day for everyone. Everyone is different in some way. Everyone wants respect. Some people get respect more easily than others based on privileges (white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, class privilege, etc.), but in the end we all have some social vulnerability. If you want people to understand and respect your differences, then you need to understand and respect theirs.

It is OK to feel uncomfortable about LGBT issues. It does not make you a bad person. We are all a little uncomfortable with things we are not used to or do not know much about. It only matters how you treat people; there is no justifiable reason for hurting someone based on their sexuality.

Religion is a main reason that people outcast persons who identify. Homosexuality may be against your idea of God, but not necessarily against another person’s idea of God. One person’s religious beliefs do not trump another’s human rights. If someone’s behavior is not hurting you, butt out. It is none of your business, and your interference is neither welcome nor productive. People are not going to magically turn heterosexual just because someone tells them that “God hates gays.” And I do not see how bullying someone for being who they are is going to make Jesus proud.

Besides, I would bet that a lot of people who denounce homosexuality in the name of religion have sex outside of wedlock. Deciding that God is OK with your sin but not OK with someone else’s is pretty presumptuous. Let us leave the decision-making and judgment-passing to God, and quit taking so many omnipotent being duties upon ourselves.

LGBT couples might make you uncomfortable. You might say, “I am fine with it, but I just do not want to have to look at it.”

At least once a day walking across campus in warm weather, I see some woman with shorts so tiny that her butt-cheeks are flapping out the bottom leaning against her boyfriend and sucking face like they are about to part for a decade. That is not something I particularly want to witness, but I cannot prohibit them from doing it. Unless people start having sex in the street, there is not much you can do about public displays of affection that may make you uncomfortable. Getting worked up over it is a waste of time.

And of course, there is the classic, “He/she was hitting on me!”

There are so many things to say about this. Firstly, was he/she really hitting on you? Was he/she even a person who identifies? A man wearing tight pants who says “hi” when he sits down at the bar next to you is not automatically gay, nor is he automatically hitting on you. So do not assume. And even if you do notice that someone is attracted to those of the same sex, that does not mean that they are hitting on you. Being gay does not make a person promiscuous, any more than being straight makes a person promiscuous.

And what if someone is hitting on you? Say someone of the same sex sits down next to you in a bar and is obviously coming on to you. Sure, you might feel uncomfortable or even a little threatened, but how is that different from being in the same situation with a member of the opposite sex? You just handle it the way you would with anyone else: You say, “I am not interested” and turn away. If they persist, you talk to a bartender about feeling harassed.

Feeling uncomfortable about LGBT issues is not a crime, nor is it anything to be ashamed of. You only have to think about how you handle those feelings of confusion or discomfort. Ask questions, be respectful and try to be understanding. Even if you cannot agree, at least be polite and respect others’ rights to live their lives the way they see fit. Do not respond with discrimination, mocking or violence. We are all better than that.

It probably sounds like something I made up to shock you, but unfortunately it is true. Just when I thought our happily misogynistic culture could not get any worse, it did. And this time, I think we have truly hit rock bottom.

According to an article on salon.com, “RapeLay” is a computer game that “allows one to simulate the experience of boarding a train, groping a schoolgirl, and subsequently raping her, her mother, and her sister, hearing them utter dialogue along the lines of ‘I w-w-want to die,’ and gradually converting them into compliant women who enjoy sex with you, while taking post-rape pictures of them and making them get abortions so that you do not die. (The moral of this story would seem to be that rape is fun and games, but fatherhood is a killer).”

Some people might say, lighten up! It is just a game. No one does this, it is just a fantasy.

Well, that is incorrect. According to cdc.gov, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Web site, one out of six women experience sexual or attempted sexual assault each year, and approximately 25 percent of college women experience sexual or attempted sexual assault. Plus, many more assaults go unreported. So no, it is not just a fantasy. It is a reality for many women.

But I will play along for a moment. Let us say that nobody is ever raped, that things like this are all just fantasy. There simply has to be something extremely wrong with someone whose fantasy is raping underage girls in front of their families, digitally capturing the event, turning them into sex slaves and then aborting their children. I cannot say that I would want to be alone in a room for five minutes with anyone who enjoys imagining sexually assaulting a woman, then taking pictures of it, then enslaving her, and then ripping her unborn child from her womb against her will, or who thinks such events are joke-worthy.

Any person who would consider this a good time or a joke must have some serious issues.

But you know the most frustrating aspect of this entire video game? None of us—and by us I mean the members of society who are not sick and crazy—can do anything about it. It does not really break any laws and is uncontrollable by others. It cannot be banned. Nor do I think it should be banned. Forbidding something only makes it more desirable, and I certainly do not want to promote this disgusting display of misogyny, mutilation and undeserved power and control to the status of desirable.

So there is nothing we can do. But to my fellow students, I do have to say: If you see “RapeLay” on your boyfriend, roommate or buddy’s computer, run. Fantasies that are this sick and twisted probably indicate a personality with which you do not want to associate.

Most of us would say no, I hope, but some say yes. According to an article on salon.com, Alex Knepper, a 20-year-old columnist for American University’s student newspaper, wrote that “[a]ny woman who heads to [a fraternity] party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK?”

I do not think Knepper is advocating rape, but I do think he is misinformed.

Knepper sees rape as a black-and-white situation. Rape does not come in such black-and-white situations. Date rape is rape committed by someone the victim knows, possibly someone she trusted. The somewhat-misleading name lends to all sorts of gray areas, many of which Knepper seems incapable of distinguishing. Should women be able to change their mind the next morning and say they were raped? Of course not. That’s not what people are talking about when they use the term “date rape.” Date rape is when a woman says no but is ignored, or when she is drugged, or when she is so intoxicated that she is simply taken advantage of when unconscious.

To Knepper, non-consent is the scary stranger who attacks a woman on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. Consent is any other sexual activity in her life. Knepper sees going into a room with someone at a frat house as a contract that sex will occur. He thinks of all these situations turning into drunken consensual sex with regret the next day, and does not allow for any other scenario. He thinks that date rape is simply women changing their minds the next day, instead of realizing that quite a lot of women change their minds or say “oh hey, this isn’t what I was going for when I came in here with you,” during the actual moment. Then the women pushed into a “too late now, you’re having sex with me whether you like it or not” situation, and that is rape. While being suddenly turned down for sex may be unexpected or disappointing, it is not grounds for raping someone.

Going into someone’s room to listen to them play guitar for half an hour does not come with an automatic promise of sex afterward. Knepper needs to understand that a woman can be making out with the man in his room, and then stand up and say, “I’m really drunk, and I don’t feel comfortable with going too far. I’d like to go home now.” It does not make her a tease or a whore. Knepper does not seem to understand that a woman is the only owner of her body. She makes the decisions as to what happens to it. If she wants to get up and go home, she has every right to get up and go home, without being forced to have sex first. It is not because she thinks that men are born eunuchs, it is because she expects men to act like adults and respect the rights and boundaries of other people.

Women would do well to exercise caution in these situations, of course. Going into a room alone with a drunken frat man is not a particularly fantastic or safe idea. But rape is never the victim’s fault; it is always the offender’s fault. If a woman is raped, it is not her fault because she didn’t protect herself well enough against assailants. It is because someone else thought that their desire to have sex was more important than a woman’s right to decide when and with whom she would like to have sex.

Victim-blaming is not right. It complicates the entire issue of rape, it subjects the victims to even more emotional suffering and complications and it discourages other women from coming forward. If someone says, “No, I do not want to have sex,” then that is the end of the story. Any force or manipulation used to overpower the victim does not make it OK. There is never any justification for raping someone. “No” does not mean “yes,” “maybe,” or “if you can make me.” It means “no,” plain and simple. It is time people like Knepper figured that out.