Students look for the truth about sex

EAST PEORIA — Somethings are shrouded in hazy clouds of societal misunderstanding, over-romanticized or over-saturated, in Western civilization. One such subject that is viewed by many as quite the taboo, is sexual intercourse, the very biological reason everyone on this planet exists right now, but some ICC students are trying to pull this topic from the shadows.

In fall 2014, ICC student Lane Hardy and a few other curious students here at ICC wanted to shed some light on the topic of human sexuality as a project for their Human Social Behavior (PHY 210) class with Mary Phelps Clayton. Hardy and classmate Alexander Vaughn started it together.

Hardy said that the reason he conducted this survey was to identify and explain common misconceptions about sex.

“For a long while, the issue of sexuality and the way our culture treats it had been on my mind,” Hardy said. “It was something I strived to educate people about in my day to day interactions. Alexander shared these concerns. It was natural then, that our topic of choice would follow suit.”

What made their project unique was that they surveyed scores of ICC students to separate social fact from fiction, and their anonymous paper-form survey was received well by most students.

“The anonymity of the respondents was very important to us,” Hardy said, “so we also made it clear that no names or other identifying information were to be put on surveys. This was important because of the very personal nature of the survey topic. In order for us to get honest answers, the respondent must feel that their identity is safe… We distributed over 250 surveys and received 153 back.”

Hardy pointed out, interestingly enough, that college students don’t actually have as much sex as society thinks.

“The majority of of responders thought that most of their peers were sexually active, the truth was quite different,” Hardy said. “People don’t engage in as much sexual activity as they let on, and the people who do engage in it frequently are engaging in it very frequently.”

Likewise, it is shown in Lane’s findings that many young adults in particular have a huge misconception as to what should be classified as “normal” in terms of their nether regions. Lane said that pornography could be the culprit here, as it’s a medium of sexuality that is easily accessed by young people and is often infamous for its use of unrealistically sexy actors, which in turn gives people unrealistic expectations for their own bodies.

Ultimately, Lane and his partners would like people to understand that sex is not something anybody should be ashamed of. It’s a normal behavior that everyone will experience at some point in their life, so anxiety should not be a necessity.