Sex blogger Sinclair Sexsmith hosted a workshop for NU’s Rainbow Alliance, addressing issues such as
sexuality and gender issues at Kresge Hall on Tuesday night. Hallie Liang/The Daily Northwestern
A sex blogger urged Northwestern students to keep their sex lives in the gutter on Tuesday night.
As part of its annual spring programming, Rainbow Alliance brought sex blogger Sinclair Sexsmith to host an interactive workshop in Kresge Hall, aimed at deconstructing gender labels, sex and sexuality. About 30 students attended the two-hour workshop, called “F*cking with Gender,” where Sexsmith spoke about exploring his own gender and sexuality through labels – and starting a blog about it.
“The reason most of us get involved with gender studies is because of our own experiences with gender and our own experiences with sexuality,” Sexsmith said. “This stuff is so super personal – people are really wanting to improve those experiences and wanting their gender to hurt them a whole lot less.”
The workshop focused on Sexsmith’s discussion of his own experiences in gender and sexuality, moving from label to label as he began to qualify himself as not just “queer” but as “sugarbutch.” Though Sexsmith is biologically female, he identifies as a male. From there, he adopted more than 40 labels, from feminist to chivalrous to gentleman. His blog, the Sugarbutch Chronicles, was recently named the top sex blog of 2008, he said.
But Sexsmith emphasized that his own experience would not necessarily be indicative of someone else’s.
“I wish I could be like, ‘This is how it is, this is how it’s going to be,'” he said. “But I think it’s important to unpack that notion of desire and of what that means.”
Jessica Kaiser, Rainbow Alliance’s princess of vibe, said the workshop was geared toward empowering students to explore “language’s constructive and destructive role in gender and sexuality.”
“What we wanted to look at was not so much the dirty sex part, but how sexual identity and gender identity intersect,” the Weinberg senior said. “We wanted students to walk away from this feeling empowered both about their sexuality and about gender.”
But for many, Kaiser said sexuality and gender aren’t so easy to pick apart.
“For those moments – or all the time for some people – where we’re feeling like we’re not fitting into that neat little box of what makes a man or a woman,” she said. “This workshop will really leave people feeling like those moments are beautiful and important.”
Lyzanne Trevino, Rainbow Alliance’s the campus outreach chairwoman, said she thought the workshop covered “topics that often go neglected.”
“It was refreshing to hear a perspective on gender and sexuality that had a queer spin on it,” the Weinberg junior said. “It was interesting in that it kind of opens a dialogue about it, so that friends can talk, and partners can talk.”
