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You may have seen their signature rainbow dildo, but what do you know about the Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators?

ISABELLE BUTERA: Content warning: This podcast covers topics related to sex and sexual assault.

ISABELLE BUTERA: If you’ve ever walked into Norris University Center on a Friday afternoon, you may have passed a table handing out birth control and pamphlets about consent. That would be SHAPE, or Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators, a student-led subgroup of the Center for Awareness and Response, or CARE. SHAPE aims to promote a healthy and safe campus culture surrounding sexuality and consent through presentations, training and events. Last week, I stopped at their table to take a closer look.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Can you tell me like what you have like on the table?

HARRIET FARDON: Yes. We have non-latex condoms, we have lube, we have a flavor of condoms and dental dams, latex condoms, internal condoms and tampons and pads, and also our rainbow dildo, which is our signature, SHAPE signature.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Yeah! Why the rainbow dildo?

HARRIET FARDON: I feel like a good way of signaling in like a silly way that we’re queer and friendly.

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ISABELLE BUTERA: From the Daily Northwestern, I’m Isabelle Butera. This is NU Declassified, a podcast about how Wildcats survive and thrive at Northwestern.

ISABELLE BUTERA: And that was Weinberg senior Harriet Fardon, a general member of the G-Spot Committee of SHAPE, which runs tables in Norris and works to reach the larger Northwestern student body.

DAVID BOTANA: Northwestern definitely has significant issues with respect to sexual assault and Title IX. So there’s a definite need for SHAPE, which provides peer educators to support students directly.

ISABELLE BUTERA: That’s McCormick junior and G-Spot co-Chair David Botana. He says SHAPE aims to provide students with alternative support systems to the Office of Equity and University Police.

DAVID BOTANA: SHAPE, particularly, fills that role on campus as being the friend that you can go to to ask for help.

ISABELLE BUTERA: In addition to G-Spot, SHAPE hosts events for Northwestern students like bringing in guest speakers, or, most recently, hosting a sex toy fair to raise money for the Chicago Abortion Fund. Additionally, SHAPE gives presentations to other student organizations about supporting survivors, healthy relationships and sexual pleasure.

ISABELLE BUTERA: McCormick senior and Presentations Chair Genevieve Kosciolek has been having discussions about sex and sexuality before even starting with SHAPE. When she was in high school, she started giving “underground” advice to other students in her school to fill in the gaps of their sex education.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOEK: I was just one of the first people in my grade to like start having sex, and there was a little bit of a period of slut shaming.

ISABELLE BUTERA: But when other students became interested in exploring their own sexualities, they came to Kosciolek because they knew she wouldn’t shame them as others might.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOEK: I had mainly like just friends of mine be like, ‘Can we talk?’ But I remember one conversation with a friend being like, ‘How do I figure out what my kinks are?’ and I was like, ‘I’m gonna make you a list, and just go through and think about each one.’

ISABELLE BUTERA: Kosciolek says from club sports to activism groups, all kinds of student organizations have requested presentations from SHAPE.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOEK: There’s a big element of like wanting to kind of set a tone and a standard for like this is not just like behaviors we expect. But we’re setting the tone that we are thinking about keeping our members safe and supporting survivors of anything.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Kosciolek and other members of the presentations committee meet with leadership from student organizations to tailor their presentations to meet the needs of the club. Kosciolek says she’s moving toward more discussion-based models of presentation to encourage dialogue with other peers.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOLEK: People share their own experiences and it’s been really cool, and it’s given me a lot of hope and excitement about the Northwestern community.

ISABELLE BUTERA: For instance, Kosciolek says she’s recently started using an icebeaker about what brings them non-sexual forms of pleasure. She says this allows students to expand their idea about what pleasure encompasses while making them comfortable with opening up.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Even though she’s been comfortable having these conversations for a long time, Kosciolek still worries while giving presentations about nuanced topics like sexual violence and the intersectionality of sex because there aren’t clear answers for the questions that come up.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOLEK: Even if I don’t have the answers, or I’m not gonna say the perfect thing, what’s more important to me is just like having people starting to talk about and think about things.

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ISABELLE BUTERA: Each fall, new students apply to SHAPE. Applicants write several essays and undergo an interview with current members to determine how they can best fit into the organization.

ISABELLE BUTERA: After they are accepted, new members must undergo 40 hours of training during Winter Quarter. In recent years, most of the training occurred over Zoom due to COVID-19 concerns and guest speaker accommodations.

DAVID BOTANA: I was really nervous about it, because I think everyone’s been to a horrible Zoom conference before. That’s just boring and pulling teeth. But SHAPE’s training was so much fun. It’s so engaging. We had these really fabulous speakers come in to talk to us.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Botana said he was impressed by the range of speakers during his training sequence. His cohort heard from gynecologists, advocates on domestic violence, legal experts and even a neurobiologist who explained how parts of the brain react to trauma.

ISABELLE BUTERA: SHAPE also aims to create a network of support for survivors of sexual violence. Initial trainings help members learn the language and tone to discuss issues relating to sexual assault, Kosciolek said.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Kosciolek also said it’s crucial to create an environment in which individuals don’t need to come forward with their experiences of sexual assault to still feel supported and believed.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOLEK: Also, I just really have enjoyed in the training sequence and have tried to continue in presentations, like just a tone of compassion and kind of the bigger idea being about creating these compassionate communities where we care about each other.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Weinberg sophomore and Communications Chair Anna Patten joined SHAPE last year. As a freshman at the time, she was seeking a community to talk openly about the intricacies of sex and sexuality.

ANNA PATTEN: It’s kind of hard to know how to start those conversations with people you’ve known for like, three weeks.

ISABELLE BUTERA: To Patten, conversations about sex that expand beyond the limited information most people receive in high school sex education are crucial on a college campus.

ANNA PATTEN: Speaking for myself and the other people who I know, like none of us are trying to have kids right now, like that’s obviously not the purpose of the sex that we are having or talking about. So, I feel like I just wish pleasure was centered more, and I feel like we tried to do that in SHAPE.

ISABELLE BUTERA: Through her time at SHAPE, Patten says she’s become more comfortable talking about sex and healthy relationships.

ANNA PATTEN: I feel like I’ve been able to spark those conversations in personal relationships, and just like with friends. Like now, people just ask me about sex toys, like that’s so fun. That was definitely not a level that we’ve been at until recently.

ISABELLE BUTERA: That’s super cool, everyone needs a friend like that!

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ISABELLE BUTERA: Kosciolek says the discussions she has while working with SHAPE influence her own sex life.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOLEK: A lot of my sex positivity when I was younger was kind of out of rebellion, more so where I was like, ‘I want to have so much sex, just because my mom says I can’t.’

ISABELLE BUTERA: But now that she is surrounded by other students working to create a network of support and openness, Kosciolek says she thinks about her sexuality differently.

GENEVIEVE KOSCIOLEK: While I was younger, I felt very like I have to make decisions about what my relationship with sex is, what my sexuality is, what my gender identity is. And now like getting to hear about so many different nuances and thinking about all these different things, it’s made me feel so much more comfortable with not having answers and just continuing to always be learning more.

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ISABELLE BUTERA: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Isabelle Butera. Thanks for listening to another episode of NU Declassified. The audio editor of The Daily Northwestern is Erica Schmitt, the digital managing editors are Joanne Haner and Olatunji Osho-Williams and the editor in chief is Alex Perry. Make sure to subscribe to The Daily Northwestern’s podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @isabelle_butera

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