As a recent grad, I recall distinctly my extreme discomfort at having to endure the mandatory program “Sex on a Saturday Night.” I already knew well there would be predators and dangerous situations on campus if you put yourself into them, as I was an American high school student. Thus, I also knew well that “Sex on a Saturday Night” was a lifestyle I did not plan to engage in.  

Yet the program being mandatory, and presented as typical of our college experience, impressed on me that the University presumed this lifestyle from all of us, and thus I was either to happily conform or find an alternative to social existence. I was alone — and too embarrassed to discover I wasn’t!

This makes clear why a Chastity as Lifestyle Center, supporting persons choosing to remain abstinent and yet fully social during their college years, is necessary. I am saddened and disappointed that the University has chosen not to approve a student initiative for such a lifestyle center on campus. The women’s and LGBT centers, in filling other needs, do not address this one. It flies in the face of tolerance that other lifestyles are developing every day and given space and intellectual consideration, but not this one, whose adherents are definitively, on any college campus in the country, in the minority. As any minority, we too need a place to find and support each other, and grow socially.

Dorina Amendola ’02
Waverly, Pa.