CULTURE & IDEAS: YOUNG, SEXUAL, AND ENTREPRENEURS.
Written by Rachel Kramer Bussel
to The New York Times, April 6, 2007.

To the Editor:
In “Campus Exposure” (New York Times Magazine, March 4, 2007) Alexandra Jacobs fawns over the college students she profiles [regarding their easy going attitude towards posing in the nude and publishing sexually explicit magazines like Boink at Boston University or H Bomb at Harvard—Editor] even as she condemns them. She calls college sex columns “little red-light districts within the respectable black-and-white confines of established school newspapers,” while the Times’ Stephanie Rosenbloom (“A Disconnect on Hooking Up” March 1, 2007) quoted former Columbia Spectator sex columnist Miriam Datskovsky to counter the more conservative views of author Laura Sessions Stepp just a few days earlier.

Can’t we accept that college-age students are simply more open when it comes to sex than those of us in our thirties, forties, and beyond and not judge them? As a former sex columnist for The Village Voice, I know that those of us who write about sex are often treated with the same level of respect as “sex workers” (read: none). I applaud this generation of sexual entrepreneurs for furthering the conversation about a topic that all of us, no matter our age, are endlessly curious about.

—Rachel Kramer Bussel
—Brooklyn, NY