While students at UC Berkeley were busy making travel plans for Thanksgiving, Nadia Cho had another prerogative.
She wanted to prove that having sex on campus was possible. Not just anywhere, but in UC Berkeley’s library. She had sex in between the stacks of her library — right next to the books on religion. And then, she wrote about her experience in Berkeley’s Daily Californian. @@checked link@@
“The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting,” Cho wrote in her column. “It was like a game — having to frantically put our clothes back on and immediately pretending to be interested in the data collections of the European Union while panting and giggling hysterically.”
Only days after her column went viral, the media world lit afire with debate about Cho’s flash of exhibitionism. Some praised Cho, applauding her for encouraging sex positivity. Many others called her a “slut” for her candid ways. The Daily Mail, for instance, reprimanded Cho @@checked link@@and insisted she threatened the university’s prestige.
But some have a slightly different complaint: A college student has hot sex on campus, then writes about it in the school’s sex column. It’s getting old.
As Jezebel points out, @@checked link@@The Daily Californian isn’t the first college paper to publish an article like this. Michigan did, too, as well as Duke, Cornell and Harvard. That leads us to the non-surprising realization that even if we aren’t having sex between the stacks ourselves, many of us are still thinking and writing about it.
Our generation considers itself more sexually open than each preceding generation, but the line separating acceptableness and offensiveness is still muddled. And, as for a sex columnist at a college newspaper, it’s easy to find yourself teetering this line, deciphering between subjects that could be regarded as sexually positive and open by some or sexually offensive and absurd by many — the latter paving the way for name-calling and comment-bashing.
And, evidently, it’s through this name-calling and comment-bashing that your piece becomes a national sensation.
Controversy sells. Scandal sells even more.
And, almost overnight, Nadia Cho became an internet celebrity. Because she had sex in a library.