Being powerful, Margaret Thatcher once said, is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.
On college campuses, that rule applies to “sex columnists” who tell us they’re bold and cutting-edge for writing about their sex lives in the student newspaper. These columns are overwhelmingly written by uncreative girls who have modeled their personalities and lifestyles after Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex And The City”—right down to the slang, the clothes and, apparently, writing a ludicrous sex column.
“Vibrators, cross-dressing, oral sex, multiple orgasms, masturbation, bondage — no topic is too hot to handle,” USA Today said in 2002.
 Actually, there are few things less “hot” (“hot” meaning controversial) than explicit sex talk on a college campus. As USA Today noted, sex columns are most popular at places like Berkeley and the Ivy League, where campus authority figures support events like Sex on a Saturday Night (required for all freshmen at Princeton) and an on-campus “Exotic Erotic” party at Yale. Only on a modern campus could an “iconoclast” be defined as “someone who engages in behavior accepted by 90 percent of students, faculty and administrators.”
Although many college sex columnists are indistinguishable from each other, two behaviors are extremely common to all of them. First, they assume the entire campus is fascinated by their personal sexual adventures. Second, they bash students who are unimpressed with their columns as “prudes.”
In an article for the Ivy Gate blog, Harvard “sex columnist” Lena Chen rated various sex and relationship columns for their alleged “shock factor.” She praised fellow sex columnist Miriam Datskovsky for her “risky approach” because she adopted a style “most reminiscent of Sex and the City” and tackled “adventurous topics.” Imitating a massively popular TV character: So bold!
Chen then attacked a relationship columnist who wrote a piece on dinner dates, sneering, “A virgin could write a better column. Next.”
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