Reflective Essay: The Regulation Of Sexuality Means

When I think about what the regulation of sexuality means, I think back to when I was still living under my parent’s roof. My parents are both fairly conservative Christians, so growing up, there were rigid rules about what sexuality meant. Sexuality in my family meant a heterosexual relationship in a monogamous marriage between two people of similar age and status. Anything that did not fit into the confines of this vision of sexuality was strange to me up until I started to form opinions on my own. Until recently, large chasms in age in status still seemed outside of my grasp of understanding as something which could be normal or healthy. As an employee of the university, a large part of the training we receive as staff has to do with the …show more content…
Institutional rules which regulate student-staff relationships seek to protect students from inappropriate sexual encounters. All of my life, through education, I’ve been told what constitutes an inappropriate sexual encounter. At our school, we were always warned about dating violence and abuse, and what to do if we ever found ourselves in an unsafe or unhealthy relationship. I remember being taught about the role power and control had in unwanted relationship advances, and more importantly, how to say “no” to these unwanted advances. An imbalance of power in the relationship was a red flag, and we were taught to recognize it and to avoid becoming involved in these relationships. Similarly, the basis on which institutional relationship regulations are founded are dictated by the …show more content…
By being assigned the role of a victim, students are less likely to advocate for themselves in sexual encounters with those they have been told are more powerful in the relationship. The notion that one is more likely to behave due to their perceived role rather than their internal instinct is called situational attribution. In “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” Kipnis argues that this situational attribution can have negative consequences for those who are victimized. She discusses how students who are molded into a role which designates no power to them in sexual relationships fail to learn important life experiences. She argues that under the guise of institutional rules, students are continually being sheltered from how real interpersonal conversations transpire, and miss the valuable lesson on learning how to speak up when they are uncomfortable in a situation (11). The inability of students to voice their opinion due to institutional rules can be viewed as an “unhealthy consequence” of the overregulation of sexuality between students and