Valentine’s Day is a day which lovers have classically celebrated by showering each other with red roses, heart-shaped chocolate boxes and heartfelt cards. Student Health Services urges students to add safe sex to that tradition.
National Condom Day is an annual demonstration put on by SHS to help students prepare for a healthy and consensual holiday.
The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Maxson Plaza outside of Brotman Hall, and will include a booth with activities and panels to encourage the use of condoms.
Some of these booths will hand out free condoms, both male and female, to those in attendance, as well as feature anatomical models to illustrate proper use both types of condoms.
Heidi Girling, health educator and coordinator for the Health Resource Center, has been in charge of the National Condom Day event on campus for six years. Girling is carrying two goals going into this event for students to take away from.
“The [first] goal is to educate about safer sex practices, and the second goal would be to teach students how to correctly use condoms,” Girling said. “Obviously many students want to be safer and they want to use the condoms, but sometimes they don’t have the education, so we want to educate them with, ‘Okay, this is how you correctly use a condom.’”
Girling says the booth will be offering free condoms and safer sex materials, such as oral sex barriers, and will be doing a game centered around the male and female condom models in which the contestants can win prizes, including candy to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Although safe sex might be considered a sensitive subject for some, students around campus agree it’s important to discuss and educate themselves on.
“I can see it as something that’s probably hard to do, because it is embarrassing for a lot of people,” said Josh Pickett, first year graduate student majoring in science and counseling. “But I think it’s one of those things that goes unspoken most of the time, but is just really important, and I applaud the people doing it.”
Pickett won’t be able to attend the event himself, but he does believe other students should attend to learn more about practicing safe sex.
Melida Villalobos, a second-year psychology major, believes the event is a “positive thing” for those on campus.
“Everybody should have that [proper condom use] visual,” Villalobos laughed. “I think many people don’t know how to put it on. Overall, many people are not informed well, so it’d be better [for them] to have something like that [event].”
Villalobos said that free condoms are a great incentive to attend the event, as some people “don’t want to go out and buy them.” She noted condoms’ importance in preventing pregnancy and against sexually transmitted diseases.