The Xavierite
With an important message to share, RAs Lauren Murray and Alexzandria Clemmons presented their program, “Sex in the Dark,” on Thursday Oct. 9 to a group of Saint Xavier students in McGuire Hall.
The main goal of the program was to express to the attendees that no one is alone, that everyone has been through difficult relationship situations, and there is help available to those who need it.
It mainly covered topics about relationships, which began with a distribution of small cups with rice inside of them, this made the cup produce noise when it was moved.
Murray and Clemmons then instructed the audience to close their eyes in order to take everyone in the audience onto the stage in a random order. This helped keep the people, and their responses, confidential.
With everyone sitting on stage, and the lights out, the girls then read off a series of statements, which were both general and personal. When a statement applied to someone, that person would shake their cup of rice, while also listening to the others who shook theirs.
Murray and Clemmons noted that the idea for Sex in the Dark came from a leadership conference they had attended over the summer. There they learned the overviews and structures for different presentations.
They took the general idea for this program from the conference, but changed it up a bit to put their own twist on it.
Expecting only about 50 people, Murray and Clemmons were surprised to find they had over 100 attendees. Though their program fliers had little information on them, this is what brought people in.
A simple flier that says the date, time, and “Sex in the Dark” printed largely on it intrigued many curious people. Many people who were willing to come out and attend the event on a Thursday night.
The second half of Murray and Clemmons’ program included a question and answer session through text, with an app called TextFree. TextFree being an app designed around allowing users to text anonymous messages in order to protect their identity.
Any person from the audience could text the number on the board to ask a question about their relationships, and other personal topics, completely anonymously.
Both of the girls would then provide their advice and feedback to the given question, then open it up to the audience for their ideas as well.
With such positive responses and feedback from the audience, the girls plan to continue improving and hosting this program. They are already planning to hold one next semester. They hope to see even more people at that one. They believe it is important to have a safe and comfortable environment to talk about relationships, relationship issues, and let people know that they are not ignored.
Take note of the fliers and online web postings so you do not miss this program or others.
Julie Gardner
News Contributor
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