Cornell Has A Sex-Education Problem

One hundred and sixty-one years ago, Cornell University was founded with the intention that “any person can find instruction in any study.” Its modern administrators seem to have taken that promise as something of a challenge.

In 2019, the university’s official health authority, Cornell Health, authored a guide titled Sexual Pleasure: Finding the “Sweet Spot.” It opens by declaring that sex can make for a “terrific study break.” Students are encouraged to explore sexual fantasies, experiment with sex toys, and consider bondage and fetish gear. Exposure to pornography, Cornell assures us, is “totally normal,” though thankfully those interested in watching it are directed toward “ethical porn” and the “Feminist Porn Awards.” Today, this report is available inside a sexual-health resource library that has been “hand-picked by [Cornell Health] staff.”

That same year, Cornell Health published Self-Exploration, which tells students they are “entitled to experience all the pleasure” their bodies can provide and instructs them to set aside private time in pursuit of that goal. Another guide, Sensate Focus, meticulously describes progressive touching exercises between partners and states that “nudity is optimal.”

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The aforementioned sexual pleasure guide directed students to a checklist titled Yes, No, Maybe So: A Sexual Inventory Stocklist, a copy of which can be found on Cornell Health’s website. The list includes: sex with two people at once, sex with three people at once, sex with more than three people at once; “cybersex”; open sexual relationships; sex toys; blindfolding; bondage; biting; scratching; spanking and slapping for sexual pleasure; sexual clamps; and sexual activity involving various bodily fluids. Students are asked to classify these acts as yes, no, maybe, fantasy, or unsure. There appears to be considerably more enthusiasm for helping students identify their preferred form of restraint than for encouraging restraint itself.

And this content is not simply confined to students who go looking for it. The school actively encourages these materials to be displayed in “academic, work, or living environments.” They come complete with printable components and take-away copies. Parents picturing the bulletin board outside their eighteen-year-old’s dorm room might well wonder when student wellness came to include institutional advice for purchasing fetish equipment.

A testament to its academic caliber, Cornell’s education is not merely theoretical — it is experiential. In October 2017, Cornell Residential & New Student Programs sponsored “Sex Toys 101” at the community center in the part of Cornell’s campus used for freshmen housing. Cornell’s event listing advertised a sex-positive “sex toy party” during which students were invited to “engage in the uses of sex toys, purposes, and demonstrations.”

Five years later, an official dorm newsletter promoted “Sex in the Dark” at Appel Commons, a dining hall, inviting students to sit in darkness while “sexperts” answered their “deepest, darkest questions.” Attendance was complemented by free glow-in-the-dark bracelets and entry in a raffle to win sex toys. “This is gonna be interesting!” the newsletter promised. On that point, at least, Cornell was correct.

More troubling is Cornell’s 2026 Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault report. Among its recommendations is a highly visible “sex-positive public health messaging campaign,” which would involve actions to “normalize, de-stigmatize, and educate students about sex, sexual health, positive sexual experiences, and developing as sexual citizens.” It recommends bringing “sexual positivity” into first-year programming and suggests a campus “Day of Sexual Health” highlighting “sexual rights, justice, and pleasure.”

It seems appropriate to ask why a task force created to prevent sexual assault is even discussing sexual pleasure. The report’s recommendations reveal how Cornell has conflated two distinct projects: protecting students from sexual violence and encouraging them to explore their sexuality. Rape is horrific and evil, and universities have an obligation to stop it, hold perpetrators criminally accountable, and support those who suffer despite prevention efforts. But fulfilling those responsibilities does not require treating everything short of assault as worthy of encouragement.

In presenting consent as the only measure of morality in intimate relationships, Cornell implies that there are only two conclusions: coercion is bad, and any freely chosen pleasure is to be promoted and celebrated. But the opposite of sexual violence is not simply pleasurable sex, and the fact that an encounter is consensual does not mean it ought to be encouraged. Adultery can be consensual, as can producing pornography or making a sexual decision that leaves emotional scars. Consent simply tells us whether another person was free to say no. It does not allow us to judge whether he or she should have said yes.

In a world of consent-based morality, short-term pleasure becomes its own justification. Cornell’s materials reflect that worldview, as the question of whether an experience is worth having gives way to instructions for having it. The university helps students classify their interest in group sex, bondage, and open sexual relationships. What, in these materials, equips them to ask whether those pursuits deserve their interest at all?

We cannot expect teenagers to grow up in a vacuum devoid of sexual desire or instruction. Someone or something, be it parents, teachers, peers, or pornography, will shape their understanding of sex, relationships, and responsibility. Cornell steps into that role when it declares certain pursuits worthy and devotes institutional resources to encouraging them. In doing so, Cornell exercises the same moral authority it claims elsewhere in student life. But families entrust their children to universities partly because they assume that authority will bear at least some resemblance to the values they taught at home. Offering a sex-toy raffle and a worksheet about sex with more than three people at once erodes that trust.

Good parenting involves teaching self-control and a broader philosophical understanding that just because you can do something does not mean you ought to. Parents who have tried to impart those lessons are entitled to ask why they are paying for a university’s health service to introduce their children to bondage equipment and sex toys. Notably, Cornell has no difficulty recommending restraint elsewhere: it tells students to limit alcohol consumption, sleep properly, and eat well. It recognizes that a freely chosen activity can be enjoyable in the moment without serving the person who chooses it.

Apply Cornell’s sexual logic to drugs. Even if heroin were entirely legal, a student’s willingness to take it and the pleasure he or she expects to experience would hardly justify a university campaign celebrating drug usage and helping students explore its possibilities. We would ask about consequences, habits, vulnerability, and the difference between momentary gratification and lasting well-being. The student’s consent would not answer those questions, nor would practical advice about reducing risks excuse the institution from asking them. The same obligation applies to sex.

I have written at length about promiscuity from the perspective of someone who has seen its destructive capacity firsthand. As a senior who, until recently, was a member of Cornell Greek life, I am hardly writing from a monastery. I have spent the last several years surrounded by the carefree sexual culture I am describing, and having watched what happens when sex is severed from commitment, I have come to believe that sexual intimacy belongs within a committed relationship, accompanied by loyalty, responsibility, and exclusivity. I am not suggesting Cornell need adopt this outlook on sex; I am merely advocating it not espouse the polar opposite.

A university can provide contraceptives, offer medical care, and take an uncompromising stance against sexual assault without appointing itself a guide to sexual experimentation. Cornell expects students to exercise restraint in every other area of life. It should stop teaching them that, when it comes to sex, permission is all the judgment they need.

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Photo by Caleb Ekeroth on Unsplash