Sex and the University: Celebrity, Controversy, and a Student Journalism Revolution

5. Love, Lust, and Every Kink In Between: The Columns Tackle Modern Students’ Social and Sexual Lives

Sex. Such a simple, small word. S-E-X. Three letters that have inspired shock, moral outrage, scandal, art, literature, the Anglican Church, and let’s not forget, good ol’ Siggy Freud. So what’s the big deal? Everybody thinks about it, everybody does it . . . so why not talk about it frankly? LIZ TOWNSEND “Sexploration,” University News, January 27, 2003 In spring 2004, Kaya Anderson Payne became a “new-age hippie,” a “detriment to society,” and, conversely, “a legend in the student press.” She started as the “Sex Geek,” a columnist for the Muse, the campus newspaper at Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland. During her tenure, Payne wrote about sexual positions, birth control, and STI prevention. “I didn’t really expect people to notice the columns,” she admitted. “‘It’s only a campus paper,’ I thought. ‘No one really checks out the back pages of the Opinions section.’ But I was wrong.”1 In her second semester as sex columnist, Payne became embroiled in what one report called “the campus scandal,” which received attention from a national media association and placed her at odds with her own editor in chief. The catalyst: “Mind-Blowing Cunnilingus,” a column she presented as a how-to guide for performing oral sex on a woman, including locating the clitoris and reading a woman’s breathing and body language to determine her level of satisfaction. “Cunnilingus is one of the surest 81 5 Love, Lust, and Every Kink In Between The Columns Tackle Modern Students’ Social and Sexual Lives 82 SEX AND THE UNIVERSITY ways to sexually pleasure a woman,” Payne wrote at the column’s start. “And why wouldn’t it be? Your tongue and lips are soft, warm, wet and gentle. Your tongue can twist and flick in ways your fingers could only dream of. Burying your face in a woman’s vulva is about as intimate as relations get.”2 The column, planned as the first in a two-part series, was accompanied by a “textbook-style” illustration of the female genitalia that covered roughly 20 percent of the newspaper page. In an interview more than two years after the column ran, Payne said she was still not sure whether it was the explicitness of the illustration or the topic under discussion, but the response to the column’s publication “was loud, swift, violent, and kind of crazy.” Angry telephone calls and “nasty letters to the editor” arrived by the dozens in the days following the piece’s premiere.3 Comments on an online forum discussing the column deemed it pointless and “softcore porn bullshit.” As Devon Wells, the newspaper’s editor in chief, said at the time, “We’re getting a lot of response on both sides, both for and against it. We get a lot of people rallying behind Kaya, saying, ‘Yeah, it’s a great thing, wonderful.’ And we get some people who say, ‘No, no, it’s a detriment to society. The Muse is turning into a pornographic magazine .’” The criticisms divided editors in the Muse newsroom and led Wells to make a difficult decision one week later. As Payne recalled, “I went in for the Tuesday afternoon meeting, going into production night. My friend, who was one of the editors, came out and saw me and said, you know, with these really sad eyes, ‘You’ve gotten hate mail. People are nervous. Devon’s not going to run the second half.’”4 By chance, during the week the original column appeared in print, the Muse was hosting the annual national conference of the Canadian University Press. The CUP is a cooperative comprising more than seventy student newspapers across Canada that identifies itself as the “oldest student news service in the world.” The “so-called cunnilingus controversy,” in Payne’s words, triggered immediate interest from CUP conference attendees, spurring a supportive letter-writing campaign from members of the CUP women’s caucus specifically. It also caused Payne, a nineteen-year-old sociology major at the time, to become larger-than-life on campus, leading to rumors circulating that tagged her as “either a heterosexual sex fiend, a sexually frustrated lesbian, or a religious virgin.”5 MODERN STUDENTS’ SOCIAL AND SEXUAL LIVES 83 In the end, the second half of the column—dubbed by Payne as “the more important actually-getting-a-woman-to-orgasm-and-beyond part”— never ran in the Muse...