In honor of February being National Condom Month, Geneseo Healthguards hosted the ever-popular “Condom Casino” on Thursday Feb. 25 in the MacVittie College Union lobby to celebrate these helpful rubbers and to help educate the college campus on very important—but often overlooked—areas of sexual activity.
“We have been doing this now annually for 12 years and we do events like this just to educate the school and the campus in a fun and interactive way, instead of lecturing people,” Healthguard senior Danely Lopez said.
The event commenced with a large crowd ready to partake in the activity booths set up around the Union. First, students were given a brown paper bag with an assortment of candy to be used in place of real money. At each booth, participants were given the opportunity win more candy. They could then take the candy won and exchange it for fun prizes such as glow-in-the-dark condoms and condom carriers—or the students could just eat their candy winnings.
There were three main attractions: “Condom Races,” “Wheel of STIs” and blackjack. The condom races served as a test in order to see how well a person knew the steps for properly putting on a condom. Contestants raced against each other to put a condom on a dildo and had to remember steps like asking for consent and checking the condom’s expiration date.
For the “Wheel of STIs,” a wheel with various STIs written on it would be spun. Contestants would have to answer trivia questions pertaining to that infection for candy prizes. The blackjack table was very straight forward: students bet an amount of candy and played to win.
“I learned more about STIs and how to gamble,” freshman Kory Seaton said. “I think [events] that educate while also being fun are good. We should definitely have more of them.”
Sex education is often a poorly covered or ignored subject because of the taboo nature of sexual activity in the United States. Many people feel this is a subject that shouldn’t be taught in schools because of the age—and sometimes religious backgrounds—of the students. This means many young adults start to explore sexual activity without proper background knowledge of the risks and precautions that need to be taken into consideration when becoming sexually active. Without this knowledge, students are more at risk to deal with such issues as unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections and more.
Healthguards hopes to combat these issues by holding events like “Condom Casino,” which combine education with play and humor.
“When we teach someone how to [have safe sex], it’s rewarding,” Lopez said. “We come to college and we all come from different schools … where people are not taught sex ed and this is a way for them to learn it in a fun and interactive way.”