With Sex Toys and Penis Cookies, Event Showcases ‘Fun Part of Consent’

Penis-shaped cookies in hand, members of Columbia and Barnard’s Take Back the Night spent Wednesday afternoon tabling outside of Lehman Library as part of their 2008 version of the sex-positive festival Sexibition.

“We wanted to promote a culture where sex can be talked about openly,” coordinator Robin Broder, BC ’09, said.

The annual event originally sprang from what organizers felt was a common misperception of TBTN’s yearly march—that the night was a condemnation of sexuality.

“There was this conception that Take Back the Night was anti-sex and not anti-violence,” Broder said.

The event, which was co-sponsored by the four undergraduate student council as well as campus groups such as the BDSM education club Conversio Virium, is seen by many as the march’s lighter counterpoint.

“That is a really strong, bold statement about the reality of what’s going on,” Alyssa Yee, BC ’08, said of the march. “We do Sexibition in large part to show the fun part of consent.”

Fun, it seemed, can be packaged in cookie form. A range of genitalia-shaped baked goods and toppings—”These are kosher for Passover,” Broder told a passing student as she leaned in to grab one—sat alongside a table full of sex toys that were raffled off at an evening program featuring sex-positive organizer and former exotic dancer YK Hong.

“I like the prospective students who come by,” Broder said. “The look of surprise when they look at the cookies and realize they’re in the shape of penises is kind of entertaining.”

The exhibition, organizers were careful to point out, was intended to promote the “culture of consent,” rather than sex itself.

“You can be sexual and intimate and active,” Yee said, “without violating consent.”

mary.kohlmann@columbiaspectator.com