On the Tuesday before Safer Sex Night, Oberlin’s budding poets and writers discovered a thing or two about publicity, and why movies like Debbie Does Dallas will keep on getting rented while Shortbus may languish in the corner of the video store until someone tapes SEX over its cover. 

Junior Kara Carmosino and senior Talia Cooper, the Creative Writing Department’s student representatives for the year, expressing concern about the lack of community among creative writing majors, proposed their Erotic Reading idea to the department as a way to bring writers and other students together. 

The week of Safer Sex Night seemed like an ideal time, given all the good, consensual romantic energy in the air. 

The department initially balked at the idea of putting its name on something with the word erotic in it (hey CRWR, no publicity is bad publicity), but finally agreed to be a sponsor when the event was re-titled “Consensual is Sensual.” Carmosino and Cooper collaborated with the Sexual Information Center to make the event a reality.

The reading defied all expectations of student poetry readings on campus. In the always-cozy atmosphere of the Cat in the Cream, the diverse line-up of readers presented to a full house of eager listeners licking cookie crumbs off their fingers. The only rules of the reading: anything goes, but keep content consensual and sex-positive. 

Junior Anna Silverstein, kicking off the program, read from an unabashedly juicy original piece in which a woman living alone has an unexpected night visitor.

When the audience was in the mood, other highlights included original and already-published work read by juniors Claire Miller and Cecilia Galarraga, senior Elizabeth Rogers and sophomore Julia Leeman, as well as outstanding spoken-word performances by senior Jovan Campbell and Baraka Noel OC ’06.

Some readers kept their work defiantly metaphorical and even used props to enhance the erotic/tongue-in-cheek atmosphere.

Galarraga brandished an orange for realism while she discussed the “mechanics” of “peeling the fruit”: “You are an orange and I / am hungry.” 

Other readers took a different approach to eroticism and riffed on sex in general, as in Rogers’ poem “Sex Education,” a poem in part about the squeamish way sex is taught in schools, and how education is better found elsewhere. 

Later, some readers joked that if there was such a good turnout for an erotica reading, all future readings should be given racy names. The “Blood and Violence” reading could be next. 

If the number of listeners who had switched to licking the cookie crumbs off each other’s fingers by the end of the night was any indication (no numbers provided), the Creative Writing department should get its, um, money’s worth.