Condoms on campus

Residential Programs and Services tries to offer convenience, albeit at an overpriced rate, to students living in the dorms. There are snack and drink vending machines, satisfying students’ cravings for junk food. There are laundry machines, satisfying the need for clean clothes. There are copy machines, satisfying the need to copy a friend’s class notes. What’s missing? The condom machines! Students cannot satisfy their need for safe sex.\nI looked far and wide (for the purposes of article research, of course) and found only one condom machine in all of the campus dorms. There is one in the Collins Edmondson bathroom near the front desk. But this is the only one! What? No condom machines in McNutt and Briscoe? This doesn’t make sense. \nDorms are mostly populated by inexperienced freshmeat living far away from their parents’ watchful eyes. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you amass thousands of pretty good lookin’ adolescents with decent social skills in co-ed dorms and give them more freedom than they’ve ever had before, there is going to be plenty of hanky-panky.\nBut all jokes aside, it’s extremely naive and irresponsible of RPS not to put condom machines in the dorms. After all, RPS doesn’t think twice about putting soap dispensers in the bathrooms. If you think about it, condoms do what soap does – protect the body from unwanted substances. RPS should really start applying this logic to condom machines.\nRPS always says how hard it tries to accommodate the different comfort levels of its residents. Well, it’s not trying very hard in the sexual realm. Students have different comfort levels with getting condoms in public. Some feel extremely uncomfortable going to the health center or the drugstore. Some don’t know where they can find these places, either, because they’re new to campus. And some simply forget to get condoms ahead of time. \nLack of discreet and convenient condom machines places these students at a higher risk for unprotected sex and unprotected sex leads to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. RPS has a duty to keep its residents safe and help prevent the spread of STDs across campus.\nSure, there are free condoms available at the IU Health Center. But it’s conveniently closed during nighttime and on weekends, when arguably most hook-ups happen.\nCondom machines have already been installed in dorms at many other public and private colleges, Purdue and Northwestern among them. If the engineering geeks at Purdue can have in-dorm condom machines, I can’t see why enlightened IU, home of the Kinsey Institute, shouldn’t have them, too.\nNow, the machines will have to offer some quality products. Luckily, we have the huge repository of sex data at the Kinsey Institute, so we could just ask them for recommendations.\nAs the Cialis commercials tell us, sex isn’t something you necessarily plan for ahead of time. But public disease prevention strategy is and should be planned ahead. So RPS, when the time is right, will you be ready?