Analyzing Sarah Jessica Parker’s sex appeal may now be worthy of an ‘A.’
The gals of Sex and the City have infiltrated aspects of a female college student’s life — now they can even be found in the classroom.
A course offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the nation’s leading technical university, is aimed at sexuality education through the lens of the popular HBO series.
Marriage, dating, gender roles, job hunting and sexism are just a few examples of material on the course syllabus.
Marie Morse, a senior in sociology and Sex and the City aficionado, said she thought the course was a great idea.
“I own all six seasons,” she said with a giggle.
Although Morse said she indulges her infatuation with the show, she points out that there are also important lessons to be learned.
“I don’t think many people realize the important gender issues the show deals with,” Morse said. “In our society, it’s basically expected that women will get married and have kids.”
She pointed to the series as useful to combat these expectations, and described many young single women as “the new bachelors of our time.”
The series, however, is not just about sex, Morse said. It deals with important societal issues and allows women to talk about their lives in a different way.
The success of the course has also been echoed by students at MIT — because of some of the tension women may feel at such a large math- and science-intensive institution.
“At MIT, people have really liked this class because it was so different from the other classes they’re taking,” Laura Stuart, a sexuality educator with the university, said.
The idea spawned from a series of discussions between two students last January, Julia Kurnik and Riva Bakal. Both invited Stuart to join them for the discussions and pitched the idea for creating a semester-long course that would earn interested students credit.
The students are also helping Stuart to teach the course.
There has been a huge amount of interest from students. The course, first offered in Fall 2005, had about 25 students registered with others showing up and hoping to add the course after the first meetings, she said.
Thirty students are pre-registered for this semester.
Class sessions follow a basic format with an introduction of a theme, followed by the screening of an episode and a discussion. A second episode is shown and a final analysis ties the night’s discussion together.
A final reflection paper is required to demonstrate each student’s understanding of the course’s central themes, and Stuart said she has been thrilled with the feedback she’s gotten.
“The papers we’ve gotten back were wonderful,” she said.
Course applicants were chosen based on several criteria, according to Stuart, because the Women’s Studies program at MIT wanted to have a class that represented several different populations.
“We tried to get a good mix. We didn’t want just ‘Sex and the City’ fanatics — we [also] wanted people who had never watched the show,” Stuart said.
She pointed to an equal gender distribution, and said many of her male students told her they had chosen the class to better understand why their female friends were so interested in the series.
Sexuality education, however, is not new to college campuses.
Chris Ousley, a lecturer in physical education, said he has taught a class on human sexuality for the past 15 years at N.C. State.
She said the course is consistently packed with a long waitlist.
Each semester, two sections of about 32 students meet in Carmichael Gym to navigate human anatomy as well as ethical and psychological subjects related to sexuality.
“I probably could easily teach five and they’d be full,” Ousley laughed.
He said he can see the value in using popular media to examine sexuality, but said that they may embellish facts and myths surrounding sex education.
“Sometimes they overexaggerate to make their dramatic or comedic point,” he said, but noted that he has used material from films and a Seinfeld episode during his lectures.
Seinfeld’s “The Contest” was used to guide students’ exploration of masturbation — a lecture topic in Ousley’s course. He said the materials could be better used as supplements rather than the main reference for the course.
He pointed to NCSU as a conservative university, and said he did not anticipate the addition of a course similar to the one at MIT on campus. However, he said the course could be valuable for other schools as an addition to their education.
“You would use it, not as a primary sex course, but as an addition,” he said.