Ok, confession time.  Not only do I love young adult fiction, but I also love vampires.  So when the YA series, Twilight, came across my radar, I am not too proud to admit my heart went both pitter and patter.  I ordered the entire series, sight unseen.

Like many a young adult and old adult reader alike, I devoured these books - plowed right through them without shame.  So I'm also not going to get on my moral high horse without admitting that I lolled about in the mud and muck for a good long while before I saddled up.

That said? The Twilight series made me deeply, profoundly concerned for the young women out there who may mistake the relationships at the center of this tale for bonafide "true love".

For those of you who may not know, Twilight follows the star-crossed relationship between Edward, a broody Victorian-born vampire who chooses to abstain from his bloodlusty desires, and Bella, an accident prone, scowly non-vampiric teen girl.  The crux of their intimate dilemma is this: Bella would love to give up her human existence and live in tortured damnation as a vampire so as to never get older than her eternally 19-year-old boyfriend, whom she worries will no longer desire her once she sprouts crow’s feet.  Edward is staunchly opposed to this plan, lest it bespoil her fragile, virginal, and cringing femininity, which is, as far as I can tell, her sole endearing feature...

It is the end of my first semester as the chapter chair of the UT CCSL chapter!  It has been an eventful first run, for sure.  There were some moments back in August when, as I slogged through the bureaucratic bog of creating a student organization, I wondered if this would ever get off the ground.  But from the safe vantage point of a nice, long holiday break, I can confidently say that the UT chapter is alive and thriving.

Our first meetings started off a little slow.  I had two very dedicated, very passionate undergraduate members, who were brimming with great ideas for our chapter’s mission and possibilities for campus interventions.  However, three enthusiastically sex positive women does not a MOVEMENT make.  Thankfully, they helped me develop a strategy to recruit more members.  First, we changed the structure of our meeting by spending 15 minutes on the procedural stuff (announcements, event organization, etc.) and then using the remaining 45 to open a roundtable discussion on a topic relevant to our mission of sexual literacy.  Second, we doled out some of our seed money to buy a ton of tacos to fuel the meeting.  There is not a student on the UT campus who can resist the allure of free Tex Mex.

The inaugural roundtable topic was “The Social Meanings of Virginity”.  We created a Facebook group for CCSL, and then a Facebook event publicizing the roundtable meeting. ...