Denmark: Kathlyn Nguyen (New Experience)

New Experience – Gender Bender

As previously mentioned, I am enrolled in a Prostitution and the Sex Trade in Europe course. For this class, we recently had a workshop on International Women’s Day called Gender Bender to illustrate the gender inequality gaps that still exist today and how many women across the world are oppressed for expressing their femininity. During this workshop, many smaller events were hosted. I opted to do the orgasm course as it sounded the most interesting to me. This course was mainly about the history of achieving orgasms which included a very detailed background about the evolution of sex toys. I learned that the evolution of sex toys illustrates a very patriarchal society as many of the sex toys made for women were created by men, and it wasn’t until recently that we found out about female orgasms. In addition, the orgasm gap between a woman and a man illustrates a very patriarchal school system as we are not taught about basic female anatomy growing up. Learning about all this was a very different experience for me as I learned many things about my own body that I did not know about, but it should’ve been basic knowledge to me. This raises my questions and concerns about sex education in the United States as I think that it would be more beneficial to teach children about their bodies and consent rather than pushing them to be abstinent. At the end of the session, we got to participate in a dildo-throwing competition where the winner got to keep a dildo! Overall, this was a very memorable experience as it illustrated the very real issues that women face every day and the stigma of women expressing their sexualities due to a patriarchal society. Maybe someday we can fix this orgasm gap and empower women but we must start the conversation first.

 

Kathlyn Nguyen

Major: Biology; Cert. Global Health

Hometown: Bloomington, Minnesota

Program: Denmark, Copenhagen / DIS – Study Abroad in Scandinavia