Zhana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?
Tag: college
The Necessity of Football
Nigerian-born pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu published his controversial paper in the journal Neurosurgery on the brain of Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs, who died in 2002. Omalu is the subject of both a recent book and film that share the same blunt title: Concussion. The book, by Jeanne Marie Laskas, expands on her reporting in the 2009 GQ exposé “Game Brain.” (The film, which stars Will Smith as Omalu, will be released by Sony Pictures this Christmas.) Omalu’s article described in detail his discovery that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an impact-based head trauma, was killing football players and other athletes who suffered repeated blows to the head. Three doctors with the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee wrote a letter to the editors of Neuroscience alleging Omalu had misunderstood his own findings. But even as the NFL tried to bury his breakthrough, the doctor continued to accumulate data on what head trauma did to the brains of athletes until a former neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers who had known Webster called Omalu to tell him he believed him. As Laskas wrote in GQ, “It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu’s work.”
‘I woke up. He was in the room. I didn’t know who he was.’
After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.