Sexual Citizens Quotes

“A sexual project encompasses the reasons why anyone might seek a particular sexual interaction or experience. Pleasure is an obvious project; but a sexual project can also be to develop and maintain a relationship; or it can be a project to not have sex; or to have sex for comfort; or to try to have children; or because sex can advance our position or status within a group, or increase the status of groups to which we belong. A sexual project can also be to have a particular kind of experience, like sex in the library stacks, sex can be the goal rather than the strategy toward another goal. People don't have just one sexual project. They can have many. Wanting intimacy doesn't mean not wanting other things, like hooking up from time to time.”
― Jennifer S. Hirsch, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

“The stories that students - and not just women - shared with us made clear the harms of sexual assault, and how parts of that suffering ripple through the whole campus community. If preventing sexual assault's emotional and social harms is insufficient to justify more attention to prevention, we can also point to sexual assault's vast economic impact.

In 2017 researchers from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that across the population of the United States, the economic cost of rape was over $3 trillion.”
― Jennifer S. Hirsch, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

“Frequently through online pre-orientation courses, college students today are taught that the absence of "no" does not mean that sex is consensual, and that they only way it can be is if both parties explicitly say "yes". But as we'll show, promoting affirmative consent is insufficient to prevent sexual assault.”
― Jennifer S. Hirsch, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

“Almost no one related an experience where an adult sat them down and conveyed that sex would be an important and potentially joyful part of their life, and so they should think about what they wanted from sex, and how to realize those desires with other people in a respectful way.”
― Jennifer S. Hirsch, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

“We offer here a partial explanation of the high rates of assault found among LGBTQ students, which is their greater willingness to label as 'nonconsensual' what heterosexual students (women in particular) experience as 'normal.' The high rates of assault among LGBTQ people may in part reflect their refusal to accept heterosexual students' normalization of sexual aggression.”
― Jennifer S. Hirsch, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus