I am a sophomore, a Neuroscience major and I'm also a survivor of sexual assault and sexual predation as a child. This past week my school had a campaign for Sexual Assault Awareness, an extremely important topic and evidently one that hits close to home. When I received the e-mail informing the student body about the campaign, a smile spread across my face. It’s a wonderful thing to bring presence to an issue that destroys so many.

I woke up Monday morning and walked into Seegers Union to get lunch. I noticed a table for the campaign, where they were whiteboarding for students to write about why they care about sexual assault. The banner on the table read “#BergIsAware." I started to walk over to the table to make a whiteboard for myself, when I saw someone holding one saying “I care about sexual assault awareness because consent isn’t just sexy, it's mandatory.” I turned my back and walked away from the table, hoping I’d never have to read something like that again; I thought perhaps it was just one student not really understanding the weight of what they just wrote.

The next morning, I left Seegers Union from breakfast to walk outside to see a large banner hanging over Parent’s Plaza saying “Consent Is Sexy,” with the Title IX coordinator’s name underneath it. Once again, I turned my back with a racing heart and walked away toward Academic Row to get to my class. As I was walking down to the end of Academic Row to the building, at every few feet of the walk were flyers with statistics about sexual assault all titled “Consent Is Sexy.” That walk to my class, for me, felt like the "Passion of the Christ." By the time I reached my class building, I was in tears, I couldn’t breathe and was experiencing a fully fledged anxiety attack. I couldn’t even walk into my classroom.

I went back to my dorm and laid in my bed with the lights off thinking of all the ways I could express how demeaning this campaign’s motto was. I thought of cutting down the banner and removing all the flyers from the campus. I devised a plan of purchasing black paint and in the middle of the night crossing out “sexy” on the banner and replacing it with “a natural right.” I speculated on cutting the banner down and bringing it to the Title IX coordinator, a woman who helped me in a sexual assault incident my first week of freshman year, following a terroristic threat of taking my life from my perpetrator. I considered replacing the banner with one that I would make, stating “Consent is a natural, birth-given right.” Finally, I decided the most effective method, one that would remain permanent, is publishing this article. An article on the Internet that will never go away, one that would express the disdain for the motto from a survivor themselves, and an article that would bring light to other college students if their university ever tried to impose such a debilitating, disgusting theme of awareness of sexual assault.

To restate, consent is a natural, birth-given right. The Muhlenberg College Sexual Assault Awareness Group claims they are aware. Aware of what, exactly? I don’t understand how they can be aware if they’re advertising a campaign to students in forwarding the notion of consent by sexualizing it? In our society, sexualizing objects and ideas is an awful, disgraceful theme that’s become so prevalent that people do not even recognize it anymore. The SAAG, I’d like to believe, did not even recognize what the actual message was behind their campaign. By sexualizing consent, we are objectifying bodies. By objectifying bodies, we dehumanize them. By dehumanizing bodies, sexual assault and rape are more likely realities. It’s a synergistic effect, coupling consent with “sexiness.” It’s a synergistic effect, with a horrifying outcome. The outcome is what this entire campaign tried to argue against. The rhetoric of the motto is counterintuitive to the awareness they tried to spread.

As a survivor, in healing we learn that it is not our fault, what happened to us. We learn that we deserve the same rights, love and care as everyone else. Consent is the most important right. Consent is not a sexy little accessory. Consent is not something that’s optional. Someone accepting your consent isn’t anything that should make someone more attractive to you, it’s something every human being on this earth is given. We are given choices in this world. We have the choice to say “yes” or “no.” We have the choice to decide “good” and “evil” in our eyes. One “good” that moral people tend to agree upon is the choice to accept or deny sex/sexual acts from others, and the “evil” is the removal of this choice. The removal of this choice is called sexual harassment, assault, predation, and rape. We all have our choices, and I’d assumed the Muhlenberg College Sexual Assault Awareness Group would make the right one in the advertisement and display of the Sexual Assault Awareness Campaign. To my disappointment, even the ones we rely on to give us a voice, are still subjected to the sexualization of ideas and products. I know I am not alone in my thoughts, because another student on campus crossed out "sexy" on the banner, and replaced it with "MANDATORY" (pictured above). I hope one day our school will accept, analyze and apologize on behalf of the central flaw of their campaign. Until then, my disdain remains -- and my support of the Muhlenberg Sexual Assault Awareness Group and Peer Health Advocates of Muhlenberg is withheld.