“Meet Big Blue,” Elaine Pasqua, HIV and AIDS educator, said as she held up a giant blue penis during her seminar Thursday morning.
“Sex and Excess: Surviving the Party,” hosted by the Student Health Center, covered safe drinking, sexual assault, sex under the influence, sexually transmitted infections, and with the help of “Big Blue,” proper condom application in order to educate students on the dangers and consequences associated with excessive partying.
“I’m really glad the university wanted to address this topic because it is a real issue and something we need to know about,” freshman criminal justice major Harley Rodriguez said.
Pasqua spoke about the importance of knowing the rate at which alcohol is ingested. She hit on the importance of having a glass of water for every alcoholic beverage to avoid dehydration of the brain, which causes the splitting headache the morning after.
“There is nothing wrong with having a buzz,” Pasqua said. “The problem is when students ingest too much too quickly.”
She also said many students are becoming intoxicated too quickly because they have no idea how much they are consuming. One drink is supposed to be 12 ounces, while most drinking cups are 16 to 18 ounces. For every drink the students think they are having, they are actually ingesting a drink and a third.
Students loved the interactive exercise Pasqua conducted to demonstrate how quickly and easily sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) spread. Students were asked to theoretically participate in sexual relations with three different people. By the end of the exercise, 45 of the 60 students were “infected” with some type of STI.
“I was surprised at how fast STI’s can spread and how many people can be affected,” freshman history major Jessica Butler said.
Pasqua has worked with hundreds of universities as well as the New York Giants, New York Jets, Baltimore Ravens, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Carolina Panthers and the Philadelphia Phillies.
A four-time nominee for “Best Speaker of the Year” for Campus Activities Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Awards, Pasqua is also the writer of the “Real Life on Campus” column and contributing author to “Welcome to the Time of Your Life.” Pasqua was featured in USA Today, NY1 News, Time Warner TV, and Knight Ridder News Service. She co-wrote, directed and produced “Be Aware of the Risks of Date Rape Drugs” which has been viewed more than 650,000 times on YouTube.
For more information on “Sex and Excess: Surviving the Party” visit www.elainepasqua.com.
