Crimson and Gold Connection; Katelyn Ettinger

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. It's the Crimson and Gold Connection on 89.9 KRPS, you're invited to the second annual Human Sexuality Symposium, being held on Thursday, May 3rd, from 12 noon until 2pm in the governor's room of the Overman Student Center on the campus of Pittsburgh State University. Joining me this hour to talk about the Human Sexuality Symposium is Pittsburgh State Senior, Kaylyn Edinger. Thank you for joining me this week on the Crimson and Gold Connection. Absolutely, I'm happy to be here. And for somebody who's not attended a much less a human sexuality symposium, just a symposium in general before, but they're interested in this topic. What can they expect? Well, the symposiums typically consist of lots of different tables set out in the room. So you can walk up to the different tables and talk to the presenters about their topic. There are no speakers, there's no timetable, so it's a very open kind of event. Anybody can come in and they can come up and talk to one of the presenters about their

specific topic. You can come and go as you please. So it's a very, very kind of laid back event. So the only restraint is the two hours that you guys have at the student-overman center, but what I want to care, PS listeners, because this event is open to the public, what I want people to know is that this isn't like a stuffy setting where only one person is talking and you're watching that one person. Oh, no, absolutely not. This is one of the settings where you can come in and talk to anybody that's in the room. All of the different presenters are knowledgeable on their topic. Mostly they are juniors and seniors because it's an upper division course. So a lot of them are psychology majors because this is one of the psychology courses, but they're very knowledgeable about their specific topics. And what's your major here at Pitt State? I'm a psychology major, specifically psychology with an emphasis in the military. And what's your topic here? You're going to present at the symposium. So the topic that I'm presenting with my group is sexual trauma, specifically we're

looking at the emotional aspects of sexual trauma that will carry over into an adult relationship for somebody who has been traumatized at a relatively young age. We don't talk a lot in public venues about sort of the issues that people will sometimes have in their older relationships as they move away from whatever situation it was that they were in as a child or as an adolescent that was traumatizing for them. How does it affect them as they try to move forward and make better connections? Now in the 700 level class with Dr. Heria Bachner, do you, does she assign topics or do you guys come up with them on your own? So the topics were given to us in a list and then we all selected which topics we preferred, like a one through three sort of situation. And ultimately she assigned each of us depending on which groups needed more people. But there were options where you could bring another topic to her that she had not put

on the list. She's pretty open-minded. Oh, she's very open-minded. About the topics. She wants to learn about new topics there, maybe she hasn't heard of and students bring to her. Absolutely. Absolutely. She's one of those academia who's always trying to learn herself. What do you go for research on this kind of topic? So there are a lot of different places you can go. Of course, the Axe Library has a great resource called Summins. I'm sure everybody is aware of it. But there are also quite a few resources available widely online because a lot of the emotional issues that survivors of sexual trauma deal with are sort of broad and difficult to quantify perhaps with research. A lot of what we pulled from were repeated anecdotal stories from survivors who discussed issues that they personally had had. So when we saw that there were several stories that all sort of mimicked each other, we took all of those stories and sort of compiled them. That was Pittsburgh State University Senior Keelan Edinger, speaking about her Groups project. Regarding sexual trauma, that will be presented at the Human Sexuality Symposium tomorrow.

Pittsburgh State, Jr. Curtis Walters also came by our studios this week to talk about his Groups project. First I asked Curtis to describe what Perifilia is. Is the main thing that differentiates a kink from Perifilia is the fact that it is consent. So consent is the major key. It's everything from like for my own addition, we each chose one Perifilia and there's as many Perifilia's as there are grasses on the ground. It's anything and everything can be a Perifilia. But myself I focused on sexual satism, which is the necessity to cause pain and necessity to cause pain, humiliation, degradation to another individual without their consent. So I had one of the other members of my group focused on sexual transvestism, which was the sexual gratification from dressing in the other genders clothing, which is differentiated

from like gender dysphoria, where it's an actual condition where their gender doesn't match up with their sexuality. But this is just people who like say for example, our male, identify as male, but find sexual release and gratification and dressing as a female. And then we had one about exhibitionism, which is basically the like kind of like the flashers on everything else. And then the last one was about frotterism, which was a very interesting one. It's a very prominent in higher urban areas where you've got trains and where it's basically the obtained gratification from rubbing against unknowing victims. It sounds like very revealing topics. And I was wondering, what kind of researcher, how do you research something that I assume is something or these topics that people usually keep to themselves? Really it's in your right, a lot of people do tend to keep to themselves with a lot of these, especially the victims, because there's a lot, especially in our society, there's

huge victim blaming complex. And where people just feel a lot of shame of, well, me, did I, did I ask for this? And no, they didn't, it's just these people use whoever they can get around. Really some of the best research that I found have been honestly done out of the criminal justice systems, where this is a part of it, or there's been smaller studies that are completed throughout. Like, I know right now one that I did we didn't focus on was things like pedophilia, where there's an ongoing group of people that are actually trying to do better and not offend, where, with sexual satism, it's really not found out until much later. And unfortunately, thanks to things like, like 50 shades of gray, and having that paint a very unrealistic picture about the BDSM community, they've have this misunderstanding and notion that that is normal. The idea of filling out a paper, giving away all your rights, like, I'm going to do whatever

I want to you, that's, that's not a BDSM consenting relationship, that's very much abuse. You can meet and speak with both Caitlin, Eddinger, and Curtis Walters tomorrow at the human sexuality symposium, taking place inside the Overman Student Center here at Pittsburgh State University. That's tomorrow from noon until 2 p.m. The event is open to the public. I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro, and you've been listening to the Crimson and Gold Connection, a production of KRPS. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.