Behind the screen: Student sex columnists hide behind pseudonyms. (Photo: Associated Press)

College is back in session, students are having sex—and those willing to document the extracurricular activity are in high demand. In Sex and the University, University of Tampa professor Daniel Remold describes college sex columnists as “rock stars.” Student sex writing alumns Julia Allison (Georgetown), Natalie Krinsky (Yale), and Lena Chen (Harvard) have parlayed their campus confessionals into, respectively, a stint as Star Magazine’s editor-at-large, a semi-autobiographical YA novel, and Bill O'Reilly's on-air designation as a “skank.” But lurking beneath these campus celebs are another class of student sex journalists—those too timid to reveal their identities to their own classmates, much less O'Reilly.

Across the country, “the amount of student sex columnists writing anonymously or pseudonymously is still relatively low,” Reimold says. But Washington-area college rags have cleared their column inches for several of the unnamed. Last year, anonymous sex writing graced the pages of the George Washington University Hatchet, the American University Eagle, and the Towson Towerlight.

Of course, writing openly about sex is not without risk, particularly in reputation-conscious Washington. Many former sex columnists “still slightly regret writing the columns under their real names,” Reimold told me. Post-graduation, the columns—and “the ludicrous assumptions people make about students who write them”—follow the former sex writers “in job interviews, graduate school applications, and first and second dates.” Pseudonymous sex writers are willing to sacrifice the fame—and the clips—for the chance to dish intimately without incident.

But sometimes, it's the papers that agree to publish these anonymous columns that are really getting screwed. So every Monday afternoon, join us for another cautionary tale from the world of anonymous campus sex writing! First up: When you don't know who to blame for painful penetration in print.

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Last September, American University students Maxwell Hillcrest, Amber Sparkles, and Buster Darkhole—not their real names—teamed up to pen an anonymous sex column for the American University Eagle. The column launched, fittingly, with a warning against anonymous sex: “It’s three in the morning. You have it inside you right now. It kind of hurts. You’ve had one too many cups of jungle juice. You think his name is Andrew, but you’re not really sure.”

American University’s feminist community read the scene as more than just bad sex. They assembled to cry “rape”—they just didn’t know who to cry it to. “I sent an email. I never got a response,” says K. Travis Ballie, one student who attempted to engage with the columnists on the depiction of a date-rape-in-progress. Even though the sex columnists’ identities were “an open secret” on campus, “I didn't know where the lines of communication were to voice my concerns,” Ballie says.

The Eagle staff was similarly confused---by why people were filing complaints to begin with. The paper's response to the fracas included a byline-less letter from the editors dismissing its critics as “baseless,” “unwarranted,” and “silly,” and noting that the column was OK'd by several female editors.

Carmen Rios, a junior who publicly criticized the column, wasn't satisfied by the releasing of demographics. “Their response to a lot of our concerns was like that---'The people writing this column are two gay men and one woman.' That doesn't mean anything to me,” says Rios. She would have preferred names. “I think people really hesitated to speak up, because when you criticize an anonymous writer, you feel like you're just falling into their trap,” she says. “People know that you can't just write a column like that at AU without getting a lot of criticism. And maybe that's a good thing.”

The Eagle has devoted inches to some controversial opinion columnists before---with the expectation that they’ll publicly weather the controversies they incite under their own bylines. In May, then-Eagle columnist Alex Knepper defended his own rumination on jungle juice-influenced sex (“any woman who heads to [a frat] party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex”) all the way to the CBS Early Show.

“Columnists are, in their own way, somewhat independent from the newspaper,” says Charlie Szold, Eagle editor in chief. “When you have a columnist get into trouble, if they’re named, they can field criticisms themselves.” But when an anonymous sex columnist (or three) drums up controversy, the newspaper must take a more active responsibility for the opinions of its columnists—even when those opinions aren’t meant to reflect the views of the paper.

“I’m not a huge fan of anonymity,” Szold admits. “We want our writers to be accountable for what they write.” So this year, the paper debuted a sex column written under the honest-to-goodness bylines of Tara Culp-Ressler and Ryan Carter. The pair have chosen to navigate safer territory than waking up with a stranger’s penis inside of you: Their first column is about the importance of wearing a condom.