Ask most Australians what they remember from high school sex education and you will get the same wince every time. An awkward video, a banana, a teacher who clearly wanted to be anywhere but there. No consent chat, no discussion about pleasure, and definitely no fun. Most of us walked away knowing more about diagrams than about desire, consent, or where to actually go if something felt off. It is no wonder that many of us grew up treating sexual health like a chore instead of something worth being curious about.
Universities have been rewriting that script since then. Every September, campuses around the country throw open the doors on SEXtember, a proper festival built around sex, consent, and sexual health that looks nothing like the classroom you remember. There is comedy, art, trivia, and honest conversation.
So, What Actually Happens During SEXtember?
SEXtember started at UNSW back in 2019 as a festival run out of the university's Health Promotion Unit, and it has since grown into a national event. The University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, the University of Adelaide, Macquarie University, and the University of Newcastle now run their own campus programs or join in on shared online sessions, meaning students well beyond Sydney get to participate. In recent years the theme has settled on "Safe. Sexy. Smart," which sums up the whole approach rather nicely. You are allowed to have all three at once, and none of them cancel the others out.
Forget a single awkward lecture crammed into one lunchtime slot. Think comedy nights built entirely around the chaos of modern dating, drag trivia, living poetry projects, design and writing competitions, and panel discussions that finally answer the questions nobody dared put their hand up for in high school. Universities Australia even singled out UNSW's program in 2023 as a genuine best-practice example of preventing gendered violence, which is a serious tick of approval for something that also involves a comedian roasting bad Tinder profiles.
Why Turn Sexual Health Into a Party?
Imagine actually looking forward to learning about STI testing. That is the bet universities are making, and the thinking behind it holds up. Shame makes people shut down and stay quiet. Curiosity makes them lean in and ask the question they would normally only trust to a 1am Google search.
There is a real gap to close here too. Chlamydia remains Australia's most diagnosed STI, and roughly half of the cases recorded each year land in the 20 to 29 age bracket, according to the Kirby Institute's most recent national surveillance data. University-aged people sit squarely in the group most likely to need testing and, until fairly recently, least likely to have had an easy, judgement-free place to ask about it. The actual test itself is usually a simple urine sample or a self-collected swab, over in minutes, which makes the ongoing stigma around asking for one almost harder to justify than the test itself.
The Events Actually Worth Turning Up For
Some of what runs during SEXtember genuinely sounds like a great night out, health message completely aside. Paint and sip sessions built around vulva-inspired art. Drag trivia nights. Comedy shows dedicated entirely to dating disasters. A living poetry project where students share their own words on desire, identity and connection, displayed for the whole campus to read.
Then there are the events quietly doing the heavy lifting underneath all that fun. Condom demonstrations, sexual health games and quizzes, and queer-inclusive workshops covering HIV and STI basics arrive in a relaxed, conversational format rather than a lecture theatre. Campus community days bring stallholders, giveaways and free safe sex packs out into the open, right where students already are, instead of tucked away behind a clinic door. Even something as small as a trivia night, mixing sexual health facts in with pop culture questions, quietly does more to normalise the topic than a semester of textbooks ever managed.
The Substance Behind the Sparkle
Underneath the glitter, SEXtember is doing some genuinely serious work. Consent workshops and bystander training sit alongside the comedy nights, teaching students how to step in safely when something looks wrong. International student sessions cover dating norms and consent across different cultures, and dedicated panels dig into contraception, body image and coping with rejection with a lot more warmth than most of us got the first time around. Most campuses also back the festival with dedicated support services for students affected by gendered violence, so the fun sits alongside a genuine safety net rather than replacing one.
None of it feels like homework, and that is entirely the point. When sexual health information turns up somewhere students actually want to be, more of them show up, ask questions and walk away better informed. That beats another pamphlet nobody reads, every single time.
What This Teaches the Rest of Us?
You do not need a student card to borrow this approach. The biggest lesson from SEXtember is not any single event, it is the idea sitting underneath all of them: sexual health gets easier the moment you stop treating it like a guilty secret.
In practice, that means booking in for regular STI testing the same way you would a dental check-up, not only when something feels off. It means having the slightly awkward conversation with a partner before it turns into a much more awkward one. And it means giving yourself permission to actually enjoy the process, whether that is a beginner-friendly kit for getting to know your own body properly or a decent lubricant that makes safer sex feel like an upgrade instead of a compromise.
If body confidence is part of what has been holding you back, SEXtember's whole ethos travels well past campus. Confidence and good information tend to arrive together, not one after the other, and neither one needs a lecture theatre to take hold.
Carry the Energy Past September
Universities only get one month with a marketing budget behind this, but the mindset does not need to clock off when SEXtember does. Keep asking questions. Keep booking the tests. Keep treating pleasure and health as teammates instead of opposites, long after the drag trivia wraps up for the year. If you want a personal version to keep the momentum going, we already mapped out a full month of Sextember challenges for exactly that.
ClubX has spent years backing exactly this kind of shame-free, curiosity-first approach, well before any university started throwing festivals for it. Wherever you first learned the lesson, it holds up everywhere else too. Curiosity beats shame, every single time.
