From 2017 to 2018, the Arcade section ran a column entitled “Awkward Sex Stories,” which featured anonymously submitted stories from Tulane University students about their various escapades and mishaps in intimacy. These stories remain some of the most consistently read on The Tulane Hullabaloo’s website, which may be due to their humor and occasional raunchiness – their titles include “Mahjong Mommy Mayhem,” “Jalapeño Business” and “Gentle Kinkiness,” among others. In a more general sense, though, we could attribute their popularity to the fact that they fill some niche within our content or some void within our readership.  

This is why The Hullabaloo will briefly revive “Awkward Sex Stories,” on the heels of Sex Week 2025. The following seven stories were submitted by Tulane students via an anonymous form over the course of the past two weeks.  

There is no reason why sex shouldn’t be an area of journalistic coverage. In fact, there is hardly a more important time or place for it to be covered: There is no mandatory sexual education curriculum in Louisiana, the only requirement for educators being that they “emphasize abstinence as the expected social standard.” Only a quarter of Louisiana secondary schools report teaching critical sexual health topics at all. Education about non-heterosexual relationships is even less common, with only 21.7% of Louisiana secondary schools reporting providing information and resources relevant to the sexual health of LGBTQ+ youth. As The Hullabaloo recently reported during Sex Week, discouraging and ignoring the realities of intimacy is not an effective public health strategy. Nor is it beneficial at the level of the individual: Even with proper sex education, wherein conversations around pleasure, consent, bodily sovereignty and power are normalized, the discovery of one’s own self and the negotiation of the boundaries between oneself and others is an inherently awkward process.  

“Awkward” has several meanings. The stories submitted and published in this most recent round of Awkward Sex Stories mostly feature heterosexual relationships, and their awkwardness mostly arises from misunderstandings of social norms and misreadings of social scripts. But for some people, including trans, queer and disabled people, acts of physical intimacy may be awkward in the sense of simply being different, adjusted to the physical possibilities of the bodies involved. In this way, intercourse becomes a form of discourse: Biology, or what is “natural,” fails to directly determine the meaning of sexuality, which is instead constantly reconfigured by the practices that humans actually engage in.  

Here, we hope to contribute to the ongoing discourse happening in dorm rooms, in classrooms, at Sex Week and beyond. While these stories are meant to entertain, they also meant to inform by making clear that sex is not usually accompanied by alluring lighting and appealing angles, as some entertainment may suggest. So, read on, and delight in awkwardness, whatever it is to you.