About
LENA CHEN is a Boston-based writer and the author of the blog Sex and the Ivy. She has contributed personal essays and reportage on sex and gender to a variety of online and print publications, including The American Prospect, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald, Glamour, and Salon. She produces Sex Really with Lena Chen for Bedsider.org, a project of The National Campaign To Prevent Teen & Unplanned Pregnancy, and hosts Sexy Times, a web series about health, sex, and relationships debuting in January 2012 on gURL.com, Alloy Digital’s award-winning alternative web portal for adolescent girls.
In August 2006, she started writing Sex and the Ivy as a sophomore at Harvard College. Her first-person accounts of sexual experiences, alienation, and the true state of undergraduate life at the world’s premier academic institution spurred campus discussion, prompted media attention, and garnered a loyal following. Quickly becoming a controversial figure, she has been criticized by some as “morally reprehensible” and praised by others for encouraging frank sexual dialogue. With a monthly readership of 30,000, Lena has been featured in media outlets nationwide, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Boston Globe, Village Voice, Marie Claire, The Washington City Paper, Women’s Health, More Magazine, Forbes, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Time Out New York, New York Press, Forbes, Boston Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, The Improper Bostonian, The Boston Herald, The Los Angeles Times, Harvard Magazine, Audrey Magazine, BUST, Alternet, Jezebel, Feministing, Global Comment, Gawker, Slate, Salon, and MTV. Internationally, she has been covered by Der Spiegel (Germany),Glamour (UK), Cosmopolitan (Australia), Times Higher Education (UK), The Times of India, The Sofia Echo (Bulgaria), The Edmonton Journal (Canada), Publimetro Internacional (Chile), and CLEO (Australia).
Lena graduated from Harvard in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a minor in Studies of Women, Gender, & Sexuality. Her senior thesis chronicled the evolution of virginity norms, explored the rise of the modern American abstinence movement, and formed the basis for the Rethinking Virginity Conference, which she organized as the Women’s Events & Outreach Chair of the Harvard College Queer Students & Allies. She has spoken about feminism, relationships, and healthy sexuality alongside activists like Robin Morgan and Naomi Wolf and before student audiences at Cornell, Brown, Stanford, and Rutgers, among other colleges.
Lena is the co-founder of Feminist Pride Day (formerly Feminist Coming Out Day) and the Feminist Portrait Project, which have since become incorporated into the Feminist Majority Foundation’s national campus programming. Lena has served on the Leadership Council for Bitch Magazine, been recognized as a young feminist leader by More Magazine, and named a Progressive Women’s Voices fellow at the Women’s Media Center. Her current blog, The Chicktionary, is a chronicle of her daily life and likes, as well as all things feminist, queer, or otherwise radical. She lives in the Back Bay.
