In mid-September, what was ostensibly Playboy’s annual list of the top party schools surfaced online — only this time, their message was a bit different. Instead of ranking colleges based on their propensity for binge drinking and general licentiousness, Playboy’s list gave top honors to those schools that worked to promote awareness of sexualized violence and consent on campus. Assumed to be authentic, the list garnered significant attention online, as articles published by sites like the Huffington Post, Upworthy and BroBible all praised the typically illicit publication for taking a moral stance on the issue.

So when it was revealed that, in fact, a team of activists from Baltimore had published the list under Playboy’s name and created fake versions of The Huffington Post and the like to spread the word, the ensuing reactions were mixed. The magazine itself declined to comment beyond denying its involvement with the project, but many, including employees of those news outlets also pranked, didn’t mind being duped; many responded quite positively to the hoax. It may have been the most confusing activism stunt of 2013, but it got BroBible writer Andy Moore to write, “The world is safe for bros to be feminists too.” And by that measure, Hannah Brancato and Rebecca Nagle’s spoof was a wild success.

Brancato and Nagle are the co-organizers of FORCE, an art activism group seeking to initiate conversations about sexual violence in the U.S. and promote consent between partners. The duo’s talk, “Upsetting Rape Culture,” outlined their efforts thus far and challenged those in Hallock Auditorium on Saturday to find avenues for action on Oberlin’s campus. “We believe that a more difficult and honest conversation in the United States needs to happen,” Brancato said. “We envision a world where sex is empowering and pleasurable rather than coercive and violent.”

The event was split between a presentation and activities that engaged the audience. Brancato and Nagle began by explaining several of the group’s major projects, their implementation and the logic behind them. In their first web prank, “Pink Loves Consent,” FORCE created a fake website which masqueraded as the Victoria’s Secret homepage while promoting a line of anti-rape lingerie. Though it received attention from a specific subset of consumers and social media users, Brancato and Nagle were less than satisfied with the project’s reach.

From there, FORCE’s “art actions” only grew in ambition. Former U.S. Representative Todd Akin’s incendiary quote last year about “legitimate rape” triggered a firestorm of backlash from the media, senators and citizens alike. FORCE took their response onto Akin’s home turf: Partnering with activism group Luminous Intervention, they projected the words “rape is rape” and quotes from survivors of abuse onto the steps of the Capitol during the 2012 national election.

The most conspicuous undertaking, though, was the Playboy hoax. Brancato and Nagle explained how their highlighting of progressive sexual health initiatives on college campuses was an attempt to mobilize students at other schools to follow suit.

“What we learned is that we needed to have really solid follow-up built into the campaigns,” Brancato said. “We want to generate buzz, but we want to do something with that energy. This time, it was a little more embedded in the project.”

That embedded follow-up came in the form of the “Consent Revolution Awards,” a contest that invited college students to submit photographs of consent-promoting actions for a chance to acquire “fame and free condoms.” UCLA took home the gold for their “7,000 in Solidarity” campaign (tagline: “There are no blurred lines when it comes to consent”), but FORCE made honorable mentions of efforts like Connecticut College’s “V-Men” video and Whitman College’s “Ask For It Day.”

The other side of Saturday’s “Upsetting Rape Culture” event was more Oberlin-centric. Brancato and Nagle periodically diverged from their lecture to engage with students through games and exercises designed to take a reading of rape culture’s prevalence at Oberlin. Students responded to a series of questions about their views on rape and consent by sitting or standing, and later asked each other a variety of questions to which their partner had to respond, “No.” These activities explored the difficulties associated with defining consent and practicing rejection in a real-life scenario.

Students then brainstormed ways to better promote consent on the Oberlin campus. Suggestions included rethinking Safer Sex Week and, in particular, its culminating dance and placing informative materials in the ’Sco and other places where unwanted sexual encounters are more likely to occur.

The pair concluded their talk with a discussion of their latest effort, the so-called “Monument Project.” Monuments, according to Brancato and Nagle, help reconnect victims of trauma with their community. As such, the campaign aims to create a permanent monument for survivors of sexual abuse.

“We live in a culture where we know how to publicly shame survivors of sexual violence, but we don’t know how to publicly support them,” Nagle said. “The existing monuments on the [Washington, D.C. National] Mall are places where our nation remembers our history, we mourn loss and tragedy, we integrate some violent things that have happened into the narratives we tell ourselves. We think that that needs to happen with sexual violence.”

So far, FORCE has created temporary monuments to this effect — floating a poem about rape down the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and assembling quilts comprised of survivors’ stories in Baltimore and other major cities. Their work has brought together hundreds of survivors and their supporters in a public display of solidarity and a call to action. Brancato and Nagle believe their work, however, is far from over.

“Community response to rape and abuse has to change,” Brancato said. “In small circles, we have to get better at it — in friend groups, in families, in religious communities, in colleges. And then all the way out to the scale of the media… [and] the way that our legal system deals with rape. Laws can change, but then people’s attitudes have to actually shift.”