If you couldn’t make Harvard
University’s recent 4th annual Sex Week, you missed out on some stimulating
fare. It boasted free seminars and workshops with titillating titles such as “What
What in the Butt: Anal Sex 101,” “Fifty Shades of False: Kink 101,” and “Love @
First Swipe: Online Hookup Culture.” Yes, that
Harvard.
Open to the public, Sex Week is
coordinated each year by a student-run organization called Sexual Health
Education & Advocacy Throughout Harvard College (SHEATH). Sex Week, the
group’s website states,
“intends to promote a week of programming that is interdisciplinary,
thought-provoking, scholastic, innovative, and applicable to student
experiences in order to promote a holistic understanding of sex and sexuality.”
That’s their way of pretending that instructing students in the thought-provoking,
holistic use of butt plugs and dental dams is academically legitimate.
Sexperts from a local adult toy
shop led the anal sex seminar, which sought to “dispel myths about anal sex and
give you insight into why people do it and how to do it well.” Parents shell
out as much as $58,000 a year
to Harvard to give their kids at least the aura of a top-shelf education; somehow
I doubt that excelling in Anal Sex 101 is what they had in mind.
Also listed on the schedule,
which is riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, was “Brown Girlz Do it
Well: a Queer Diaspora Remix,” a workshop designed to “situate our personal
narratives within broader systems of racism, casteism, classism, islamophobia,
and imperialism.” Call me Old School, but what college students need is a lot less indulgence in their own personal
narratives and a lot more immersion
in the narratives of the great storytellers who shaped our civilization. They
need a lot less indoctrination in grievances and victimization, and a lot more exposure
to the sublime heights that the human spirit has attained in art, science, and
philosophy. They need to stop ghettoizing themselves according to racial and
gender categories and start identifying with our common humanity. That’s what a
liberal arts education should be about.
Many Harvard students no doubt are getting an impressive education, but
the university isn’t doing its reputation any favors with workshops like “Virginity
& Abstinence,” which posed the burning question, “does viriginity [sic]
exist?” or “Romance on the Rocks: Alochol [sic] and Consent.” Does one really
need to take a seminar to grasp that drinking and sex go together like a horse
and carriage?
To their credit, some at Harvard resisted
the siren song of kink. Student Molly Wharton told The College Fix,
I do question the
amount of time and resources that went into planning and funding these events,
some of which are downright vulgar, at a place like Harvard. I can’t imagine
that there are not more worthwhile educational programs and initiatives to
which Harvard’s resources should be devoted.
Nailed it. But SHEATH's
co-president Kirin Gupta defended
the workshop this way: “Saying we don’t need it is like saying we don’t need
sex education, or should have abstinence-only education, or that people should
feel ashamed for doing whatever it is that’s part of their sexual practice.”
Not quite. There’s a difference
between sex education and the promotion of a narcissistic obsession with sexuality.
As for shaming anyone: frankly, our culture needs
some shaming now and then – not for what we do in private, but for our increasingly
perverse willingness to put our private lives on display in the public square.
Criticizing the program, however, gets
you smeared as an unevolved bigot: “The conservative backlash speaks to the
latent homophobia that society thinks so often it has gotten over, and has not,”
says Gupta. “It speaks to these residual prejudices that people [have] when
faced with a reality they’re not willing to acknowledge or respect.”
No, it doesn’t. Objecting to Sex
Week is not about the fear and loathing of homosexuality or kinkiness; it is simply
about questioning the program’s appropriateness and academic value, particularly
at an institution of supposedly higher learning that began in 1636 as a
seminary.
Harvard University doesn’t have a
formal mission statement, but Harvard College, the undergraduate program, does.
It is committed to, in part, “the advancement and education of youth in all
manner of good literature, arts, and sciences.” Sorry, but S&M, “feminist
porn,” and “queer spoken word groups” do not fall under that umbrella.
I’m no prude. I used to
work in the porn industry. But when an institution as esteemed (rightly or
wrongly) as Harvard offers a slate of workshops featuring, for example, “the
demystification of sexual fetishes,” the school doesn’t merely look silly; it
is giving its imprimatur to a cultural obsession with seeking personal identity
in the shallows of our libido rather than in the depths of our soul.
(This article originally appeared here on The Federalist, 11/19/14)
