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Sunday, December 4, 2022

Institutions of Lower Learning

 

As if you needed any further evidence that even our most prestigious institutions of higher learning have degenerated into woke indoctrination mills aimed at deconstructing the moral, intellectual, and cultural underpinnings of our civilization, a new course catalog for Princeton University reveals that the Ivy League school will begin offering its students courses on BDSM and fetishism next year.

As colleges and universities all over the Western world hasten to “decolonize” their curricula in order to erase the magnificent legacy of no-longer-relevant Dead White Males™ such as Will Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, they offer, as alternatives, courses like Princeton’s “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” both of which students (or their parents) paying $57,000 in tuition can look forward to in 2023.

“Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives because of the underground elements of the community,” reads the jargon-bloated course description. What will students be doing in the course? Why, they will “consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera,” of course.

Nothing expands the mind and prepares one to become a productive citizen of society quite like surveying the personal ephemera of BDSM enthusiasts.

Students of the Black + Queer in Leather course will be required to read such classic works of scholarship as The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography by Ariane Cruz and A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Mireille Miller-Young.

In “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” a course which impressively manages to combine the Left’s obsessions with perversion and anti-Westernism, students will be reading, among other works, On the Worship of the Fetish Gods by Charles De Brosses and “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” by Karl Marx.

With a reading load like that, who’s got time to trudge through Shakespeare?

“This course introduces students to the anthropology of religion and a key debate of the field on the fetish,” the Anthropology of Religion course description reads. “Students will learn about the colonial history of the study of religion and the role of fetishism therein.” Ah, colonial fetishism – now there’s a neglected field worthy of its own degree program.

But wait – there’s more! as the old infomercial sales pitch used to go. Students also “will gain the tools to critically intervene in ongoing conversations about race, sexuality, cultural difference, and decolonization by becoming familiar with debates on fetishism in anthropology, critical theory, and Black and queer studies.”

It’s difficult – okay, impossible – to envision just what uses these courses will have for students once they graduate from college and attempt to enter into the working world – unless they enter the intellectually-degraded and ideologically-straitjacketed field of academia. Are employers now eagerly scouting for potential employees who are “familiar with debates” on fetishism and decolonization? Workers who have “the tools to critically intervene in ongoing conversations about race, sexuality, cultural difference, and decolonization”? Not specifically, but woke Human Resources departments everywhere are looking for employees who have the cultural Marxist bona fides to fit right into the new corporate culture of anti-racism and LGBT allyship.

By the way, this is hardly the first time fetishism and BDSM (that’s “bondage, discipline, dominance, and submission,” for you uneducated non-elites) have made inroads into what used to be considered higher education. In 2020, Indiana University Bloomington hosted an annual “sex fest” on campus, which featured “kink,” sex toys, and BDSM demonstrations. In 2019, Ohio State University hosted a “Sex Week” during the week of Valentine’s Day (how romantic), which included an event on how to use sex toys, as well as a Planned Parenthood-sponsored talk on abortion (because, you know, sex sometimes results in the unfortunate byproduct of an unwanted clump of cells). Since 2012, Harvard University – founded in 1636 to train clergy for the new commonwealth – has hosted annual Sex Week workshops on such stimulating topics as “What, What, In the Butt?: Anal Sex 101” and “Kinks & Fetishes & and Taboos, Oh My!”

All snarkiness aside, the tragic truth of all this campus kink is that the modern university – in fact, all public (and arguably most private) education now beginning as early as pre-K – is no longer a setting for the expansion of minds, or the transmittal of our civilizational legacy, or even the development of career skills. It is now – in addition to disseminating the divisive racism of Critical Race Theory – about normalizing, legitimizing, and even celebrating transgressive sexual practices designed to smash the supposed oppression of bourgeois morality, and a gender ideology designed to dissolve the nuclear family. The undisguised Progressive agenda now is revolution against all of the West’s civilizational norms, at the heart of which is a Judeo-Christian sexual morality that clashes with the anti-family, godless collectivism of today’s cultural Marxists.

Their corrosive racial and gender ideologies have infected even the math and hard science departments, medical schools, and law schools. In light of this, parents and students need to rethink the value of pursuing “higher education” until this educational indoctrination is confronted and stamped out wherever it rears its ugly head. A good place to start would be the elimination of campus programs and courses promoting sexual perversity.

A civilization hell-bent on undermining itself cannot survive. It’s time for a revolution of the unwoke against the subversive elites and the institutions they dominate which are fundamentally transforming our social and political landscapes.

From FrontPage Mag, 12/4/22