The New York Times, maybe not unsurprisingly, recruits subscribers through college emails with the offer of limited free access. Today’s offering, from the cover of Sunday’s Book Review brought the headline, Sex and God at Yale, by Nathan Harden, from a review titled, “An Innocent in the Ivy League” by Hannah Rosin. Of course, this is all old stuff for a NYT reviewer. Sex Week at Yale is so passe’ that Rosin needs to tell us that this has all been deplored before and that next year the whole thing will be toned to a simple sex ed. level, without the sexually hectic hijinks. Perhaps this is really because the “Can You Top This?” nature of the event has finally exhausted all fresh and unusual opportunities for debauchery.
Apparently Harden’s book tells all and if you don’t really want to know, there are much softer explanations of the book sans titillation or nausea, one in interview form in yesterday’s Inside Higher Education, elsewhere on First Things and this looks to be the book of the early fall season for either those inclined to be outraged or for those who like to mock them. The New York Times caters to the latter and showing its sophistication, Rosin really wants you to know, sort of rub your nose in things you don’t want to know, as if you ought to think of all of this as reality’s version of natural satire. Mostly, then she can be condescending about Nathan Harden,
Like many home-schoolers, Harden is a true American eccentric. He quit before he finished high school, got a G.E.D. and spent his interim years drifting: loading cow manure for the gardening department at Walmart, working as a baggage handler for United and as a lounge singer in Florida, and volunteering with a medical relief charity. Somewhere in there he found his true love and, almost on a whim, married. Harden’s accounts of his itinerant travels are in some ways the most entertaining parts of the book, although he takes pains to avoid seeming too world-weary so that when he arrives on campus he can be truly, deeply shocked.
Then what follows is truly deeply shocking and this is just the review with little quoted bits, not the book nor even Sex Week itself, which if you’ve read about it seems designed by the wise and wonderful at Yale to kill any innocence or moral inclination any arriving student might have. I suspect that what Harden was trying to show was that he was no home-schooled rube and than anyone not inured to what now passes for normal on college campuses is going to be truly, deeply shocked. What aroused me to write was this portion of the review,
In arguing against pornography and the loose sexual culture, Harden is generally protective and patriarchal but in an idiom that resembles Andrea Dworkin’s. The problem with the hookup culture is that it breeds sexual violence, he argues. “Rape is rape. It’s the hideous, hidden reality behind the hookup culture,” he writes. The only problem is, Sex Week has always had the sound approval of campus feminist groups, with an exception or two where a film has proved a shade too violent.
Andrea Dworkin? But Harden is not wrong. An increase in rape is the reality behind hook-up culture, whether the “legitimate” rape we’ve been hearing so much about this week or the cultural pressure to conform inherent in campus life that Tom Wolfe examined in I am Charlotte Simmons and which any parent with open eyes hopes his child will resist. Date-rape, facilitated by drugs or drinking or even humiliation, is surely just as damaging to the human soul as rape where a woman has the capacity to resist. What is the best response to that last line of Rosin’s, that campus feminist groups are in full approval of Sex Week? Why? What’s wrong with those women? Considered with this, abortion is a logical extension of the degradation of women; how they must hate themselves.
I can leave you with this, from The Daily Beast, in an article written by two female Yale students, and maybe it is the good news. Don’t get me wrong, they also have no use for innocence, but they also say, “Those things did happen, during Sex Week at Yale: a 10-day event held biennially that most students don’t really attend because they have other stuff to do. Like go to class.”
August 25th, 2012 | 1:11 am
Kate, those Daily Beast Yale misses Olivarius and Gordon are as clueless and as arrogant as they come. They’re all about MOCKING Mr. Harden. And what do they think that accomplishes? For feminism? For sophisticated Yale-dom? They seriously want every guy that comes to Yale to be too cool to voice his repugnance–thought-through or not–at this Sex-Week junk? Junk SPONSORED by Yale University, even if not so many students bother with it? And then they think they’re righteous for the times they huffed and puffed against, and, look out, THREATENED TO SUE a cretin fraternity that publically boasted about their getting the gals to take it anal? But it’s Harden who gets mocked by name? DE-LU-SION-AL.
And yet, the conventional wisdom. And young Yalie, you’d better wise up. This Harden has issues. So Olivarius and Gordon, who were on the Womens’ Center Board, after all, say.
Consider, if you will, their bizarrely bifurcated view of pornography: A) Everyone now watches bazillions of hours of it, so come on, Sex Week has to ‘unpack it,’ you know, like fine literature! B)How awful it is that guys get their ideas of sex and what women like from it!
Uh, what if what we “unpack” is that its operation is sub-rational and its impact pretty bad for women? What then, sophisticated Yale misses? Do you seriously imagine a reality–against which you damn this one–in which women can “have enough power to control our own image” but without laws restricting and ramping-back porn? Without morays turned back against public titilation, and especially at a place like Yale? Morays openly expressed by guys, such as Harden?
Oh, but we’ll have the lawyers! We won’t need no stinkin’ morays, if we can just “raise” the guys “consciousnesses” to…at least FEAR THE LAWYERS.
My guess is knowing of his stance, Olivarius and Gordon wouldn’t give a guy like Harden the time of day at a party, and yet, as for those guys who somehow hint that a bit of “humiliation” might be forthcoming…well, that’s a more complicated thing, and not one that we can reasonably expect any individual college woman, even the ones who heartily agree with op-eds by Olivarius and Gordon, to take a categorical stand against.
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P.S. Kate, when you write “Rape is the reality behind hook-up culture,” the grief you could get in response is, “What does that sentence MEAN?” “THE reality?” Because plenty of young women enjoy their hook-ups, and never get raped. So, you need a response to that, or a different way of expressing what you mean.
Because I always offer rhetorical advice after an ornate rant!
August 25th, 2012 | 6:46 am
Carl, yes, that was a pure rant blast actually fueled by unrepeatable stories recently heard. I’ll touch up the rhetoric a bit, I promise. Thank you for taking apart the Olivarius and Gordon piece. That turned up in a Google search when I got to the end of my essay and wondered what else was out there on the subject. It was too complicated and sophomoric to venture into, so I took my comfort where I could.
Who cares about private consensual sex? Though the modern pressure put on the young for that has created other problems; some mores work better than others. This is different, Yale or other colleges making sex a public event, promoting risky practices and setting up an expectation of a no-holds barred sexual standard, both on campus and in society by extension. That does harm and causes confusion in the young. Apparently, one pleasure of a large university is that you can just go to class and find a culture within the system that allows you private morality, but you have to avoid the dorms. There, everyone is learning the lessons the college offers as if the campus were one big sex ed. experiment. Rosin, Olivarius and Gordon probably learned their smirks there.
One thing that makes Olivarius, Gordon and even Rosin laughable is that dichotomy between the license they applaud and the kind of respect a female professional has to insist on in the workplace to be taken seriously. Wouldn’t they really rather work with someone like Nathan Harden than with the guy for whom a bazillion hours of porn has set other expectations?
I wonder how much of the Harden book I’ll be able to read? I could not get through Charlotte Simmons, although I thought it was brilliant. The young told me it was spot on, which is such a pity. I suspect academia will have to mock Harden considerably, because it is also spot on.
August 25th, 2012 | 10:18 pm
Kate, I was saying that mine was the rant, not yours!
My prayers for the sufferers of the stories unmentionable.
August 26th, 2012 | 9:08 am
Carl, there is plenty of rant to go around.
Thank you for your prayers, which join mine as there is nothing else to be done.
August 26th, 2012 | 6:55 pm
I’d thought that any description of our declilning morals and ethics might, finally, be best described as banal, trite, and boring. But, perhas that’s not the case.
Having largely abandoned republican principles, and primarily the one that recognizes our relationship to God, we turn toward ‘democracy’ which is always and everytime “designed to make the competitions of ignorant individuals balance each other out.”
August 27th, 2012 | 9:51 am
Hi Kate,
Thanks for mentioning the book. What neither the Times review nor my former classmates’ article reveals is that for-profit interests, including a sex toy company and porn stars were back in Yale classrooms this year, lecturing as experts on human sexuality. This was during Sex Week 2012–supposedly reformed and toned-down. I’m also amazed at the dismissive attitude toward glamorized sexual violence that many self-described feminists espouse when commenting on the extreme porn screened at Yale. For me, it was a shock and an outrage.
- Nathan Harden
August 27th, 2012 | 3:53 pm
You are very welcome, Mr. Harden. I hope your book is widely read and that it has a beneficial effect on college campuses. However, the focus of shock and outrage there seems to run counter our own. How did higher education get so much of the low in it? Perhaps colleges that promised to be in loco parentis muddled their Latin with colloquial Spanish and thought they were standing as loco parents.
Feminism: once women embrace the idea that they have a right and a duty to themselves to kill their infants in order to be equal to men, then anything goes. Everything else actually falls short of that rather ultimate amorality. “To be like men” when you have a low opinion of men is to embrace the image you have of man as low and accept that as your norm. This is the problem some of the women/feminists who are reviewing your book have. “Aren’t men awful? And we are equal to them!” It is confusing.
If your parents home schooled, as I did, attempting to instill a sense of the nobility of mankind, that goodness was the standard for behavior, that morality mattered, then no wonder you were shocked at what you found on campus. I hope you do not get hit too much. In the last 24 hours we seem to have been slammed by spam. Maybe that is coincidental or maybe it has to do with what Carl Scott wrote most recently in his songbook. Oh well.
You have stirred things up. All the best and again, I hope the book is a great success!
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