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!

Thank you for your prayers, which join mine as there is nothing else to be done.

My prayers for the sufferers of the stories unmentionable.

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.

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!