Iqra’i

Things I never expected to hear in the dining hall: “The female orgasm will be today at four o’clock.”

Sex Week is an interdisciplinary sex education program designed to pique students’ interest through creative, interactive, and exciting programming.

No. No, it’s really not.

I am all in favor of sex education. College students knowing how to avoid pregnancy and STDs is a wonderful thing. (Nothing, I’m afraid, will ever rid the human race of the awkwardness that accompanies sex, and I’m not sure I’d be in favor if it could. There’s something to be said for a little endearing fumbling — provided you eventually figure things out.)

But the problem with Sex Week (okay, one of the problems with Sex Week) is this: It’s not about safe sex. It’s not even about — God forbid! — virtuous sex. It is, very fundamentally, about the glorification of an emotionally vacant culture which emphasizes body over mind, carnality over romance, and objectification over any kind of true connection.

The feminist objection to Yale’s hookup culture is that it lends itself to the dehumanization of women. This is true but vacuous. Hookup culture leads to the dehumanization of the human, to the separation between love and sex, to the idea that the most intimate things we do with our bodies are no more meaningful than scratching an itch. But can we undo it?

Will quotes the bit of Burke that I was planning to:

“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature…”

We may sit here all we like and implore Sex Week and porn culture to let us put her clothes back on — but even if we succeed, the damage has been done. She has been stripped bare in the public square and exposed to the stares of the mob. Life requires pleasant lies. She may be but a woman, and as a woman but an animal, and yet to treat her as one is the height of vulgarity.

Like a woman, life has her powders and paints to hide blemishes in public. With her lover she can be plain and still found beautiful, but no true gentleman would want the world to see his lover as he does. To be a conservative, I think, is to recognize the necessity of pleasant lies: not to mislead us, but to make us love before we understand.