Porn Generation

by Ben Shapiro

  UCLA’s Dykstra Hall was one of the nation’s first co-ed dorms, established in 1960. As early as 1994, the administration set up a dispensing machine for condoms. Nora Zamichow of the Los Angeles Times pronounces that the “degree of casual contact between the sexes [at Dykstra] is stunning.”22 It’s not too easy to stun an L.A. Times reporter.

  Marisa, a twenty-two-year-old UCLA senior, lived in one of the nicer dorms on campus with three roommates. She says that contraception was “definitely available,” and specifically cites “a big fair at the beginning of the year in the dorms. It is mainly for freshmen to get acquainted with college and dorm life. I go every year... the Student Health Advocate [SHA] table was handing out colored condoms.”23 The SHAs, by the way, have office hours in UCLA’s dorms, during which they hand out free over-the-counter contraceptives.24 Think of it as improving convenience in an on-demand world.

  Marisa also recalls a time when one of her roommates allowed her boyfriend to move into their room. “He even brought his stuff, like clothes and things,” she remembers. “He slept with her, in the same bed,” with three other girls in the same room.

  Those who protest dorm policies that encourage this zoo-like environment are ostracized and ridiculed. In 1998, five Orthodox Jewish students sued Yale University, asking that they be allowed to live off-campus. They objected to the sexual atmosphere of the dorms; in particular, they weren’t happy with co-ed toilets and showers, sex manuals and condom availability, and required “safe sex lectures” for freshmen.

  Instead of accommodating their request, the Yale administration ripped into the students, stating that dorm life was “a central part of Yale’s education.”25 Richard Levin, the President of the Yale Hillel (a campus Jewish organization), stated that if the students weren’t willing to live in the dorms, they shouldn’t have come to Yale in the first place: “Why come to a university like this one if you won’t open your mind to new ideas and new perspectives?” he queried. “This is not a place where people who close themselves off to the world can thrive.” In the end, the students paid for campus housing and then lived off campus.26

  In recent years, new and more disturbing arrangements have been developing. Many campuses have created co-ed dorm rooms, where students of opposite sexes share actual living space. Haverford College in Pennsylvania has employed such a strategy; their aim is to “replicate a family situation, where students share a home with separate bedrooms,” though administrators concede that boyfriends/girlfriends have taken advantage of the situation.27

  NYU also offers co-ed space. “I think it’s a valid option that should be open to consenting students,” says Lucia. “I don’t think it represents an oversexualization at all. It’s just universities needing to keep up with the pace of social culture.”28

  This is the familiar market argument: Society is leading universities, not the other way around. There’s a market for sexual freedom, so why not let the universities cater to it?

  Such an argument ignores all pretense of social responsibility. If society is moving in a more and more perverse direction, is it not the job of the universities to remain a shining beacon of truth? After all, that’s what the universities proclaim themselves to be. UCLA’s motto is Fiat Lux, or “let there be light.” NYU’s is Perstare et Praestare, “to persevere and to excel.” Harvard: Veritas, “truth.”

  And yet these same universities run from the idea of objective truth in pursuit of feel-good, “live and let live” morality. It is strange that in their flight from the very notion of objective truth, the universities have anointed their own version of “tolerant” truth as sacrosanct. Hence the current renaissance of speech codes designed to restrict any mode of thought other than the one promulgated by the universities. Columnist David Limbaugh reported in 2003, “Some have estimated that as many as 90 percent of American universities have adopted such codes in one form or another.”29

  Most speech codes are vague enough to sound plausibly open-minded. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the tolerance espoused by the universities invariably extends to those with traditional moral views. University of Colorado at Boulder expects students “to join together to ensure a climate of diversity where everyone values individual and group differences, respects the perspectives of others, and communicates openly to attain the best education.”30 At Harvard Law, students are informed that they are joining “a community ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change. The rights and responsibilities exercised within the community must be compatible with these qualities.”31

  Standards don’t come much vaguer than this. It’s not difficult to see how quoting Leviticus or Saint Paul could inhibit the “dignity of others,” especially in an environment where the law school dean condemns military recruitment on campus due to their “unjust” policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Other universities are clearer about their goals. University of California at Berkeley “opposes” speech that contains “harassment, intimidation, exploitation, and other forms of discrimination that are based on race, ethnicity, sex, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and other personal characteristics.”32 Kansas State University avers, “Every person, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability, shall be treated with respect and dignity.”33

  The universities have instituted a new right: the right not to be offended. When tolerance of every sort of behavior reigns, those who believe in standards and rules are destined for castigation.

  Professors as parents

  Universities embody another characteristic that social liberals love: replacement of parents as authority figures. And these new, improved “parents” aren’t likely to give you rules to follow or goals to reach. They’ll sanction whatever you decide to do. In fact, they go further than sanctioning licentious behavior: they actively proselytize for it. College for the porn generation is a whole new, fresh, exciting world—a world without rules.

  Since the 1960s, the inmates have been running the asylums. When students protested administrative power during that tumultuous period, administrators and professors caved in, in some cases even cheering on the rowdy young idiots. Robert Bork, who was a professor of law at Yale during this time, recalls, “That was the pattern across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s: violent rhetoric and violent action from the fascists of the New Left, followed by the abject moral surrender of academic officials the public had a right to expect would defend the universities and the orderly processes of their governance.”34

  Many of the student radicals of the 1960s are now the professors and administrators at universities. Their views have not moderated. Just as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) proclaimed in their 1962 Port Huron Statement, the current goal of the professoriate is “finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”35 As Bork comments, “This translated as foul language, sexual promiscuity, marijuana and hard drugs, and disdain for the military and for conventional success.”36

  In many ways, nothing has changed. Professors are still rebelling against traditional morality—only this time, they’re leading young people down the path to acceptance of deviancy and rejection of faith and family. Sexual experimentation is taught and encouraged. According to Princeton University sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, those who are in serious relationships in college are missing out. She says that it is important for “people to protect themselves physically and emotionally,” but “disagrees with moralists” who condemn sexual experimentation. 37 “I don’t think we can come out and discourage sexual experimentation,” agrees Elizabeth Paul, an associate professor of psychology at New Jersey College.38

  As soon as students arrive on campus, they’re introduced to the world of sexual self-awareness by the administration. “I remember very distinctly there was a sex-orientation during the orientation over the summer before enterin
g freshman year,” says a recent NYU grad, Doug.39 “They had a professional sex therapist or something come demonstrate everything from condoms to dental dams.”40 Lucia remembers the situation as well: “I remember the whole orientation being pretty sexually charged in general, but one of the workshops towards sexual education and knowing the resources the university makes available—resources like free condoms and dental dams, counseling, crisis resources, pamphlets. At orientation specifically, we played games, watched demonstrations, and the workshop itself was conducted by the head of the sexual health center.”41

  “All that and a box of press-on nails”

  At UC–Berkeley, one class involved male and female students discussing their sexual fantasies, porn star lecturers, strip-club field trips with instructor sexual demonstrations, and class exercises in which students photographed their own genitalia. This class was keeping with the students-as-teachers theme of the 1960s radicals; as columnist John Leo wrote, “A lot of educational theory says that teacher-led classes are too hierarchical. They imply that teachers know more than students. In student led-classes there aren’t any teachers, just ‘coordinators’ and ‘facilitators,’ and everybody is on the same level.” Everyone in the class received two credits.42

  Courses on porn have become commonplace around the country. Universities that have offered such courses include Kansas University;43 San Francisco State University; University of Massachusetts–Amherst; Chapman University; Northwestern University; and University of California–Santa Cruz.44 At Wesleyan University, they describe a porn course almost as a social good: “The pornography we study is an art of transgression which impels human sexuality toward, against, and beyond the limits which have traditionally defined civil discourses and practices. . . . Our examination accordingly includes the implication of pornography in so-called perverse practices such as voyeurism, bestiality, sadism, and masochism.”45 The list goes on.

  Other universities use their sex courses as a formula for postmodern radicalism. Women’s Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies departments, specifically designed to fight social traditionalism, dominate the universities. Yale has a “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program,” in which “Gender—the social meaning of the distinction between the sexes—and sexuality—sexual identities, discourses, and institutions—are studied as they intersect with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and transnational movements.”46 And Harvard pumps as much radical social liberalism as it can into its “Women, Gender and Sexuality Department.” “Cultural and historical differences in femininities and masculinities, transnational sexualities, women writers, gender and media studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual studies, transnational feminisms, gender and environmental movements, philosophies of embodiment, queer theory, women’s history, transgender studies, gender and religion, the political economy of gender, feminist theory, race/class/gender politics, technology and gender, gender and science, and masculinity studies are just a few of the areas of study that fall within this concentration’s purview,” their website excitedly explains.47 With this department description, Harvard actually surpasses James Joyce in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest amount of intellectual drivel ever crammed into one sentence.

  On many campuses, rabidly leftist departments like Sociology and English work in concert with the LGBT and Women’s Studies departments in order to push sexual license. At UCLA, the English Department cross-lists courses with the LGBT Department and Women’s Studies Department. Such courses included M101A Intro to LGBT Studies, described by the campus gay magazine as follows: “To a closeted gay boy soon to shed the cocoon and emerge a winged Nubian Princess, this class was all that and a box of press-on nails . . . The two professors were the perfect Yin-Yang combination: Professor Schultz’s bright fairy flame lit the fires of pride in my soul and Professor Littleton’s uber-dykey-ness slapped me with reason and political reality.”48 Apparently, singing “YMCA” in class will now move you one step closer to a university degree.

  A strange new world

  Surrounded by sex in the context of dorm life, campus life, and classroom life, getting sucked into the oversexed culture of the universities is easy, and it’s dangerous. Still, Lucia, who lost her virginity at age twenty-one and has had two sex partners since, believes that it’s good for both college guys and college girls to get their grooves on. “Sexual experiences and sex in general are great things, especially when you are young. I wish I had hooked up more. As long as a student is safe and is generally cognizant of how his/her actions may affect the people involved, I think it’s a necessary thing to go through in life,” she said.49

  But that’s just the problem. Youngsters engaging in sexual experimentation don’t know what they’re getting into. For young women, pressure to fit in often means sacrificing emotional well-being. Where once there were sanctioned excuses for upholding traditional morality—it’s against university policy, men aren’t allowed in the dorms, etc.—the porn generation now finds only encouragement to discard traditional morality at every opportunity.

  The long-term side effects are even more disturbing. In a world of one-night stands and random hook-ups, it’s only natural for young men to view women as sex objects. For young men, college is a cornucopia of illicit pleasures. “Playing the field is the norm at college,” Miquel Moore, a twenty-two-year-old student at Southern Illinois University, explained to the Los Angeles Times: “Everyone is looking for people to hook up with at parties, and both people are content with that. A university is like a community of kids—so open, and we are free to really do what we want. I know when I got here, I thought, ‘Oooohhhh, give me all the college girls!’”50

  Lucia sees what men want as well: “I think the real difference between men and women lies in the fact that women think about these issues at all and most men probably don’t. College boys are more apt to act and only think about it if it gets them into trouble later on.”51 It’s notable that despite Lucia’s awareness about college boys, she’s still upset she didn’t hook up with more of them.

  Sex is considered a substitute for developing an actual relationship. For guys especially, if you’re able to have sex with a good-looking girl on a regular basis, that’s an excellent incentive to keep a bad, pointless, or even self-destructive relationship going. And if you’re able to get several random good-lookin girls to give you sex, why bother attempting relationships at all?

  With the death of emotional and intellectual relationships, young people are trying to find themselves and their partners solely through physicality. Even Lucia recognizes the danger in this trend: “What I fear most is seeing young people try to figure out or articulate their emotions through sex and hooking up. I think some have the mentality of ‘Oh, well I cheated on him and I don’t feel bad so I should break up with him’ or ‘Oh, I cheated and I feel horrible so this must mean I love him and should stay with him.’ You know: using others as a means to figure your own emotional relationship junk out.”52

  The saddest part of the sexual experimentation promoted by the higher education system—and by the parents who willingly and inexcusably offer their children into its clutches—is that all of these detrimental consequences are avoidable. Yet those parents and administrators who approved of the actions during the 1960s are actively seeking to pass the torch across generations, while others choose to ignore the negative consequences of their former activities, thereby allowing their children to go through an even worse chaos. Either way, this is nothing less than spiritual and emotional child sacrifice, with countless and very real Charlotte Simmons clones emerging at the end.

  “If you give people more freedom, ultimately they become more responsible,” says Sara Jamieson, a 2000 grad of Connecticut College.53 That’s the hope. College is supposed to be a time when young adults discover who they want to be. Self-discovery implies unrestrained freedom, trying new things, all with the hope that the identity you discover is something to aspire to, equippi
ng you to find success and lead in the real world. But the former hippies of the 1960s have charted a different path as university leaders, and they’ve found the porn generation all too eager to follow, delving into sexual experimentation, nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism. Forget Fiat Lux, Perstare et Praestare, or Veritas—the motto of today’s university is simple: “Do whatever or whomever you want.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  POP TARTS

  OFFICIAL RECIPE for POP STARDOM:

  • Start with a cute, pubescent ten- to twelve-year-old girl

  • Two–three yrs. Virginal, wholesome, faux innocent play-acting (Disney Channel brand highly recommended)

  • Two yrs. Ambiguous, semi-pedophilic cavorting

  • Two yrs. “Sexual discovery” (dirty dancing, X-rated lyrics, and/or promiscuity)

  • For extra sales, add just a smattering of bisexuality.

  Voila! You’ve transformed yourself into a platinum-record “artist.” Keep it up for twenty years, and you might even win a Madonna Award for profit-driven sluttiness!

  It was the passing of the torch. On August 28, 2003, MTV held its annual Video Music Awards show. The big production number was like something out of the gay activist handbook. First, two little girls—Madonna’s six-year-old daughter, Lourdes, and one of Lourdes’s friends—romped across the stage, dressed as flower girls. Then, the competing princesses of pop tart whoredom, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, both dressed in sluttish bridal costumes, popped out of wedding cakes and began singing Madonna’s 1984 hit “Like A Virgin.” Finally, Madonna made her grand entrance. Dressed in a black, form-fitting S&M “groom” outfit, Madonna joined the two former Mouseketeers, and the three gyrated around the stage like hookers starved for johns. Shifting into her newest hit song, “Hollywood,” Madonna began feeling up Spears and Aguilera onstage; in one especially repulsive move, Madonna snuggled up to Aguilera’s thigh and removed her garter. Then, the choreographed moment everyone had been waiting for: Madonna lunged in at the receptive Spears, who opened her mouth, and the two played a round of tonsil hockey.