Mary's Contraries, December 10, 2012

"Kink on Campus" by Mary Grabar, posted on December 10, 2012: For all the Bill O'Reilly of Fox News-watching, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who believe that a student club for kinky sex is another sign of the end times, we have Inside Higher Ed that explains it all. You see, Harvard students need a BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Sadism and Masochism) club for their emotional health and intellectual development. 

Besides, other cool Ivies, like Yale and Cornell, have had these for a while.  These groups provide students with "a safe space during informal lunch or dinner meetings to talk about kinky sex and self-awareness."

And don't worry, parents! CNN reports that the club will provide "safety teams" for particpants. 

We know about the need for "safe spaces" on university campuses, what with all those conservative professors chasing down and harassing feminists, gays, and anyone caught with a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

"As with most student clubs," explains Inside Higher Ed, "there’s an educational element to it."  We know this because an expert on sex tells us:

“Most people grow up without receiving adequate information about sexuality from either their parents or from their schools,” [Debby] Herbenick, a sexual health educator at the Kinsey Institute, said. “Certainly if college students are practicing BDSM as part of their own sexual lives, then having accurate information may help them to practice BDSM more safely and to communicate effectively about it with partners.”

(Kinsey would be the institute founded by the entomologist Alfred Kinsey, who did not transfer over knowledge about the sex lives of insects, but who interviewed pedophiles for his sex research.)

And isn't college all about getting information?  I mean important information, not stuff like dates of wars, quadratic equations, or grammatical parts of speech, but

how to give and receive clear consent, and how to manage pain and discomfort, for instance. But BDSM has some unique considerations. For example, Herbenick said, many people practicing BDSM create “contracts” between themselves and their partners – contracts that often are not legally enforceable.

Now that's one for the law school!

According to its constitution, Harvard College Munch (as it's called)

exists to promote a positive and accurate understanding of alternative sexualities and kink on campus, as well as to create a space where college-age adults may reach out to their peers and feel accepted in their sexuality.

In spite of the mental health stamp of approval and intellectual respect given to such clubs, a former student president did not want to give her name.  The 2008 graduate who was president of one such club at a small Northeastern university said that:

being able to talk openly about her preferences helped her get “a much stronger sense” of her personal identity, and learn how to engage and communicate with her partner in healthy and productive ways.

“I think people hear 'Fetish Club' and think it's about sex and leather and whips and chains, but a lot of times it wound up being more about cookies and philosophical discussion on the nature of power dynamics in relationships,” the former president, who asked not to be identified because of current employment, said in an e-mail.

Another expert quoted was "a psychology professor at Northwestern University who last year caused a stir when guest lecturers that he'd invited demonstrated the use of a sex toy in an after-class presentation."  J. Michael Bailey "lamented" that anyone would question such a club's legitimacy.  He believes that such a club is as legitimate as a ski club or a religious club.  (Although we know that at Tufts University students had a hard time establishing a Christian club that excludes those who do not believe the Christian truths of the Bible.) 

 

According to sex toy prof Bailey, those who oppose kink clubs have hang-ups:

“Lots of people are hung up on sexuality, and so they don’t blink until somebody brings up some sexual version of something that they have heretofore accepted. And this is obviously an instance of that.”

 

It's all quite normal: 

 

Kink enthusiasts have “Standard dating questions," according to the former club president. These include "'Will he respect me in the morning?'" a much "more loaded" concern "when you’re playing with power balances and domination."

 

No doubt.

 

They also have family values:

 

"a lot of people who like kink do want to find love and family alongside their other preferences.  You take all that anxiety, add in the real physical risks that come with some BDSM activity, and I think it's clear that it's incredibly valuable to provide a place for young people to learn and discuss and feel safe and 'normal.' ”

 

Okay, so Dissident Prof wonders: why is it not okay to call someone a name or make a joke that mentions ethnicity, but it's okay to horse-whip another student (if it's in the "contract")?  Do the usual criteria of race, class, and gender come into play? Wouldn't these actions and words go beyond the standards of bullying now outlawed in all educational institutions across the land? 

 

Never mind.  This makes Dissident Prof very nervous.  Obviously these issues are too complex for her traditional, Fox News-watching mind.

 

Dissident Prof couldn't understand the "poetry" of Professor Porco at Hamilton College either; she had fainting spells as she read some of them online (in order to do research for her article at Minding the Campus).

 

Porno Prof Alessandro Porco wrote a poem about fantasizing about having sex with George W. Bush's twin daughters.  (Dissident Prof won't go into details about the contents, but will note the news of the calls to fire a high school teacher for giving an assignment to students to depict the White House under water in a digital imaging class.  Readers can see and hear parents express outrage over the depiction of a president "drowning" (as in debt, anyone? being in over his head? metaphors? irony? the long tradition of cartooning American political leaders?) here in the video.  Suddenly, students cannot even photoshop the White House.) 

 

But does anyone care that a professor who writes vile poetry about having sex with the Bush twins is teaching freshman composition?  Imagine the outcry if these were Obama's daughters.

 

A reviewer of the collection named after a porno star, The Jill Kelly Poems, in which Porco's poem appears wrote,

 

"While poems such as Ménageà Bush Twins would make the hair on George W.'s back stand on end, Porco's lewdness is balanced with a style that leaves the reader yearning for more." 

 

So transgressive! 

 

Dissident Prof can't remember if the review appeared in the New York Timesor the New York Review of Books.  But it could have appeared in either.

 

Professor Porco defended his poetry as having artistic and scholarly merit.  (For the benefit of the rubes who can't understand poetics.)  The title poem of his second collection, Augustine in Carthage, he said, is a "trans-historical re-imagining of Book III of St. Augustine's Confessions in present-day Montreal," with T.S. Eliot serving as a "Tiresias-like guiding presence."  His poem "examines" the "hypocrisy of spiritual conversion."  It also includes "21 of the filthiest limericks I could think to write" and a scene of Jesus having sex with his mother.

 

But as an extended part of their freshman orientation, young men at Hamilton were subjected to special therapeutic sessions on sexual assault. In the spring, the student body was reminded of the dangers of sexual assault with clanging church bells and blaring air horns.  They had to admit to inherent male thoughts.

 

Dissident Prof appently is not as sophisticated as the postmodern feminists who would preempt young men's thoughts, yet allow for chaining, whipping, and all sorts of other things that involve hurting co-eds.

 

So where is Professor Porco now?

 

At UNC-Wilmington, listed as "Alex Porco."  On a three-year contract. 

 

On a bright note, Appalachian State University offers a course on conservatism, called Conservatism in America, taught by George Ehrhardt.  The name Russell Kirk is mentioned.

That name always comforts Dissident Prof, especially when she's had to cover the unpleasant realities of academic life.  

She anticipates objections regarding "academic freedom" from the defenders of campus kink clubs and pornographic poetry.  Kirk cited favorite Edmund Burke in claiming that the "disease of our time" is an "intemperance of intellect," which provokes extreme views of academic freedom.

 

From Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning:

 

The freedom of the Academy, so far as that freedom is endangered today, can be preserved only if we hold fast to the principle that the ends of education are wisdom and virtue.

 

By today's academic standards, that's truly tansgressive!

 

 

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