What You Can Learn from “Sex Week” at Yale
By Bijan Aboutorabi
For those of us on the Yale University campus, hardly a semester goes by without some tragicomic reminder of the dysfunctions and paradoxes of sexually liberated college life. The class of 2012’s senior video—played the day before commencement, in the presence of parents, grandparents, and siblings—depicted a threesome taking place in the library’s stacks. Each year’s incoming freshmen, meanwhile, are duly taught the requisite “safety” and “consent” protocols along with the dozens of campus sites where they can pick up free prophylactics. (Students are admonished to “wear your rubbers” by weirdly cheerful posters of dairy cows in pink rain boots.) Thus the cult of sex bookends the undergraduate experience, a fitting frame to a four-year romp through the sexual playground of the modern university.
Predictably, youthful licentiousness has a dark side. In October 2010 frat pledges marched past freshman dorms shouting chants that openly glorified rape and graphically joked about necrophilia. But nothing so trivial as that could shake Yale’s complacency about its sexual scene. The same month, the student dean’s pre-Halloween e-mail was a paean to “glorious consensual sex,” teaching students that the hookup culture would enrich their lives, provided only that the right verbal signs were given.
Only when nineteen students submitted a formal complaint to the Department of Education, alleging that Yale had violated Title IX by systematically sweeping sexual assault reports under the rug, did the administration tweak its official sexual policy of laissez-faire—by slightly rearranging a few bureaucracies and reaffirming the glory of consent as the sole criterion for sex.
Yale’s cult of hedonism reaches its apogee in a carnival called Sex Week, held the week preceding Valentine’s Day every two years. Sex Week’s official mission statement is to foster “engaging and meaningful discussions about sexuality, intimacy, and relationships.” The reality is much starker: a student-organized deluge of events starring pornographers, sex toy vendors, polyamory activists, and everything else imaginable. An event emblematic of Sex Week 2012 was “Fornication 101,” a “course” that promised “to introduce students to carnal knowledge.” Now that is an Ivy League education.
In 2011 I was among the group of students that founded Undergraduates for a Better Yale College to openly challenge the prevailing libertine culture. In our events and activities, we try to present a vision of sexuality that takes love and intimacy, not the individual search for pleasure, as the starting point. To self-indulgence and puerile titillation we oppose the virtues of integrity, responsibility, and respect for the dignity of the human person.
Our first campaign, a petition calling for an end to Sex Week, won more than two hundred student and faculty signatures as well as letters of support from appalled parents. Yet the university administration was too timid to cancel Sex Week—despite the recommendation of Yale’s own ad hoc committee on sexual climate. So during Sex Week 2012, we hosted True Love Week, with speakers such as author Anthony Esolen and sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and topics ranging from the true nature of love to the social importance of a strong marriage culture.
Of course, Yale is just one battle-ground in the sexual culture wars simmering on the nation’s campuses. Other groups fighting the good fight include Princeton’s Anscombe Society and Harvard’s True Love Revolution. Students interested in provoking dialogue should get in touch with the Love and Fidelity Network (loveandfidelity.org), which offers campus groups invaluable support. Standing against the reigning culture may not be easy, but it is essential if students are to have an alternative to the hegemony of the hookup.
Bijan Aboutorabi, a senior at Yale, is an IR contributing editor and the former chairman of Yale’s Conservative Party.
