Evangelical Paganism at Yale

Barbara Kay, in an article in the National Post entitled "Every Week is Sex Week" writes about the current "Sex Week" going on at Yale University.

Yale University is arguably the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the United States, counting amongst its distinguished alumni five presidents and 19 Supreme Court justices, not to mention America's most influential public intellectual, William F. Buckley, avatar of the conservative revival that shaped American politics for decades.

Yale has its pick of the youthful crop. So recurrent campus events that have the enthusiastic support of a critical mass of Yalies provide a window into the minds of the country's future cultural and political elites.

Founded in 2002, and since then an increasingly successful biennial celebration, Sex Week at Yale this year featured 34 events, including presentations on kinks and fetishisms, an instructional seminar on masturbation and two presentations defending non-monogamous sexual relationships. The program was written up in the April 5 edition of National Review by former Yalie Nathan Harden (Buckley fans will love the title: "Bawd and Man at Yale").

If there is an overarching theme to Sex Week, it might be that "nothing is forbidden." Implied subthemes are:

- any student without sex on the brain 24/7 is pretty hopeless; and

- all sexual activities are ethically equal; their worth is proportionate to the intensity of physical pleasure they deliver.

A third of the 34 events were hosted by porn industry stakeholders. In 2008, one film's graphic violence against women so unnerved organizers they stopped it mid-reel. They seem to have recovered: This year a porn actress specializing in sadomasochism showed a film in which she is bound and flogged (real welts appear), while her whipper taunts her with obscenities. Then the porn actress called for a female volunteer from the Sex Week audience, on whose inner thigh a male volunteer attached a string of clothespins ( "Put it on with an intention," the actress instructed when he shrank from inflicting a cruel enough grip to cause pain). . . .

Week-long campus festivals take enormous amounts of time and energy to organize. It makes sense to expend both on cultural or academic assemblies-- fields by nature dependent on communal participation-- but it makes no sense to organize a "conference" to facilitate group voyeurism into behaviours universally regarded as private.

Unless the purpose of the event is evangelical paganism. The hallmark of paganism is the repression of reason and the inflammation of sensation. Collective voyeurism serves to arouse even the most jaded sexual appetite, as well as cutting off any retreat into private moral judgmentalism. Once one has participated in group OrgyThink, one has lost one's sexual honour and cannot easily regain it.

Sex Week, therefore, strikes me as nothing more than a forum conceived to proselytize the student body on the cultural virtue of dumbing deviancy down, and to shame students who adhere to traditional moral standards of reasonable restraints on sexual gratification.

Now I think Kay is onto something here. The idea that people ought to be allowed to do whatever they want behind closed doors is one thing; Sex Week is something entirely different. It is not liberalism so much as the attempt to co-opt all public space for a new religion that aims to snuff out the old one.

Yale University is a private club and can do anything it wants as long as it is not illegal. But one can raise the sensible question of whether promoting an anti-intellectual, religion of passion that seeks to subordinate the reason to the lower appetites is in any way consistent with the goals and aims of a true university. It would seem that Yale is intent on destroying, not preserving the intellectual heritage of the West. Which is up to Yale. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the days of Yale being known as a great university are numbered.